2024 Speakers
Please refer to the Schedule page for a list of speakers.
2023 Speakers
Our Event MC is Jason Benetti. Since 2016, he has been the primary television play-by-play announcer of Chicago White Sox baseball and the alternate play-by-play announcer of Chicago Bulls basketball for NBC Sports Chicago. Now primarily contracted with Fox Sports nationally, Benetti was formerly the main announcer for ESPN’s alternate “StatCast” telecasts, and additionally has worked for NBC Sports, Westwood One, and Time Warner covering football, baseball, lacrosse, hockey, and basketball.
Ethan Katz, a Rockies farmhand for four years, retired from professional pitching in 2009 and took a job as a pitching coach at Harvard-Westlake School. You could say he got lucky: Lucas Giolito and Max Fried were underclassmen at the school, and Jack Flaherty soon joined them in the rotation. Or, you could say the pitchers got lucky, as everybody involved in that story has since found glory in the major leagues. Katz’ ascent to the highest level took a bit longer than his three first rounders’ did. As he once put it, “I’ve done every single coaching job there is from the start of high school, except Triple-A.” By the time he got his first big-league assignment in 2019, as an assistant pitching coach with the San Francisco Giants, he was widely seen as a rising star. The White Sox hired him to be their pitching coach after the 2020 season, a position he still holds.
Ehsan Bokhari is the Assistant General Manager of the Chicago Cubs. For the Houston Astros, he was previously the Senior Director, Strategic Decision Making, Senior Director of Player Evaluation, and Director of R&D, and entered the baseball industry as Senior Analyst for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He holds a Ph.D. in quantitative psychology and a Master’s in statistics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Bachelor degrees in mathematics and psychology from the University of Arizona.
Dan Turkenkopf is the Vice President of Baseball Research & Innovation for the Milwaukee Brewers. He oversees a team of analysts conducting baseball research projects supporting player evaluation, amateur scouting, player development and the medical department. Turkenkopf previously worked with the Tampa Bay Rays from 2013-15 as developer of baseball systems. In that role, he designed applications to convey information to the baseball operations staff, coaches and players and evaluated potential roster transactions. In addition to his work in the front office, Turkenkopf has been active in the public analysis space since 2008, writing for Baseball Prospectus, The Hardball Times and Beyond the Box Score. Outside of baseball, Turkenkopf has held positions as senior director of strategic research for Apprenda, a cloud software startup, and as a solutions architect with IBM. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 with bachelor’s degrees in economics and mathematics.
Katie Krall is a Senior Product Manager of Baseball Strategy at Hawk-Eye Innovations, a division of Sony Sports Business. She spearheads development of new products that leverage biomechanics, player tracking, bat, and ball flight data. Krall spent in uniform 2022 as a Development Coach with the Boston Red Sox where she oversaw pitch design, advance scouting and integrating data into player plans. She previously was part of the Global Strategy team at Google focusing on Google Workspace after two seasons with the Cincinnati Reds as a Baseball Operations Analyst, a position that combined the worlds of roster construction, analytics, and scouting. After graduating from Northwestern University, Krall worked for a year and a half at Major League Baseball in the Commissioner’s Office in New York City as a League Economics & Operations Coordinator. At MLB, Krall advised Clubs on 40-man roster management, MLB rules and compliance, major league administration, and salary arbitration. In 2016, Krall planned the World Series Trophy Tour for the Chicago Cubs. The previous summer, she was an Assistant General Manager in the Cape Cod Baseball League. She received her MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in June 2022.
Jim Albert (@albertbayes) is Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University. He was named a Distinguished University Professor at BGSU for his statistics research in sports and Bayesian modeling. Besides his many research articles, he has written or coauthored the books Curve Ball, Teaching Statistics Using Baseball, Visualizing Baseball, and Analyzing Baseball Data with R. He currently contributes to the blog Exploring Baseball Data with R which describes the interesting patterns in baseball measures of performance using the rich sources of baseball data.
Beth Woerner is the assistant baseball coach at Lebanon Valley College, a Division III school in the MAC Freedom Conference. This is her third season at LVC, where she works with infielders, teaches baserunning concepts, and assists with recruiting. Previously, she served as a graduate assistant coach at the University of Charleston (WV), where she earned a Master’s Degree in Strategic Leadership. Before transitioning to coaching, Beth was a research and development intern at Baseball Prospectus, where she focused on baseball analytics and technology.
