“It’s a lifestyle change”.

Photo by Chris Briggs on Unsplash

How It Started

He was very clear. My future boss was preaching to me that working in baseball was a major lifestyle change. This was subsequently hammered into my brain by my next 4 people I interviewed with. Taking a job in baseball was intriguing, something I had thought about since I cracked open Moneyball in 2004.

I’d worked in analytics my entire career after graduating with a finance degree. I read that the team was looking for people to join their baseball operations group in my local newspaper, the actual paper edition. I applied and expected to follow a typical baseball front office applicants’ path of never hearing back about the job. To my surprise, that wasn’t the case. The interview process was quick, phone interview followed by an in-person interview with my future boss and colleagues. I got a call back from the director of baseball operations and he said I didn’t get the job.

He had good news though, he offered me a similar job but in a more junior role. They hired someone more way more experienced and overall just a better programmer that I was for the job i applied for. The guy they hired was talented and always happy to answer any questions I had. I learned a tremendous amount from him and am indebted to him for how much he taught me.

That’s how my job in baseball started, some dumb luck and I assume some tricky budgeting/accounting maneuvers to hire 2 people instead of 1. I began working in baseball as a Database analyst, that title is exactly as made up as it sounds. I did data and software engineering mixed in with some data visualization and task automation. I did not give input into what players we should select or what prospects we should promote, I created and structured our data so our analysts could build statistical models to grade and evaluate players. I also helped build our data platform so that our management team could (occasionally) use the work the analytics team did in decision making on players.

On The Job

My first day started a tradition in our analytics group. I showed up to the office, excited as can be to start my career in professional baseball, eager to meet the big wigs of a front office. After a badge photo (while still wearing a raincoat), I was escorted to a room that could only be described as a shoebox.

There were 2 people sitting in it (by the end, we had 7 people in the shoebox before we were upgraded to a larger space) , one was the guy who got the original job I applied for. The other guy was an intern who wore so many hats that a GoldenEye character in DK-mode still wouldn’t be able to fit them all on his head. In addition to his many skills in rudimentary software engineering and data analysis, the volume at which this dude could crack a sunflower seed in his mouth was ear-splitting. I never could figure out if it was the fact that he cracked them so loudly or it was the fact that we were sitting in a room the size of a small SUV. That was the entire room, 2 people.

There were 2 additional interns, one manager of baseball analytics and then my boss, the senior director of baseball operations. That brought the total number of full-time employees to 4, plus 3 interns. The tradition that I started in our group was that on every single persons first day, be it an intern or full time role, my boss and the manager of baseball analytics were not there. They were either at spring training, or doing draft meetings at an off-site location. This tradition continued throughout my entire career in baseball.

When I started with the team, we had a stats platform that was populated using free database software and built with the help of extremely cheap labor (interns make ~10 bucks an hour). If you have ever been involved in building a software platform, you know that it comes with some bumps in the road. I won’t bore the readers with the exact details of this, just some highlights:

· During the quality assurance process after changing some formulas for our internal stats website, we stumbled across the fun fact that our star hitter was now showing as having 400 RBI the previous season. Our joy was short-lived as we realized this was a major mistake and we needed to re do ~20 hours’ worth of work.

· Since baseball isn’t exactly a friendly environment, there isn’t really a great way to map data across various sources. For the better part of a season, we were labeling the point where a pitcher releases the ball incorrectly in the entire minor league and college system. This wasn’t a huge deal as no one in the organization really listened to us at this point.

Cowboy Ohtani

· I can’t stress this enough. Playing the Angels since they acquired Shohei Othani is every teams worst nightmare. While his skills on the field are impressive, the real reason teams despise playing the Angels is because the 2-way playing Othani breaks every advance scouting report and causes havoc for the entire advance scouting team.

Success

After establishing a somewhat stable stats platform, we started to focus on the radar measurements provided by the MLB and minor league teams. I spent the majority of my team integrating these measurements into our internal data platform. These radar measurements are known as Trackman data in the industry. This is because from 2015 through 2019(MLB started to use another company to track ball position and player position starting in 2020), MLB and minor league affiliates used a third-party company called Trackman to measure how hard players threw, how quickly they ran, and how a much a baseball spun. At this point, we had now hired 4 full time analysts. 2 of them were responsible for utilizing this Trackman data to measure the expected performance of hitters and pitchers based on their Trackman data.

We had success in creating useful measurements for both pitchers are hitters, some of the hitting stats are now publicly available(xWoba) but these proprietary pitching stats remain somewhat a secret that I’m not going to divulge here but I’ll say that they quantified the true quality of a pitch based on the physical properties(spin rate, speed, location etc) of the pitch.

Winding Down

I worked usually ~60 hours a week, working about 12 of those from home. Compared to the analysts and leadership, these are rookie numbers.

Rookie Numbers

During the season on home games, the analysts and leaders are there usually around 9:30 A.M and don’t leave until the game is over around 10 or 10:30 P.M. I was spared from this because I didn’t analyze players or scout them, I just did data/software. A rain delay is a front office employees worst nightmare, waiting around for the game to restart when all you want to do is go home is a brutal way to spend a Friday night.

It would be an incomplete picture if I didn’t discuss compensation in baseball. As mentioned before, interns make about 10 dollars an hour. I would estimate that 80% of people in baseball start out as interns, this means that 80% of people who work in baseball have worked for peanuts. I won’t discuss my personal compensation other than that when I left baseball, it was due to a couple of reasons, one of the largest ones being that I was offered a position for about 80% more than I was making while working for the team. Baseball knows they can under compensate, its simply understood that you don’t get into baseball to make money. The people who work in baseball long term are a different breed.

Having left baseball now, its easier to have some perspective on it. It was very fun and one of the most exciting jobs you can imagine. Helping to build an analytics platform and seeing it mature to a useful tool was an incredible experience. The people I worked with were the smartest and most driven people I’ve met. It was time for me to leave though, I have a family now and needed to get compensated better and work less, it was that simple. I’m just a fan now but I’ll always hold my time in baseball close to my heart.