I got up at around 3AM PST. I was dropped off at the Ontario Airport at around 4, and got on a plane to Dallas at around 6. After a 3 hour flight, I stopped over in Dallas for about an hour. Since I hadn't eaten anything yet I walked over to a "Chili's" that was inside the terminal grabbed a buffalo chicken sandwich. Since I was still recovering from a stomach flu that I got two days ago, I only ate half of it before I waited for the next flight to board. As I was waiting in line I saw a barber shop in the terminal. Laughing to myself at the ridiculousness of the scene. I snapped a few quick pictures before I walked aboard the plane.
I mean seriously, what's the point of this? Maybe you're so focused on the trip, ie, getting your hotel and rental car set up, getting to the airport, packing everything you need, getting to the airport early enough to get through security, and that once you get to the airport you realize "Oh s--t, you know what I forgot to get before I go this trip? A haircut!"
I mean I can kind of see it, and it's not the weirdest place I've seen a barbershop (I remember when I was younger, you could get a haircut at Lake Elsinore Storm games in the stands behind home plate), but still. What happens if you really like the job the barber shop did? The only way you can go there again is if you buy a plane ticket. Maybe you can get a round trip ticket to Austin every month or so and spend $170 on a buzz cut?
Anyway, I finished the rest of the sandwich on the flight to Boston. After a 3 and 1/2 hour flight, I landed in Boston at around 4:30 and picked up my luggage at around 4:45. I waived down a cab, and told the cab driver to take me to "the Courtyard Marriott in Cambridge." After an erratic cab ride, in which the cab driver kept weaving and cutting off other drivers, the driver stopped at the "Boston Marriott" and asked if this was the right hotel. I told him that it wasn't and that the hotel I wanted to go to was the Courtyard Marriott in Cambridge. After more weaving, I finally arrived at the hotel. Even though the cabbie initially almost dropped me off at the wrong hotel and drove like his underwear was made out of poison ivy, I still left him a nice tip. I checked in at around 5:30, and rode up the elevator up to my hotel. It was a decent-ish hotel, not the best place I've ever stayed in but it wasn't a rat-hole motel either. Unfortunately for me there were no temperature controls in the room, just a small A/C unit next to the window. As a person who has trouble sleeping in different places than in my own room, this would prove to be a problem.
After sitting around in my room for about an hour to settle in and relax, and I changed into some new clothes and then took a cab to the Meadhall in Cambridge for the Fangraphs meetup. The Meadhall is a restaurant that boasts a wide selection of beers and is located on the first and second floor of the Cambridge Center. Since the meetup was on second floor I walked upstairs to where all the writers and readers were at. When I got to the 2nd floor I went to the bar and looked at the beer menu, and was shocked to see that they had Lagunitas on tap. Lagunitas is a craft brewery located in Petaluma, CA and, up until this point, didn't figure that it was sold outside of CA. I had one friend (who lived in Petaluma) introduce the beer to me when I was in UC Santa Barbara and I also knew another who I went to school with who worked there as well. To show solidarity to my friends (and because I like the beer) I decided to order it. The bartender told me, even more to my surprise, that they were sold out of Lagunitas. So instead of that I ended up just buying a Sierra Nevada.
The Fangraphs writers were mostly in a separate room from the rest of the floor. The room had various appetizers on a table underneath a flat-screen, HD TV that showed the Red Sox-Yankees game. Since I hate both teams equally, I spent most of the evening walking around and look for people to converse with. After conversing a bit with a few people I struck up a conversation with Dave Appelman and Carson Cistulli about my presentation, which was about using percentages (like K%) instead of (K/9) for pitching statistics. Appelman, who is Fangraphs' lone programmer and is thus responsible for the site's web-content, told me how he and managing editor, Dave Cameron, have gone back-and-forth with each other over whether or not K% and BB% should be included in the dashboard on the site, with Cameron pushing for it and Appelman thinking that it's not that big of a deal. I tried to use the topic to persuade Appelman to see my presentation and to convince him otherwise, but alas, he told me that he had a 5:30 PM flight, and thus he had to cut out of the seminar before my 3:45 presentation. After conversing with a few other people, since I didn't get much sleep the night before, I left the bar early and got a cab back to the hotel at around 11 and went to bed.