John Garrett is an Analytics Engineer at Rapsodo. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Utah State University, graduating in 2022. He conducted research on baseball aerodynamics and the Seam Shifted Wake effect in the USU Experimental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory for three years as an Undergraduate and Graduate Research Assistant to Dr. Barton Smith. Before completing his M.S. degree, he served as a Baseball Data Intern with Major League Baseball.
Daniel Eck is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the UIUC with research interests in baseball analytics. He maintains a website containing his research endeavors in baseball and his ongoing collaborations in the area (https://ecklab.github.io/) and he is developing a website devoted to era-adjusted baseball statistics (https://eckeraadjustment.web.
Alan Nathan is a physics professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a long career studying the high-speed collisions of subatomic particles, he now studies much lower speed collisions between baseballs and bats. He runs the very popular site The Physics of Baseball, and has served on various panels advising organizations such as the NCAA on issues related to bat performance.
Bin Lyu is a research engineer in the Sports Science Lab (SSL) at Washington State University. He joined the lab in 2014 to pursue a Master’s degree in Mechanical engineering. After graduation, he has remained dedicated to his work at the lab, primarily focusing on testing sports equipment. He has conducted a comprehensive bat swing sensor study. He is also an expert in measuring sports ball aerodynamics and has successfully developed an exceptionally accurate contactless sports ball drag and lift measurement system. He was able to establish correlations between baseball drag and seam height, which helped explain the MLB baseball changes and the home run surge since 2015.
DJ Baxendale is the Director of Analytics for Arkansas Razorbacks Baseball. He pitched at the University of Arkansas 2010-2012, and was a member of the 2011 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team. In 2012, Baxendale was drafted in the 10th round by the Minnesota Twins. He spent eight years in the Twins organization , including pitching for their AAA affiliate 2016-2019. Upon retiring in 2019, he joined the Arkansas’ coaching staff, and this past season became their Director of Analytics. As part of his work, Baxendale makes daily use of the team’s data and technology. He hopes to grow the college game by using data as a tool for player development and evaluation.
2018 Speakers
On June 13, 2013, Nate Freiman hit a line drive to left field, becoming just the 20th—and final—major leaguer in history to knock a walk-off base hit against Mariano Rivera. He retired last year with a career 100 OPS+ in the majors, but this lefty-mashing first baseman was anything but average: Besides being, at 6-foot-8, the tallest position player of his era, he is also one of the most inquisitive. The Duke graduate taught himself R and, as he pursues an MBA, is publishing his own research at the FanGraphs Community blog.
Dr. Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hibberd, PhD, LAT, ATC is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Science at The University of Alabama. Her research focuses on assessment of shoulder dysfunction using neuromuscular and biomechanical measurement models and injury prevention in overhead athletes. Her long-term research goal is to identify effective methods to prevent shoulder pain and injury in overhead athletes through implementation of intervention programs and identifying practice guidelines that maximize performance while reducing the risk of injury. In order to accomplish this goal, Dr. Hibberd conducts research in overhead athletes of all ages, while emphasizing the dissemination of this research through peer-reviewed publications and presentations, community engagement and interactions with clinicians.
Fernando Perez, the first Latino Ivy-leaguer in MLB history, managed to hitch a ride on Tampa Bay’s first World Series team, which was the highlight of his cafe venti MLB career. Since retiring, Perez has worked as a coach and ambassador for MLB in Europe and Africa, as a freelance writer, and as onscreen talent. He is a correspondent on Vice World of Sports airing on Viceland and ESPN, he appears on The MLB Network and on MLB.tv, and he is an instructor at The School of the New York Times.
Dr. Lloyd Smith is a professor of mechanical engineering at Washington State University. He is the editor of Sports Engineering and the director of the Sports Science Laboratory. His lab specializes in measuring the performance of bats and balls for amateur baseball and softball. His work includes measuring the aerodynamics of sports balls and numerical simulations of ball impacts. The impact simulations require rigorous ball material characterization and are used to describe equipment performance and personal injury.
