But enough of Seattle itself. I went to SABR36 to present a couple of studies that I had conducted. The first was on the Hall of Fame and the second was on relief pitching.

The Hall study was a "poster" presentation, something about which I knew about as much as you do. I had a four-foot by four-foot palette on which to paint. So I took my Hall study—long story short, baseball average 20-30 players per ten years but taking into account expansion less than one-half of one percent of today's players will get in—and converted my usual wanton tables into graphs replete with callout boxes with the more salient points. Oh, and I also inserted many copious cartoon character slides to balance out the numbers.

Unfortunately, my flight from Newark was delayed a couple of hours, I didn't arrive at my hotel until after 1:00 AM Pacific time, and I didn't wake up until after 8:30. So when I arrived at the hotel where the convention was being held, I only had about 5-10 minutes to get my presentation on the board. The room for the poster presentations was already full and two-thirds of the presentations were up. After searching in vane for the person who was supposed to be organizing the presentations (and whom I never did find), I struggle to find a small strip of Velcro tape to hang my presentation.

So I am on my knees attempted to post these things in something that vaguely resembles a straight lines all the while, I look around at the presentation facing mine in which just about every baseball movie ever made is glaring down on me in glorious four-color glossy regalia. Goddammit! I feel like the kid who made his science project while the rest of the class had their parents help.

I finally complete the hanging of my various slides with the miniscule strip of Velcro tape that I found, and people are actually starting to read it. After about fifteen minutes someone from MLB.com stops by to ask if I want to contribute on a project they are doing on the Hall of Fame, and I'm feeling a bit better. A bunch of people stop by to read and discuss the study and before I know it, it's two hours later, poster presentation phase is complete, and the room is emptying out for lunch.

Now, I have to worry about my second presentation, an oral one. The one time I presented it previously (two days earlier to my somnolent wife) it went two minutes too long and I just found out from the program that I was supposed to leave five minutes for questions. Oops.

To be continued…