BeerGraphs — a website devoted to the analytics of beer — is now alive. Very soon it will have sortable leaderboards and everything. And it’s been too long since we had a FanGraphs meetup anyway, so let’s do another one. Where better to have a top-flight beer and watch some good baseball than the Public House attached to AT&T Park in San Francisco? Please come and talk baseball (or beer) with our merry band:

June 7, four until ?, Public House at AT&T Park, San Francisco

Eno Sarris (FanGraphs, BeerGraphs)
Howard Bender (FanGraphs)
Wendy Thurm (FanGraphs)
Steve Berman (Bay Area Sports Guy)
Grant Brisbee (SBN)
King Kaufman (Bleacher Report)
Patrick Newman (NPBTracker)
Ian Miller (Productive Outs)
Adam Cacioppo (BeerGraphs)
Aram Cretan (Freewheel Brewing)
Rob Conticello (Clandestine Brewing)
Adrian Kalaveshi (Clandestine Brewing)

Watch Austin Wilson do anything on the field and you’re struck by his athleticism. Six-foot-five, 244 pounds of muscle, he glides across center field in the Sunken Diamond on defense. During batting practice, no bat makes a more satisfying sound than his.

But with parents that hold multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard and Stanford, obviously the Stanford center fielder is more than a collection of high-end body parts. In fact, his makeup could go a long way toward smoothing out the wrinkles in his game as he proceeds to the professional leagues. It has already helped.

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“I’m probably leading the league in bad contact, too.” — Marco Scutaro

We talked for a few minutes, Marco Scutaro and I, about hitting and contact before a game a few weeks back. When I told him he’s leading the league in contact rate since 2010, he offered the response above with a slight frown and a flick of the bat. He swung a bat the whole time we talked, even. But his voice never really wavered — it never betrayed either the physical effort he was putting into choosing his bat for the day or the matter-of-fact humor that accompanied his answers.

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Is there an ideal ground ball rate for hitters? Should they be thinking about how many grounders they hit? Armed with some spreadsheets and a couple conversations with some Royals’ hitters, let’s see what we can discover.

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Knuckleballers aren’t like other pitchers, or so the saying goes. Their pitches flutter like butterflies, they pitch at less than max effort, they don’t depend on velocity, and they can pitch into their fifties. All of these things seem true, and yet the more we know about knuckleballers the more they might actually be more like all the other pitchers out there. So when 38-year-old R.A. Dickey has lost some oomph on his seminal pitch, maybe it means something, just like it usually does for other pitchers.

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Andrelton Simmons is solid with the glove. He makes all the plays he should. Andrelton Simmons is spectacular. You should see his arm. Really, though, Andrelton Simmons is spectacularly solid.

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A.J. Ellis wasn’t supposed to make it. At least not according to the A.J. Ellis whom the Los Angeles Dodgers took in the 18th round of the 2003 draft. That Ellis wasn’t planning on a career the major leagues. And yet, here he is, 10 years later with at least one facet of his game considered to be elite, and a regular job on a good team in the big leagues. How he got here — and who helped him along the way — best describes the sort of a player and the man he’s become.

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