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FanGraphs DC Methup (Coming Soon to Chicago)

So FanGraphs periodically does these "gatherings" in different cities. I saw they were holding one in DC (and it was only ten bucks), so I figured I'd go and check it out. There's one coming up in Chicago as well on July 16th (link below), so this should give you all an idea of whether or not it's worth your time.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/fangraphs-chicago-meetup-july-16th/

Admission was ten bucks for which you got a free beer and decent little buffet while you listened to a bunch of guys talk baseball (more or less a Q&A setup). They had two sessions (the first one was mostly Nationals focused, the second one was open to all MLB).

During the Nats session, they had two guys from the front office there to answer questions. I'm not going to be able to remember their names, but the one guy worked pretty closely with Rizzo (he was some kind of assistant GM) and the other guy (who was pretty young, probably early 30's or maybe even late 20's) was heading up one of their analytics departments. This session was fairly interesting, as you got a little bit of a feel for how they operate, however as you can imagine there were a lot of topics they couldn't really broach at all (couldn't really speak to current players, any of their internal processes, their plans for the future, etc). Got to understand a bit of how they apply analytics and people asked some good questions about their opinions on some recent happenings (i.e. the recent Angels' power struggle), though again they couldn't really badmouth anyone in the industry so answers were pretty safe and vague.

The second session was more interesting. They had Dave Cameron from Fangraphs, Dan Brooks (the founder of BrooksBaseball.com) and Mike Ferrin (from SiriusXM) again taking questions and this was more of a roundtable discussion between them which was started by questions from people in the room (there was a bit of an "I'm the smartest guy in the room" flavor in some of the questions which was annoying, but whatever). As you can imagine, since these guys have no affiliation to any team, they could be more honest with their opinions. They tossed around some pretty good topics, hitting one bunch of topics that are bantered around here and on other sites regularly (revenue split in the next CBA, lack of interest in baseball amongst American youth, DH or no DH, international signing(s) processes, etc) and also some that I hadn't thought much about (the homogeneous nature of baseball front offices caused by low pay and an influx of overly qualified candidates).

Overall, I would say I definitely got my money's worth between the free beer/food and the semi-interesting discussion. They did a plug for the upcoming SABR convention in Boston, which sounded more interesting (lots of topics to pick and choose from to listen on and less participation from the peanut gallery). The lineup for the Chicago one looks pretty good, so if you're interested I'd encourage you all to give it a shot. If anyone goes, would love to know what you think!

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