CHICAGO — I live in fear of two things: flying and networking. But so powerful was the allure of baseball science and making new friends that I boarded the Flyaway bus to LAX to begin my path to the 2024 Saberseminar in Chicago, the preeminent conference at the intersection of dingers and calculators.
At one point, it had felt like a good idea. Earlier this year, after I published an article for FanGraphs on a new way to measure pitcher command, I came across a 2023 Saberseminar presentation by Scott Powers, a former Astros assistant general manager and current professor at Rice University, where he outlined his own novel approach to a similar question. I emailed Powers to ask some questions about his presentation; he suggested that I might enjoy attending the conference in August.
I figured that if I could swing a trip out there—and perhaps get a generous publication such as Defector to pay me some money to cover the costs—it could be a great opportunity to gain some sources and learn something new about the sport.
More pressingly, I had recently turned 31. My friends, once all gathered within minutes of each other in Berkeley and Oakland, are now spread out across the country. And these friends, despite largely being fantasy baseball psychos themselves, grew tired of me manically texting them increasingly obscure statistics. I was experiencing a low-grade version of the male friendship crisis—and thought I might be able to combat it at the Saberseminar.
I came up with this scheme in June. In July, my partner Filipa received some surreal, terrifying news: She had tested positive for breast cancer. I no longer felt like going to Chicago to network. I was not particularly concerned about whether my nascent baseball analytics writing career would take off. But she insisted I go. “It’s like when Mark Kelly went to space because he thought it’s what Gabby Giffords would’ve wanted,” she told me, which, to be honest, did not make me feel better.
I had resolved to go to a bar meetup organized by The Athletic’s Eno Sarris on the night before the first day of Saberseminar. I don’t know Eno at all. In fact, I didn’t know anyone at this conference. Showing up alone at a random Chicago bar because a famous baseball writer tweeted about it felt far beyond my social comfort level. But if I wanted to make some baseball internet friends, this meetup seemed like the best place to start.
I recognized Eno right away. He was in a circle of five or six guys; they were having a heated discussion about which major-league organizations do the best job at developing pitching. I grabbed a beer, took a deep breath, and awkwardly lodged myself into a gap in the circle.
I drank too much that night, which had its upsides—it did facilitate several long conversations with fellow fans of the Rates and Barrels podcast and some former members of MLB front offices. But the cost was evident as I walked to the Blue Line station the next morning, the sun angled directly into my eyes, my body struggling to process the humidity.
I pulled up to the Hermann Hall Conference Center a few minutes after 9:00 a.m. They held the entire conference in the auditorium, which had the graduated seating and soft lighting of a typical large lecture hall. Volunteers handed out lanyards at tables in front of the auditorium. (Mostly) men milled about, making cordial conversation.
The morning presentations washed over me like statistics ASMR. I needed to beeline for the coffee at the first break. That’s when I spotted my new boss, Meg Rowley, the managing editor of FanGraphs. I had started as a part-time contributor at FanGraphs a couple weeks ago, but having only talked to her on the phone, she had no idea what I looked like.
I unavoidably knew what she looked like and, maybe more embarrassingly, sounded like; I’ve been listening to the podcast she co-hosts, Effectively Wild, since the Obama administration, and so I could pick her voice out of a crowded room of hundreds of chattering nerds. I think I made it weird. Nonetheless, Meg was extremely kind and proceeded to introduce me to the rest of the FanGraphs staff at the conference.
This took some of the fear out of the whole lunch situation, which I have to admit I was dreading. I kept thinking of my first day of college. My dad and stepmom had just dropped me off, and I’d never felt so alone in my life. Gripped by fear, I latched onto my roommate Zach, who had spent the summer on campus and already had an enviable group of friends. Shamelessly, I followed him from party to party, clinging to this most tenuous of social connections.
I’m out of practice with these sorts of uncomfortable social exposures and feared that the Saberseminar lunch would resurface these primal wounds. For a few minutes, these fears were justified. The majority of conference attendees, as far as I could tell, were R&D staffers for a variety of major-league teams. They rolled around in cliques of six or seven, conspicuous in their matching Nationals polos or Brewers backpacks. I’m sure they were friendly, but it didn’t seem like they were inviting many strangers into their inner circle.