Eddie Romero became the Director of International Scouting for the Boston Red Sox in November, 2011. Eddie joined the Red Sox organization in 2006 as an assistant in international and professional scouting, was named Coordinator, Latin American Operations that November, and Assistant Director, Latin American Operations/International Scouting in 2011. Prior to being named Director of International Scouting, Romero was a prosecutor for the State Attorney’s office for the fourth Judicial District of Florida.
Jonah Gabry is a core developer of the widely used open-source Stan software for statistical modeling and a researcher in statistics at Columbia University collaborating primarily with Andrew Gelman on methods and software for Bayesian data analysis. Jonah is an author of the rstan and rstanarm R packages, which provide interfaces to Stan, as well as the author of the shinystan and bayesplot packages for model visualization, and the loo package for model comparison. In addition to developing statistical software, Jonah is affiliated with several research centers at Columbia, including the Applied Statistics Center, the Institute of Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the Population Research Center. Outside of academia, he has provided statistical consulting to professional sports teams (including baseball), major publishing companies, and other businesses, as well as US and European Union government agencies.
Anette E. “Peko” Hosoi is an American mechanical engineer, biophysicist, and mathematician, currently the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Christopher Geary is Chief of Sports Medicine at Tufts Medical Center and is an Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his residency in Orthopaedic Surgery at Tufts Medical Center. Following his residency, he completed the San Diego Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Fellowship. He also served as Assistant Team Physician for the San Diego Padres, San Diego State and UCSD. He is currently a team physician for Tufts University and Emerson College and is a primary reviewer for the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
Chuck Korb is the founder of the Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball conference, now in its fifth year. Chuck’s background is in the investment industry where he enjoyed modest success before moving to his true love, teaching. Chuck currently teaches at-risk/low income middle school students in his home town, Malden, and consults with a professional hockey team. He has also taught numerous classes and seminars on sabermetrics, and has written multiple articles for Lindy’s, Maple Street Press, and various on-line sites.
Tom Tippett previously held the position of Director, Baseball Information Services, in the Sox front office. Prior to joining the Red Sox in 2008, Tom was the founder of Diamond Mind, Inc., serving as president and chief architect of that company’s baseball simulation products until he sold the company in 2006. From 2003 to 2008, he consulted with the Red Sox Baseball Operations department of the Red Sox on technology and baseball research projects. A Toronto native, Tom graduated from the University of Waterloo with an Honours B.Math degree and earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Dr. Glenn Healey is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Irvine where he is director of the computer vision laboratory.
Dr. Alan Nathan is a physics professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a long career studying the high-speed collisions of subatomic particles, he now studies much lower speed collisions between baseballs and bats. He runs the very popular site The Physics of Baseball, and has served on various panels advising organizations such as the NCAA on issues related to bat performance.
Dr. Dan Brooks does biostatistics and research design. He maintains the popular PITCHf/x analysis website BrooksBaseball.net. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife Marilyn (who still wears her pink Sox hat proudly), son Logan (who is very excited by BALL! BALL! BALL!) and dog Teddy (who wishes they would hold Bark in the Park at Fenway, even if he’d probably spend all game eating peanuts off the floor).
Brian Mills is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management at the University of Florida with research and teaching focused on managerial sports economics. He is also an instructor at Data Camp teaching baseball analytics with R and has written multiple book chapters on baseball analytics. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sport Management – and M.A. degrees in Economics and Statistics – from the University of Michigan. Prior to his time in Ann Arbor, Brian earned a BA in Psychology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland where he played Division III baseball.
Brian Bannister is the Red Sox director of pitching analytics. He spent five seasons pitching in the major leagues, most notably with the Kansas City Royals, where he finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2007. He was a right-hander with an underwhelming fastball in a sport that lusts for hard-throwers and lefties, and his ability to succeed was attributed as much to his brain (and stubborn perseverance) as to his arm. “He tinkers and analyzes and studies and plots and creates and destroys and invents and experiments,” the writer Joe Posnanski once said of him. By a certain type of baseball fan, Bannister will be remembered as the first ballplaying sabermetrician, a student of advanced statistics who saw information as valuable, not threatening. His public embrace of the brainy side of sports helped bridge the divide between baseball’s jocks and nerds.
