So You Want To Work In Baseball (Part One)

Advice from people doing it

Welcome to Warning Track Power, an independent newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

My uncle tried to save me from myself. He’s always been more than willing to share his opinions. And so, with a few magic words that impress upon a sixth-grader forever, he exposed the folly around my decision to take French instead of Spanish.

I don’t remember the statistics he cited, but I recall a couple of words he used in referring to me. The message was clear: The ability to speak Spanish would have a far greater positive impact on my future than French ever could.

It’s the best advice I never took. Uncle George was right. Take a look at 40-man rosters and prospect lists. You don’t see too many players from French-speaking nations, do you? Merde!

When I’m approached these days by students and young professionals looking to begin a career in baseball, one of the first things I ask is: “Do you speak Spanish?” Next, I acknowledge that the game has changed significantly in the nine years since I last held a position in a front office. Fledgling, or nonexistent, analytics and R&D departments now boast headcounts greater than what entire baseball operations staffs were 15 years ago. A lot has happened in a relatively short amount of time. Just ask your flip phone and Blackberry.

On Sunday, league officials, team employees, agents, media, and job seekers will descend upon the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Hotel in Nashville, site of this year’s Winter Meetings. In an effort to educate myself on the state of the modern front office so that I could best advise aspiring baseball professionals, I spoke with former colleagues — all of whom began as interns — and a few current team employees whom I first met as college students looking for a way in.

Everyone I spoke to has achieved some level of success in the game. They all have made an impact upon peers and their organizations. They are role models for those looking to begin a career in baseball and for anyone curious about baseball leadership. The insights they shared serve as great advice. Their stories capture the game’s rapidly evolving foundation.

In the interest of keeping this piece a manageable length, the story will be told in two parts. This is part one; the second installment will be published later this weekend (and can be found here).

During these conversations, I was most struck by the fact that there are more internships and entry-level full-time positions than ever before, yet only so many growth opportunities. As Joe Sheehan, an Assistant General Manager with the Blue Jays says, “The top of the pyramid hasn’t really changed. We’ve just excavated further down.”

Similar comments from almost everyone I spoke to made it clear there is another chapter to this story. Getting in is one thing. Staying in and advancing is an entirely different challenge (for a different day).

When it comes to getting in, there was a common refrain: Viable candidates find ways to differentiate themselves.

“I would hope they’re extremely passionate about baseball,” says Nate Horowitz, Senior Director of Player Personnel with the Mets. The fact that Horowitz even has to say that signals a different reality within the game. “Take on independent projects to separate yourself,” he suggests. Research that demonstrates and develops analytical skills are one option. Publicly available courses on Driveline, the data-driven training facility embraced by many players and organizations, is another. “Add something to skill set that allows you to contribute.”

Lobby Lizards Unite

Horowitz and I first met at the Winter Meetings in 2010. I wrote about that encounter this time last year. In Horowitz’s first season as an intern, Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw won Cy Young Awards. It wasn’t that long ago.

“It happened to work out for me. I feel very lucky about that,” says Horowitz, now the Senior Director of Player Personnel for the Mets.

“I think if I was applying for jobs now with my resume, then I would have no chance… At the time, I got in with an economics degree and stats minor I couldn’t really do anything with.” He shares that interns and entry-level staffers today arrive well versed in programming, database management, or building apps for decision-making programs. “And that’s not even people in the analytics department.”

Getting a foot in the door today requires a different strategy and a more specialized skill set than what was required only 10 years ago. “My first year with the Angels, there were generally seven or eight of us in the office, and three were interns,” Horowitz says of his experience in 2012. Take a quick look at the front office directory of most teams and you’ll see that it takes more — sometimes much more — than just seven or eight people to staff an analytics team.

“It’s a different experience,” Horowitz concludes.

Coding and Carrying Tools

If you tuned into broadcasts this past season, at some point you probably saw a heat map. With a color scheme like a meteorologist’s weather chart, shades of blue, green, yellow, and red overlaid on the strike zone reveal a hitter’s strengths and weaknesses by location. Similar maps exist for home plate umpires; they display the accuracy and consistency of their strike calling. These visualizations are fairly widespread today. Fifteen years ago, however, that wasn’t the case. What the general public now accesses for free was once only possible through hard-to-parse data that required skills, not always available in organizations new to the analytics revolution, to make sense of.

Joe Sheehan got his start as the baseball operations intern for the Padres in 2008. I still remember when he first generated heat maps that revealed a specific home plate umpire’s strike zone tendencies. Before each game, we knew if that day’s umpire was more likely to have a generous zone or a tight zone, and exactly where and how those opportunities could be exploited. Sheehan was ahead of his time.

He made a brief stop in Pittsburgh to work for the Pirates before landing in Toronto in 2011. He’s been there ever since, building out the organization’s analytics initiatives among other responsibilities.

“Coding is becoming what Excel was 15 years ago… So much of the stuff you need to use to do your job — whether it’s a scouting coordinator, an analyst, or an assistant coach that’s a liaison to the staff on the field — there’s so much data to gather,” Sheehan says, including Trackman (the tracking system that uses radar technology to provide metrics on pitches and batted balls) among one of their biggest sources of data.

