Working for Teams

As many of you know, there has been a great growth in sports analytics in recent years which is demonstrated by the many analysts currently employed by professional sports teams. Although I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to do baseball research as an academic and in retirement, I have always been a little envious of my friends who have had opportunities to work for professional teams in baseball, football, hockey, etc. In particular, my ABDWR coauthor Ben Baumer worked as an analyst for the New York Mets before he obtained his doctorate, and more recently my other ABDWR coauthor Max Marchi has been working for the Cleveland Indians/Guardians for over 10 years.

This summer some baseball team job ads caught my attention since it seems teams are interested in hiring people with Bayesian modeling expertise. I am happy to announce that I have accepted a Part-Time position as a R & D Analyst with the Houston Astros. The Astros have a strong analytics tradition and I am very excited to get involved with new problems and new types of baseball data working with the Astros analytics team.

The Exploring Baseball Data with R Blog

I have contributed to this blog for over 11 years and I have written about 400 posts on various topics related to exploring baseball using R. (There have been over 677,000 views of our posts over those years.) I have collected many of these posts by top on my baseball research page and you’ll see posts on Bayesian Thinking, Career Trajectories, Clutch Performances, Count Effects, Multilevel Modeling etc. These posts have definitely helped my transition from academia to retirement. But given this new opportunity, I plan on taking a break from this blog, although I may post occasionally on new developments in R software / packages and baseball data.

Ben, Max and I have been very appreciative of people’s interests both in the ABDWR book and our posts. I am personally excited about the growing interest in sports analytics and meetings like Saberseminar, the Carnegie-Mellon Sports Analytics Conference, and the New England Symposium of Statistics in Sports have been great showcases of the research of students in problems in sports. And as data becomes more available, especially at the collegiate level, there will be more opportunities for amateur research and working with sports teams.