2017 Speakers
Rick Hahn, who is in his fifth season as the White Sox general manager, has been with the club since October 2000 and helped build the 2005 World Series Champion and 2008 postseason teams. The Chicago native was named the club’s senior vice president/general manager on October 26, 2012, and his duties include oversight of all player personnel matters, coaching staff decisions, and the club’s player development and scouting operations. During his 12 seasons as White Sox vice president/assistant general manger, Hahn worked on roster composition, player acquisitions, talent evaluations, and contract negotiations. Hahn is active in the organization’s community outreach efforts as he has met with the organization’s Amateur City Elite (ACE) youth baseball teams and volunteered his time serving meals to families at the Ronald McDonald House in downtown Chicago.
Jean Afterman, the New York Yankees’ senior vice president and assistant general manager, is the highest-ranking female executive in a major-league front office. Her career began on the stage, where as an aspiring actress she starred in Shakespearean comedies and Cole Porter musicals. She earned her law degree at the University of San Francisco and soon after met Don Nomura, who represented Japanese baseball players seeking to play in the major leagues. She used a loophole to help Hideo Nomo sign in the United States and, after Hideki Irabu’s turbulent negotiations with major-league teams, helped create the posting system governing teams’ purchases of Japanese players’ rights. “She was as tough and smart and quick and as unafraid of George (Steinbrenner) as anyone,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman once told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have her on this side of the fence?'” She has been with the Yankees since 2001.
Tyler Tumminia Cherington formerly served as Senior Vice President of the Goldklang Group. Tumminia was responsible for the marketing and broad scale sponsorship, operations, and communication efforts for the Goldklang Group. She developed the Group’s award winning marketing philosophy, Be Your Own Fan, in response to current market trends and industry analysis. In addition, Tumminia was responsible for the largest group-wide partnership with a major brand and the largest singular themed promotional event in the Group’s history. Her development of the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame received tremendous recognition throughout the industry, and has been hailed as a game-changer in how scouts are perceived at the local levels. She is currently minority owner of the Pittsfield Suns of the FCBL. She is a recipient of the Roland Hemond, MASA and Marcom awards for excellence in her field, and in 2011 was named Executive of the Year by NYU’s sports management program. In the fall of 2011, she successfully completed MLB Scout School in Arizona. Tumminia was also named 2013 Sports Business Executive of the Year from Minnesota State University. In 2014, she was named Top 25 Most Influential Women In Sports, by Bleacher Report and received the Game Changer award by Sports Business Journal as a Female Owner in Baseball.
Dr. Glenn Fleisig, Ph.D., grew up in New York as a big baseball fan with an aptitude for math and science. While attending MIT (across the Charles River from this seminar), he discovered the field of sports biomechanics for combining his interests. After graduating from MIT, Fleisig volunteered as a research intern at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, where he met up-and-coming sports medicine doctor Jim Andrews. The two men shared a passion to understand and prevent injuries in baseball and other sports. Fleisig earned graduate degrees from Washington University and UAB. In 1987, Dr. Andrews opened the American Sports Medicine Institute and hired Dr. Fleisig to head up the research. During the past 25 years, Dr. Fleisig has published over 100 scientific articles, worked with thousands of athletes including from 20 Major League Baseball teams, appeared in countless television, print, and online stories, and presented his work all over the world. Dr. Fleisig is also the pitching safety consultant for Little League Baseball and a member of USA Baseball’s Safety Committee.
Dr. Mike Reinold is currently the co-founder and president of Champion Physical Therapy and Performance, a physical therapy and performance training facility just outside Boston in Waltham, MA. He was formerly the Head Athletic Trainer and Physical Therapist for the Boston Red Sox. Prior to the Red Sox, he worked at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, AL under the direction of orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews. He is a leading clinician, researcher, and educator in the field of physical therapy, sport biomechanics, and performance training with an emphasis on rehabilitation and performance enhancement in baseball pitchers.
