The keynote speaker was Scott Boras, and he really did a good job of making you like him. He is a lawyer, so he’s trained to do that, but it worked.

They had a GM panel with Jed Hoyer, Fred Claire, and Dan Evans. Claire and Evans were pretty honest in talking about their experiences, but Hoyer was a little less “open” since he’s still working as a GM. Claire was asked what his biggest mistake as a GM was, and he said it was trading away Pedro, by far.

The player panel consisted of Tommy Davis and Al Ferrara. They were entertaining and had some good stories of their days growing up in Brooklyn. Del Crandall was supposed to be there but couldn’t make it because his wife was ill. I was disappointed about that since I’m a big Milwaukee Braves fan.

I was able to meet guys like Jonah Keri, Sean Forman, Dave Cameron, Rob Neyer, etc. If you are a retrosheet user or SABR member, you’ll recognize names all over the place and it was great to be able to put faces to the names.

Finally, we went to three games. Friday night, we saw the Dodgers win 1-0 over the Padres. Saturday night, we saw the Angels beat Pineda and the M’s. Hunter went deep twice and we saw Mike Trout in his second career game. Sunday night, we went to Lake Elsinore to see the Storm play the Visalia Rawhide.

If you’ve never been to a SABR convention, I highly recommend getting to one.