As the lanyarded masses lurched toward the lunchboxes filled with turkey sandwiches and Rice Krispies Treats, I started to panic. Thankfully, I spotted Ben Clemens, another FanGraphs writer that I’d just met; I kind of just stood around him for a while, and eventually other FanGraphs employees piled up, and then before I knew it, I was part of a clique, secure in the cocoon of the group. I’d made it.
At the end of the first day’s talks, I glommed on to the FanGraphs staff just as I had to Zach in those first days of undergrad. We walked over to the official Saberseminar networking event, held at a beer garden near the White Sox ballpark. This was my big chance. I knew many of the people I had been tweeting at for the last few months would be somewhere, but most of them I only knew by their Twitter screen names, their unhelpfully vague profile pictures. Would this impede my efforts to make friends?
It turned out the answer was yes and no. I met a couple friendly internet people and chatted with FanGraphs associate editor Matt Martell for a while, but I mostly ended up talking to team employees. After two drinks, I locked in. I bounced from R&D guy to R&D guy, grabbing their contact info and asking questions I knew they couldn’t really answer. At some point, I was eventually dragged out to dinner.
I was feeling pretty good when I woke up on Sunday morning. Learning my lesson from Friday night, I had paced myself well and slept a couple extra hours. But I still hadn’t really accomplished my goal.
I’d met my new coworkers, but that didn’t feel like the central purpose of this trip. What about making baseball friends from the internet? I remembered what Filipa said to me on the phone the night before—that our dog had confused me with another medium-sized white guy riding a bicycle and lost her mind. Also, that it’s OK to be awkward; people find that endearing. So I resolved to be weird on this last day of the Saberseminar.
I knew I needed to talk to Scott Powers, the Rice professor from whom I’d learned about the event. I saw earlier that week that he’d posted a tweet saying that if you’d like to meet up with him, you could schedule time on his calendar. Late Saturday night, I finally booked one of those times, selecting a 15-minute window during lunch. Around 11:45 a.m. Sunday, I got a text from Scott: Meet at the outside tables in the atrium.
Even though Nick Wan of the Reds was in the middle of a genuinely riveting live coding tutorial, I left the auditorium, finding Scott with two of his students and another front-office guy. I wanted his feedback on another post I’d published recently, and while his insights were valuable, I was struck more by a comment that reminded me of my entire reason for being there. “This is where you find your people,” he told me.
After lunch, I ran into a couple Driveline guys, Marek Ramilo and Jack Lambert, who I was familiar with from Twitter and who had given one of the best presentations of Saberseminar. They were chatting with Stephen Sutton-Brown, the creator of Baseball Prospectus’s StuffPro pitching model and someone who’d given me a ton of help on past stories of mine. Here it was, the moment I’d envisioned: people emerging from behind the bizarre veil of the internet, materializing as real human beings in space.
We stood there talking for a while. I listened to them break down the specifics of calculating pitch arsenal interaction effects. I told them about my not-so-serious book idea where I try to become the worst pitcher in independent baseball with the help of a pitching lab like Driveline. And I realized Scott was right: The Saberseminar, beyond the cynical networking opportunities, the knowledge dissemination, and the need to see and be seen, was above all an opportunity to connect as human beings with the handful of people in the world most like me in a super-specific way, people spending large amounts of their wild and precious lives trying to answer questions about a game.
Will these friendships endure? I’m not sure. But it is a reminder that as I get older, these opportunities ought not be taken for granted. Growing up, I formed connections indiscriminately, bonding over Digimon or having the same birthday. I’ve stayed relatively close with my friends from childhood, but age, I’m finding, hardens personalities. When I was a freshman in high school, everyone connected over Call of Duty. Now my friends are heavily involved in researching train history in postwar Japan, exploring obscure corners of California to fish for native trout, or writing science fiction epics on futuristic sea exploration. We become more ourselves, and we move further from a shared ground as we do.
Before I knew it, it was 4:00 p.m.—the conference was over. I walked out of the auditorium and started thinking about Filipa. Her life—our lives—are about to get pretty hard. Filipa was due to start chemo in two days. But what I realized over the weekend is that even though baseball might be on some level a dumb game, it’s also an emotional port and a medium for connection, even and maybe especially when things get hard.
