Tampa Bay Rays continuing shift in front office hiring

The Tampa Bay Rays hired Jeff Sullivan from Fangraphs on Friday, continuing a recent trend in the game.

On Friday, Jeff Sullivan announced that he was leaving Fangraphs to join the Tampa Bay Rays as an analyst. This is not some outlier of though, as hiring the top public baseball analysts has become the latest trend in MLB hiring.

With the proliferation of baseball statistics accessible to anyone with an internet connection and excel skills can conduct their own research. While teams obviously remain ahead of the public in terms of baseball knowledge, that gap has continued to shrink with websites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus, and data driven baseball facilities such as Driveline Baseball at the forefront of public baseball analysis.

The analytics department of each team has employees who scour the internet searching for new information and up-and-coming analysts who can make a difference. This off-season alone has seen Sullivan, Russell Carleton (Mets), and a slew of Driveline instructors, most notably Jason Ochart (Phillies) make the jump to professional teams. Previous off-seasons have been no different, with teams hiring Dave Cameron, Kevin Goldstein, Jason Parks, among so many others.

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All these hires are a win for the public baseball sphere but also for sabermetrics writ large. Every team has bought into analytics to a varying degree and the detractors have continued to be pushed out. Teams who went all in, such as the Astros, Cubs, Dodgers, Rays, among others, have seen their teams be successful year after year culminating in World Series appearances or victories. These teams were met with the scorn and disdain from their fans after years of 95 loss or worse seasons. All the detractors were silent after World Series victories.

The revolution in analytics across baseball has only made the competition fiercer. All teams are working with the same information and it is more critical than ever to have analysts who can conduct in-depth research and message the data in a practical form.

Analytics are making there way into field staff as evidenced by all the Driveline hires. With new technology like Edgertronic Cameras, Rapsodo, along with Trackman units, there is more information generated now than ever before in the minor leagues. These devices capture spin rates, velocities, and so much more than report all the data back to the front office almost instantly. With all this information, teams are taking a more data driven approach to player development to maximize a minor leaguer’s chance of contributing and succeeding in the Majors.

This is where instructors from Driveline who can use data to teach optimal swings and pitching motions are critical. The science and data behind the why can be complicated, players for the most part only want to know how to get better and instructors who can interpret the data and intertwine that with coaching can improve a player’s outcomes.

Data in baseball is not going away. Before, teams were after ivy-leaguers with economics and finance backgrounds for quantitative decision-making and Silicon Valley engineers to build robust database systems. Teams still value that skill set; however, they are hiring more and more people who contribute research to the public arena to do their research exclusively for them. Much like teams try to squeeze value out of every player on the field, they are now doing that in their Player Development and Analytic circles too.

In Moneyball, Billy Beane said “adapt or die”, teams now are adapting more rapidly than ever.