“Being able to get the data into a worksheet that you can look at is pretty important as far as being able to function. It’s not table stakes [for an internship], but it’s become closer to that.”

Sheehan’s advice for attracting a team may sound straightforward, but that doesn’t make it simple. “Find a carrying tool,” Sheehan says. “That hasn’t changed. The tools have changed. Deeper analysis is still a separator. If you’re able to do something — there’s so much free data out there now — if you’re able to find a better projection system for college, the minors, the Majors… those are still critical.”

He also identifies blogs and baseball websites as sources for future hires, calling the growth of teams’ R&D departments “borderline unfettered.” Sheehan, himself, wrote for an analysis-driven website before beginning his internship with the Padres.

Practical experience is also in play. For someone looking to get into coaching and player development, there are now many facilities around the country where players train under the supervision of biomechanists. Data-capturing technology has become part of the mainstream. Somebody has to know the technology; somebody has to explain the results. Newer technology has spawned pipelines that lead directly to teams. Additionally, clubs employ personnel dedicated to examining biotech data. New opportunities abound.

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“It Is What It Is”

“There’s a higher technical bar now than there was 10 years ago, especially with coding,” says Josh Studnitzer, who began as a minor league video intern with the Orioles in the summer of 2014 after graduating college. Back then, a video intern’s job usually entailed setting up cameras over the two dugouts in order to capture the pitchers and hitters from both open and closed sides. A third camera stationed behind the plate recorded every pitch. Once the game began, the intern would chart pitches, logging every outcome in specialized software that indexed each pitch and result with accompanying video.

In 2015, Studnitzer reprised his video responsibilities for the Cubs’ affiliate in Myrtle Beach. The next year, he gained a baseball operations internship with the Mets then held a similar role with the O’s in 2017.

Studnitzer is now the Manager of Major League Hitting Strategy and Analysis with the Phillies, the organization he joined in as an advance scouting intern in 2018. It wasn’t until the 2019 season that he finally earned full-time status. That’s quite a journey.

“It is what it is,” Studnitzer says. “It can be tough to make people fit… I was confident in the work I was doing. I was clarifying what I was doing with each next step.”

Echoing what Sheehan says, Studnitzer believes that coding and a solid understanding of programming languages such as SQL, R, and Python are a prerequisite for those interested in the R&D side of the game. Additionally, as many teams are investing in tech-heavy facilities — where biomechanics and a variety of metrics are studied and applied — there’s more opportunity to find a point of entry.

Studnitzer suggests that candidates create a portfolio of work, which might include a predictive model or an app. “How are you going to differentiate yourself from other candidates?”

Red Bull and Tomato Soup

This past January, Peter Wardell oversaw the signing of Jeremy Rodriguez, a 16-year-old shortstop from the Dominican Republic, for $1.25 million. It was quite a way to commemorate 10 years of working for the Diamondbacks.

Wardell graduated from UCLA in 2012 and set out to make it in baseball. It wasn’t an open-ended adventure, though. “I was very focused on putting the best effort forward to then know that the next step would be even bigger. Six months to prove to myself that I was willing to give everything I had,” he says. “If I didn’t get a job that winter, I wasn’t going to work in baseball.”

Wardell began writing for Baseball America in the spring. “I tried to figure out ways to differentiate myself from enough candidates,” he says. After college, he moved to Cape Cod to scout the collegiate summer league, and then he covered the Arizona Fall League. As he puts it, his skill set was writing baseball: “I could then introduce myself as Peter Wardell of Baseball America.” It made him more memorable. Plus, he could build his list of contacts, gain media access, and make money.

“I used all my savings to move to Cape Cod,” he remembers. Once there, he couldn’t afford a car. So he bought a mountain bike and put 1,000 miles on it that summer. “I took a one-way flight from San Francisco to Providence, Rhode Island, and when I landed is when I told my parents that I didn’t have an apartment.”

To make ends meet, Wardell got a job with the local school district. From six o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon, he mowed lawns. Then he’d ride his bike to two games every night. He was sustained that summer by baseball, Red Bull, and tomato soup. He left the Cape about 15 pounds lighter than he had arrived.

Wardell was still a good four months from landing an internship.

That fall, while at a game in the Phoenix area, Wardell encountered Brendan Domaracki, then an assistant in the D-backs scouting department. That meeting, which happened largely because of Wardell’s baseball-centric strategy, ultimately led to an internship.

Wardell is now the Director of International Scouting for the Diamondbacks. (Domaracki is the Director of Player Personnel for the Mariners.)

“I still, to this day, like trying to find people that are hungry, that have done something to develop themselves before they try to join a team,” he says.

He notes that teams can’t always focus on their internship candidates. As such, he suggests that candidates get on teams’ radars as early as possible.

This past July, Jeremy Rodriguez — the left-handed hitting prospect Wardell signed earlier in the year — was traded to the Mets in exchange for Tommy Pham, a critical piece of the D-backs’ postseason success.

“Being different is still a thing that carries over to this day.”

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So You (Still) Want To Work In Baseball (Part Two)