It was something other than excellent list segmentation that caused Major League Baseball to send me an announcement of the SABR Analytics Conference that is coming to Phoenix in March, but I was glad to get the email anyway. It’s nice to know that people attending the Cactus League in the second week of March also have the option to drop in at the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown for $595 worth of stat-crunching fun.

Or if you don’t want to shell out the registration fee, you could just hang around in the lobby and try for autographs from front office types, such as Derrick Hall (President and CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks), Jon Daniels (General Manager of the Texas Rangers), or Rick Hahn (General Manager of the Chicago White Sox).

According to the conference website, some topics that will be covered include:

• General Managers Panel on how analytics shapes front-office decisions (with Jon Daniels, Rick Hahn and Jed Hoyer)
• Measuring Player Performance
• New innovations in baseball analytics
• Player Agents — their view of analytics
• Advances in medical information and its impact on decisions
• New applications of PITCHf/x data
• The use of analytics in scouting
• Player panel — the impact of data and information on performance
• The International Game — the next hot spot for talent development

If you can’t make it in person, you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #SABRanalytics. See pictures of how much fun they had last year in the daily photo galleries at SABR.org/analytics/photos/2012.