FORT MYERS — There’s no one more vital to the future of the Red Sox than a Natick kid who, 13 years ago, had two job offers on the same day: one to stay with the World Series-champion Red Sox, another to tour Japan playing harmonica. With a band called Buddahead.

Though he is a stats wonk, Zack Scott had visions of playing like John Popper, the harmonica virtuoso from Blues Traveler. But those didn’t supersede a baseball dream that started to materialize after a boring corporate job right out of college.

He passed on the world tour.

“It was really weird,” Scott said of the timing, “but was an easy call.”

Now the Red Sox vice president of research and development, Scott’s job is to bring the organization up to speed in an area it once appeared to lead but slipped.

Transitioning the team to a new-age database called Beacon and replacing the old one, the famous Carmine, is the tip of the iceberg.

Scott, 39, has help worthy of King Kong and Godzilla, literally.

Legendary, the entertainment company behind movies such as “The Dark Knight” and the upcoming “Kong,” has a robust analytics department with an office in Copley Square. It has been working with the Sox’ own beefed-up department — it’s been called Sox Science in the past, but that’s not the official title — to better the team’s ability to leverage data.

The same engine that processes truly immense amounts of data to market movies — thousands of characteristics about people — is available to the Red Sox.

“If you think about our world, we have ‘Kong’ coming out in three weeks,” said Legendary chief analytics officer Matt Marolda, who hosted the Red Sox in a conference room with a Godzilla theme. “There’s a lot of media happening and we’re constantly refining the people we’re targeting over the course of the campaign. If it took us a day or even a few days to query our own database a new set of audience models, whatever we’re doing, that’s not practical. So we had to create this whole back end in order to do that.

“It turns out if you kind of go on this other parallel thread, obviously with the Statcast data that MLB teams have access to, they have a similar problem.”

A link to curse buster

Scott is one of the few remaining front-office members who has a 2004 World Series ring. He’s a direct link to Theo Epstein, Ben Cherington and Mike Hazen, forward-thinkers who ended an 86-year hex and turned the Sox into a true powerhouse over the years.

Even Hazen, now the Diamondbacks general manager, wasn’t with the team in ’04.

Sox assistant general manager Brian O’Halloran is still here, as is VP of major and minor league operations Raquel Ferreira.

“It’s weird. We talk about it,” Scott said. “When Amiel (Sawdaye left to join the Diamondbacks this winter), he was one of the last few to leave. . . . It feels good to be around that long, but it is funny because it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but it really was and we all were at such a different place.”

Scott was just an intern when the Sox pulled off the mad scramble at the 2004 trade deadline, a four-way deal that sent Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs, and his insights were asked for by the big bosses: Epstein, Jed Hoyer, Josh Byrnes.

Scott had major league roster knowledge because he came from Diamond Mind, a baseball simulation outfit run by Tom Tippett, who later joined the Sox himself.

“That (2004) was my first deadline, and it was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy how it works,’ ” Scott said. “I remember the rush after watching this huge trade, the face of the franchise getting traded — a very high stress thing for Theo.

“I’m just like, ‘I’m going to go take off and go play at the Paradise,’ because I wasn’t that involved.”

Buddahead was playing that night.

Scott is detail-oriented and by extension, a neat freak. His desk is mostly bare aside from a computer, a Baseball America prospect handbook and a family picture with a colorful filter.

Then you catch him performing on stage.

“The thing I love about it is, it was always such a different side to his personality,” Hoyer said of Scott. “A part you didn’t see on a day-to-day basis because he was pretty reserved in the office. Then all of a sudden this guy oddly busts out on the harmonica, and he’s unbelievable.

“You’re shocked by the Zack you knew at work and the Zack going all John Popper on the harmonica.”

Adaptability may be Scott’s best trait.

A current approach

Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski believes in analytics, but they’re not his forte. Delegating responsibilities, though, are part of his management style — combining with John Henry to afford Scott freedom to bring the Sox up to speed.

You probably didn’t realize they were behind.

There’s always been this belief, this assumption, that the Red Sox were at the top of baseball world when it comes to analytics and innovation on a whole, an arena that today covers the medical field, wearable technology and other advancements.

The movie “Moneyball” firmed the imagery: There was Henry trying to hire away A’s general manager Billy Beane as portrayed by Brad Pitt.

The concern in recent time has been that under Dombrowski, the Sox would become more old-school; that when Henry made comments about relying too much on analytics, comments he’s since backtracked from, the Sox were making a mistake.

They might not have been analytical enough to begin with.

Scott said the perception definitely didn’t line up with reality, at least not over time.

“There were probably times the last 10-15 years where I felt like we were probably the upper edge of the industry, and there were times where I think teams just devoted more resources and were maybe a little more progressive in some way,” Sawdaye said. “But in saying that, the Red Sox have always been upper third. Whether they’re No. 1 or (No.) 5 it probably doesn’t make really a difference.”

Too many people were spread between different departments, in Scott’s view. Tippett, who left the organization last year, was split between analysis and technology, for example.

“We were doing analysis in some of these areas, just you could only do so much,” Scott said. “Because we weren’t growing. Early on I’d say we were probably like top five in terms of number of resources dedicated to this stuff and then everyone else started growing pretty rapidly in the last several years.

“We were late on really doing enough with (the pitching data). I think a lot of that was, we didn’t have enough manpower to do that and all the other things we wanted to do so we had to make choices.”

The ‘Big Data’ push

The meeting that set a wave of change in motion coincidentally came the same day Dombrowski was hired. Cherington was part of the meeting, ahead of any announcement from the team that Dombrowski was coming on. Marolda was there, too, and has helped the Sox in hires.

Henry wanted to know, after reading “Big Data Baseball,” a book on the Pirates, if the Sox were positioning themselves correctly.

“What I did observe was that the Red Sox were not in a dissimilar spot to where we were . . . five years before, where they had a lot of data,” said Marolda, who grew up a Sox fan in Harvard. “But it was difficult for them to corral it.”

Scott tracked the number of analysts and technology folks other teams employed. Including himself, his Sox department now numbers 11 — five people full time on the tech side, three analysts, plus two people who help with implementation, former major league pitchers Brian Bannister and Dave Bush. There are consultants the team works with, too.

“I think we’re in a good spot. Are we No. 1 in terms of numbers? No,” Scott said. “The Dodgers, they went very aggressively in hiring. I feel like they hired all these PhDs in different specialized areas.”

The management structure for the Sox is still to be determined. As an example: whether the medical innovations fall under his umbrella is a current discussion. There’s a ton of moving parts. But Scott also doesn’t want the department to lose agility.

Never a sour note

The harmonica playing is an example of maybe Scott’s best trait. He describes himself as an introvert, but where he has always succeeded is his ability to relate. He can talk to “quants,” he can talk to jam-band musicians and he can talk to baseball folks.

“He can articulate and he’s patient,” Sawdaye said. “He’s like a teacher in some ways. He can articulate what he’s seeing from an analytics perspective to anybody.”

Scott got to pursue his other dream too, to an extent. He recorded some tracks with Buddahead, although they didn’t end up needing him.

“They ended up bumping me for John Popper of Blues Traveler,” Scott said. “I can’t complain about that.”

Scott is far behind the scenes, but the future of the Sox is his show.