Last month, when the Blue Jays informed the media they had extended a qualifying offer to Marco Estrada, they also tacked on a more under-the-radar announcement: Joe Sheehan had been promoted to director of analytics.

It was primarily a change in title (and presumably salary), as Sheehan had already been directing the team’s analytics for the last few years. But it signified an increase in stature for the 31-year-old and his department within the Jays’ revamped front office under new team president Mark Shapiro.

In Cleveland, Shapiro’s Indians were at the forefront of baseball’s analytical revolution of the early 2000s, luring MIT grads to join their front office while developing what was the most sophisticated baseball information system in the game. DiamondView, the Indians’ proprietary analytical database, was launched in 2000 and is considered the forebear to similar databases that now exist throughout the league. (The Jays, for example, launched their database, The BEEST — a nod to longtime team president Paul Beeston — in 2013.)

Since taking the reins in November, Shapiro has hinted at plans to replicate his past investment in analytics by beefing up the Jays’ department. Earlier this month at a news conference to introduce Ross Atkins as general manager, he called Sheehan “one of the bright young guys in the game today,” but added that Sheehan was working with a staff “that’s smaller than most.”

In an email to The Star this week, Shapiro was less explicit, calling analytics an “area of opportunity” for the organization.

It’s not as if the Jays under Alex Anthopoulos were non-believers in advanced statistical analysis. They hired Sheehan, after all. But they did not buy in to the extent of organizations like the Indians, Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates, among others. Maybe it’s just titular semantics, but Sheehan is the Jays’ first director of analytics, an elevated title Shapiro first bestowed in Cleveland eight years ago.

Sheehan, who sat down with The Star earlier this week for his first media interview, was reluctant to wade into those political waters or discuss any plans to expand his three-person department. “I don’t have anything I can say on that,” he said, cagily. “We have thoughts, but nothing I can tell you at this point.”

Growing up north of Boston in Winchester, Mass., Sheehan was raised a rabid Red Sox fan. Inexplicably, his favourite player was Scott Cooper, who mostly served as a backup to Wade Boggs. Sheehan’s appreciation of Cooper was not rooted in any rigorous analysis.

“I was 8,” he says, laughing. “It was probably just a cool baseball card or something.”

After high school, Sheehan went to Oberlin College in Ohio, where he studied biology and played on the baseball team, which competed in NCAA’s Division III.

“He really understood the game,” says Eric Lahetta, Sheehan’s coach at Oberlin. “As a player he was always one step ahead of everybody when it came to putting people in the right position, lining up plays. He was just a very heady baseball player.”

Later, he worked in the sports information office of Oberlin’s athletic department, where, for minimum wage, he compiled statistics, wrote game stories and left an impression for his diligence and attention to detail.

“We were kind of a loose operation prior to his arrival there,” says Joe Karlgaard, the former assistant athletic director at Oberlin who now works at Rice University. Karlgaard said Sheehan took great pains to make sure all of the stats the department collected, even the most mundane, were counted consistently and accurately. “He was nothing if not precise.”

Although Sheehan was a top player for Oberlin — he hit .317 and led his team in RBIs in his senior year, while playing stellar defence, according to Lahetta —he knew he didn’t have a future on the field, given how far down Division III is on the NCAA ladder. So he started looking for jobs.

After graduating in the spring of 2006 he worked as an intern in the Colorado Rockies’ public relations department. In the playoffs that season, Major League Baseball introduced PITCHf/x, a system that tracked the velocity and trajectory of every pitch, feeding the information into the league’s popular Gameday app.

This was a pivotal moment for Sheehan’s career. He saw great potential in the new information, and while the league wasn’t publicly releasing the raw data, you could find it if you knew where to look. Sheehan was among the early keeners who taught themselves how to collect and analyze it.

The next season PITCHf/x was in every major-league ballpark. Sheehan, meanwhile, was back home working for his uncle’s towing company and trying to figure out how to get back into baseball.

Armed with more free time and reams of PITCHf/x data, Sheehan started doing original research and writing for a now-dormant website called BaseballAnalysts.com. He was hoping to build something of a resume.

Today PITCHf/x data is widely available and easily sorted on websites like Fangraphs and Brooks Baseball. But in its nascent stage it was mostly uncharted and Sheehan was part of the vanguard of early explorers — most of whom were soon scooped up for front-office jobs. “We all work for teams now,” he says of his former data-scraping cohorts.

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Sheehan was hired by the San Diego Padres in 2008. In his farewell post at BaseballAnalysts.com, he wrote of his new job: “Sure the pay is low and the hours are long, but for a 23-year-old baseball fiend, there’s no cooler feeling than going to work at the ballpark everyday.”

After a season in San Diego, Sheehan was hired by the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were on the cusp of becoming one of baseball’s most forward-thinking and creative organizations. Sheehan joined the Pirates when they were in the process of building MITT (an acronym for Managing Information, Tools and Talent), their own proprietary database.

“I think the main thing about him that stood out is his ability to focus and to be super detail-oriented,” said Dan Fox, now the Pirates’ director of informatics.

After two seasons in Pittsburgh, Sheehan joined the Jays in 2011. He says working with Fox and the Pirates was “a huge help” when building The BEEST in Toronto. “Just having that map in my head that helped me start up here and kind of hit the ground running a little bit.”

Asked to describe The BEEST to a layman, Sheehan betrays a sense of humour for the first time in the half-hour interview.

“It’s approaching self-awareness,” he deadpans, completely straight faced. “It might launch the nukes next year, judgment day.”

After letting his joke sink in, Sheehan explains that the database functions as a one-stop shop for all of the organization’s analytical tools, consolidating scouting and health reports with statistical projections and contract details. “It lets you just go to one place and find everything you want to know about a guy,” he says. “It reduces the information gathering part and let’s you focus on the evaluative part.”

Sheehan’s career in Major League Baseball has coincided with an unprecedented flood of data. “The sheer scope of it” is what’s most impressive, he says, adding that last year’s addition of Statcast — the player-tracking technology that measures hitters’ exit velocities, outfielders’ route efficiencies and baserunners’ speed, among other things — led to another cascade. Before PITCHf/x, baseball’s record-keeping was largely unchanged for decades and consisted of little more than boxscores.

“Now we’re measuring every thirtieth of a second,” Sheehan says. “Carlos Correa’s career is going to be documented on a completely different level than somebody like Ted Williams.”

While analytics are an important evaluative tool, Shapiro said earlier this week, it will never replace the human element.

“The beauty of baseball and the beauty of sport is that it’s played by human beings and people that come with frailties and imperfections and ultimately are immeasurable,” he said. “… We will never dehumanize a decision. Analytics lead us to make better decisions — they objectively challenge a gut that can you lead to an emotional or momentum-based decision — and they contribute to really good decisions. But analytics don’t produce decisions; they contribute to good decisions.”

What he loves most about his job, he says, is the competition, even though he spends most of his time crunching numbers in an office.

“The players are playing the game and doing the majority of it, but whatever little piece we can do, whether it’s trying to add somebody or make a trade, that’s the best part. That’s the reason I do it.”

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