The Best Conference of the Year

Over the last few years, sports conferences have become a popular endeavor. Inspired mostly by the success of the Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference held each spring, others have seen an opportunity to gather a bunch of interesting speakers and host a series of Q&As, and you now have a host of options to pick from if you want to attend one of these shindigs throughout the year.

But for baseball fans who are reading FanGraphs on a Friday in June, there’s one conference that remains the gold standard: The Saber Seminar.

The official name of the event is Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, and the two-day conference lives up to that title, providing speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, including team executives, analysts, and scouts, independent researchers, academics, members of the media, and people just breaking into the realm of trying to discover truths about the game. Over the course of a weekend, the event provides a wide range of different talks, spanning just about every type of analysis there is in baseball. It is, without fail, one of my favorite weekends of the year.

And the best part? The entire event is put on to raise money for cancer research. In each of the last few years, the event has raised over $20,000 for The Jimmy Fund, and this year, the money raised will also benefit The Angioma Alliance. The coordinators and speakers are all donating their time to put this event on, and so not only do we get to have a great weekend of baseball conversation, we get to help fight cancer in the process.

And because the organizers of the event want it to be accessible to all, the price remains remarkably low, by conference standards. A ticket to both days of the conference, lunch included on both days, is just $160; if you’re a student, that gets cut down to $85. Most sports conferences are three to four times that price, so this is the best value, by a mile, in the business.

I know I’m doing a bit of a hard sell here, but really, you should make plans to come to this event. It is a fantastic weekend, full of interesting conversation and knowledge, and also filled with plenty of time to socialize and hang out with others who love baseball as much as you do. The conference is being held on August 13th and 14th this year, and will be held at the Jacob Sleeper Auditorium on the campus of Boston University. If you’re in or around Boston, this is a no-brainer; if you’re not, you should still consider traveling to Boston for the event, because it’s that good.

In addition, we’ll be doing our annual FanGraphs Meetup the night before the conference, so the weekend provides a ton of chances to hang out and maximize your baseball nerdery.

Mark your calendars for the second weekend in August, and if you’re not in New England, look into getting yourself to Boston for that weekend. This is the baseball conference you don’t want to miss, so get your tickets now, and come hang out with us in Boston this summer.