Sig Mejdal has an opinion on baseball players. It might seem radical, but he’s a smart man, a former NASA researcher at the forefront of baseball’s statistical revolution. Let him explain.

“They’re our species, they’re not aliens for which we need some expert to translate and communicate,” said Mejdal, a special assistant to Jeff Luhnow, the general manager of the Houston Astros. “I don’t buy into the idea that a socially mature, sensitive analyst cannot speak to a baseball player, and my experience is that it works just fine.”

Mejdal, 52, has been with the Astros since 2012, when they were the majors’ worst team. Now they are World Series champions, a status that presents a new challenge to their front office, the most unapologetically progressive one in baseball. Instead of trying to build a winner, the Astros must sustain their success in an era with so many rivals copying their old blueprint of tearing down the present to build for tomorrow.

The answer, the Astros believe, is in the seamless transfer of analytics from the iPad to the diamond, a full-scale data immersion from the lowest levels of the minors to Minute Maid Park. Every team now values advanced metrics. Not every team has sent its top analyst to spend a summer as a first-base coach on the bottom rung of its farm system, as the Astros did with Mejdal last season.