The Nine Spring Training Conference Baseball has always had about it a sense of community, offering a gathering place for serious fans to share their baseball stories. Early on in my research for Breaking into Baseball, I met Bill Kirwin, then a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Bill, who grew up in Boston a Red Sox fan, had the genius in 1993 to organize a baseball conference that came to be held annually during spring training in Arizona’s Cactus League, which he foresaw might attract baseball researchers and authors as well as academicians who use baseball in their courses on literature, sociology, business, history, and other disciplines. Attract he did, particularly people from the snowier regions of the country, who came to cherish the opportunity to present their research for publication in Bill’s academic journal, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture; attend spring training games (aka “field research”) in the company of like-minded colleagues; and sit up half the night arguing such topics as to best way to experience the game: radio, television, or live at the ballpark. Bill’s interest in baseball -- its history, its context, its literature – was catholic and he took an interest in my research into the feminine side of the game. At the Nine Spring Training Conference I first began to believe that the stories I was discovering might make a book of some value. At Nine I was able to present, test, and refine the ideas and themes developed in Breaking into Baseball. One of the reasons I love this game is that it has no clock, permitting us to believe that baseball is eternal. Not so, however, for our baseball heroes. Bill Kirwin was stricken with brain cancer in January of 2007; he enjoyed one last summer of baseball, one last World Series, which the Red Sox swept, before he passed away on December 11, 2007. Bill worked this past difficult year to ensure that Nine would continue. He had already passed the editorship of the Nine journal into the able hands of Trey Strecker of Ball State University; last spring, he asked my husband Dan and me to organize the Nine Spring Training Conference. This we have done, with the help and support of Steve Gietschier of The Sporting News, Larry Gerlach of the University of Utah, web-mistress Roberta Newman of New York University, and keeper of the Nine archives Anna Newton, as well as the numerous Nine regulars who have offered counsel and encouragement. The 2008 Nine Spring Training Conference will be held at the Clarion Tucson Airport Hotel, March 13-16th, with author Lee Lowenfish as the keynote speaker on the subject of “Whatever Happened to the Marvelous Importance of the Unimportant?: A Plea for Putting Today’s Baseball and All Sports Mania in Proper Perspective.” Bill Kirwin will be sorely missed, but his presence will surely be felt by all of us who remain a part of the Nine community. |
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