Travis Sawchik, a former newspaperman, is now a staff writer at FanGraphs and is the author of ‘Big Data Baseball.’ He is a Cleveland-native living behind enemy lines in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Jeff Sullivan is senior editor at FanGraphs, and has been since 2012. He’s also co-host of the Effectively Wild podcast, and has been since just a few months ago. Prior to FanGraphs, he worked at SB Nation, writing on a daily basis about the Mariners for a decade. He lives in close proximity to the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Eno Sarris has edited children’s books, written about beer, and taken pictures of pitcher’s fingers for a living, so he’s living the dream(s). At his best, he combines ham-fisted analytics and random findings from the liberal arts wing with barely structured interviews on tiny topics.
Jason Benetti is a TV play-by-play announcer for ESPN and the Chicago White Sox, currently in his second season with the Sox. Benetti joined ESPN as a play-by-play announcer for college basketball in 2011, and since then has also called college football, baseball and lacrosse games, as well as high school football. He began calling Major League Baseball for ESPN last summer. He has had broadcasting jobs with Fox Sports 1, the Syracuse Chiefs (Washington Nationals Triple-A affiliate), Time Warner Cable Sports, BIG EAST Conference, High Point University, IMG College, the Salem Avalanche and DePaul University. Benetti graduated from Syracuse University in 2005 with bachelor’s degrees in broadcast journalism, economics and psychology. He then went on to earn his J.D. at Wake Forest School of Law in 2011. The Illinois native is a spokesperson for the Cerebral Palsy Foundation’s ‘Just Say Hi’ campaign. He has taught sports broadcasting and sports interviewing as an adjunct professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Dr. David Kagan graduated from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) with a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics in 1977. He immediately began graduate study in physics at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned perhaps the last Ph.D. in atomic spectroscopy in 1981. He became a faculty member at California State University, Chico in the same year. Kagan retired from CSU Chico and earned Emeritus status in 2014. All the while he has remained true to his lifelong obsession with baseball and is a frequent contributor to The Hardball Times. Kagan’s alter ego, Dr. Baseball, Ph.D. can be found at MajorLeaguePhysics.org and @DrBaseballPhD.
Dave Cameron is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs, where he and his coworkers analyze, discuss, and fawn over the sport of baseball. He’s been writing for FanGraphs since 2008, and was promoted to Managing Editor in 2010. In addition to FanGraphs, he can be found writing weekly for ESPN Insider and he regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal’s sports page as well. He also is a proud cancer survivor, as his leukemia has been in remission since August of 2011, and he encourages you to give every dime you have to cancer research, as he is quite happy to be alive today.
Harry Pavlidis is the Director of Data Analysis for Baseball Prospectus. He also provides a regular column featuring PITCHf/x based scouting and analysis. As the founder of Pitch Info and previously a founding partner of Complete Game Consulting, Harry has been providing professional services related to the handling and analysis of baseball tracking data since 2009. Harry is a graduate of Syracuse University with more than fifteen years experience in developing online and mobile applications–for things not even related to baseball, too.
Jason Rollison is the co-owner and managing editor of piratesbreakdown.com, an analytics-heavy site and mobile app focused on the Pittsburgh Pirates. In addition to covering the Bucs, Rollison is a featured writer at SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score, freelances for several newspapers and serves as a beat writer for the State College Spikes. He is a sucker for analyzing pitchers, and he may or may not want to name his first born “Trackman.”
Kate Morrison is by day a digital and social media marketing specialist from Dallas, and by night a baseball writer and analyst for Baseball Prospectus, FanRag Sports MLB, and WFAA.com. Additionally, as a research assistant for Pitch Info, she works to ensure the quality of pitch tagging on BrooksBaseball.net. Kate grew up loving baseball thanks to her mother, who made sure she understood the game.
Bill Petti leads Predictive Modeling and Data Science consulting at Gallup. In his free time, he writes for The Hardball Times. Additionally, he has consulted for multiple Major League Baseball teams, and has appeared in a number of MLB-produced documentaries. He is the creator of various public tools for baseball analysis, such as the Edge% app, the Interactive Spray Chart Tool, and the baseballr package for the R programming language. Along with Jeff Zimmerman, he won the 2013 SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis.
Nick Ceraso is a rising junior studying business at the University of Michigan. He spends his summer days as the Product Development Manager for Atlantis Technology. By night, he models MLB free agent salaries and dreams of Anderson Espinoza back on the Red Sox.