Due to the excessive stuffiness in the room and my inability to sleep well in a different place, other than my room, I only got about 1-2 hours of sleep that night. I then showered, shaved, changed, and walked over to the nearest Dunkin Donuts, which was less than a block from the hotel. Since I'm from CA, we don't really have any Dunkin Donuts out where I live. But I did stop at a Dunkin Donuts once during a spring training visit in Arizona and really liked both their coffee and their donuts. So going there for breakfast was a bit of a treat for me. Anyway, I ordered a small, hot coffee plus 2 donuts. I ate the first donut in the store and sipped a little bit of the coffee, but since my stomach was still grumbling from the flu bug I had a few days before, I decided to eat the other donut slowly as I walked to the seminar. The seminar was held at the Chemistry building at Boston University. Since the seminar was only 1 and 1/2 miles from my hotel, I walked the whole distance, over the Charles River, to the Metcalf Science Center at Boston University.
I got to the seminar at around 8:55, and sat near the back of the lecture hall. Dan Brooks & Chuck Korb, both of whom were organizers for the event, briefly thanked everyone for coming out before stepping aside for the presenters. The highlight of the first half of the day was Chuck Tippett. Tippett, who created the online, baseball-simulation game "Diamond Minds," works in the Red Sox front office as analyst. Tippett talked about how he came to work for the Red Sox after he was brought in to simulate how the Red Sox bullpen against the Oakland A's hitters before the 2003 ALDS. He also gave a list of skills that teams looking to hire front office staff, look for in interns. Some of them are obvious: being able to program, knowing how to manipulate and analyze data, being able to speak a foreign language, knowing how to edit video, etc. But he also mentioned two that weren't so obvious (at least to me): being able to throw batting practice, and being able to catch bullpen sessions. You would think teams would have plenty of personnel on hand to handle these duties, but I guess you would be wrong.
After an hour lunch, the second half of the 1st day's presentation began. The highlights of the 2nd half included Keith Law and Keith Woolner. Law was a former writer for Baseball Prospectus as well as a former "Special Assistant to the GM" for the Blue Jays and is now a writer for ESPN.com. Law expressed over and over the importance of scouting in the front office, especially in regards to amatuer and minor league players to the point to which he seemed to imply (at least from my perspective) that using the kinds of statistical analysis commonly applied to major league players are mostly useless for lower levels. Law talked about his approaches to scouting, how he likes to sit a little bit up the line on either the 1st or 3rd base side (depending on which way the hitter bats) to get a good look at a hitters' swing, and emphasized how important it is to watch a hitter take batting practice (he mentioned that while scouting, a prospect he was looking walked in every plate appearance Law saw, thus depriving Law the opportunity to look at the prospect's swing). He also mentioned that if he worked in a front office again that the one thing he would try to do is improve the relationship and communication between player development and the other departments in a front office. A problem that, Law says, is rampant in a lot of teams.
After a presentation by Fangraph's Bill Petti, Keith Woolner spoke. Woolner, also a former Baseball Prospectus writer, is the inventor of Replacement Level-based value stats like VORP (a predecessor to WAR) and is currently an analyst for the Cleveland Indians. Like Tippett, Woolner mainly talked about what it is like to work in a front office setting. The one big piece of advice, which I have heard and taken to heart over and over again, is that saying that you have "passion for the game" on your resume is not enough to get into a front office. You have to be able to show "something" whether it be some little research project or whatever if you want to get in.
After all but one of the main presentations were done, it was time for the 4 student presenters of the day. The presenters, like I would have to do the next day, each gave a 10 minute presentation on a research topic that they did. While each of the presenters that day gave a good, solid, effort, you could tell that a lot of them weren't used to making a presentation outside of a classroom. A lot of the presentations was overwhelmed with statistical jargon (like p-and t-tests) and methodlogy instead of just an overview and an explanation their results and it's possible applications. Still I felt like most of them did a good job overall.
After the last presentation, I walked back to the hotel. I spent an hour or two editing and rehearsing my presentation before getting dinner. Before I left for Boston I checked yelp to see if there were any good places near my hotel to eat. I found a spot that sold lobster rolls that was a block and a half from my hotel that was highly rated. So I took the elevator down and walked over, only to be disappointed when I found it that it closed at 6PM (it was 7:30 when I got there) and closed the next day at 1:30 PM. Dejected, I went back to my room and ordered a small pepperoni pizza which was so bland and undercooked that I only ate half of it. I spent the rest of the night rehearsing my presentation before I took a shower and went to bed.
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