Andrew Dominijanni is an acoustic research engineer who uses his free time and background in mechanics to learn about baseball. He has appeared on NHK Sports Japan, offering a data-inclined fan’s perspective on emerging batted ball data. He is a graduate of Brown and Stanford, and lives outside Boston with his wife and dog.
Dr. Katherine Evans is a biostatistician who specializes in causal inference, missing data, and prediction. She works with electronic medical records but gets far more enjoyment from applying the same statistical methods to the vast array of data available in baseball and other sports. Though Katherine was raised in California, she has lived in Boston for almost a decade and will still get starry-eyed at the mention of Dave Roberts.
Stephanie Springer is an organic chemist who hung up her lab coat to assume her current role as a patent examiner, where she reviews new methods of using known drugs. Prior to that, Stephanie spent over ten years in the pharmaceutical industry as a medicinal chemist, where she worked on early stage drug discovery research. She enjoys cooking, craft beer, and chasing her 3 year old son around ballparks.
Jen Mac Ramos is a stats intern at Baseball Prospectus and a writer and podcast host at The Hardball Times. They enjoy learning about player development and writing non-serious comments in any code they write. Jen graduated with a bachelors in English from Mills College and a masters in journalism from USC and currently resides in a sleepy Central California town.
Kiri Oler is a math professor in Denver, but also has professional experience in data science and information security. She has a BS in mathematics, a BA in English, and an MS in security informatics. She enjoys baseball mostly for its weirdness, but also for providing a fun application for her technical skills.
Rachel Heacock is a student at the University of Virginia studying Applied Statistics. Though she comes from a quantitative background, she holds a particular interest in the mental aspect of baseball. She has contributed to both Beyond the Box Score and The Hardball Times. Rachel is currently living in Salisbury, Maryland for her minor league player development internship with the Orioles.
2016 Speakers
Dave Dombrowski was named as President of Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox on August 18, 2015. In this role – newly created by the organization – he is responsible for all baseball matters for the club. A distinguished and experienced baseball executive, Dombrowski arrived in Boston with nearly 40 years of service in Major League Baseball. In addition to his extensive accomplishments relating to on-field baseball performance, Dombrowski has also been involved in areas off the field around the game. In April of 2013, former Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig named him chairman of the Commissioner’s On-Field Diversity Task Force, which addresses the talent pipeline that impacts the representation and development of diverse players and on-field personnel in Major League Baseball, particularly African-Americans. While with the Tigers, also in 2013, he accepted the Commissioner’s Award for Philanthropic Excellence on behalf of the club for their Anti-Bullying community program. Dombrowski and his wife, Karie, live in suburban Boston with their daughter, Darbi, and son, Landon.
Bryan Minniti is in his second season as the D-backs’ Assistant General Manager and 16th in Major League Baseball. In this role, he assists Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa, Sr. VP/General Manager Dave Stewart and Sr. VP of Baseball Operations De Jon Watson on all facets of the team’s baseball operations including rules compliance, transactions, budgeting, statistical analysis and contract negotiations. Minniti joined the D-backs following five seasons as the Assistant GM with the Washington Nationals. Minniti began his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates as an intern in the Baseball Operations Department in 2001 and worked as an assistant within that department before joining the team full-time in 2004. He was named Director of Baseball Operations in 2007. He earned a bachelor of science degree with a double major in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002.
Jerry Weinstein has been coaching baseball players since 1966, when he took a position as an assistant coach for the UCLA Bruins’ freshmen team. In the 50 years since, he has been a coach on two USA Olympic teams, managed Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic, been director of player development for the Los Angeles Dodgers, served as catching coach and coordinator for offense for the Colorado Rockies’ major-league club, and managed four minor-league teams. As the legendary head baseball coach at Sacramento City College for two-plus decades, he graduated more than 200 players to the professional ranks including 29 in the majors, compiled an .800 winning percentage, and was twice named National Community College Baseball Coach of the Year. “If we lose and enough people get better, we’ve had a great day,” he once said. “If we win and no one gets better, we have not.” He is the co-author of Baseball Coach’s Survival Guide and the author of The Complete Handbook of Coaching Catchers.
John Baker, now a baseball operations assistant with the Chicago Cubs, is a former Major League catcher who played for the Marlins, Padres and Cubs. He also spent time in the minor league organizations of the Athletics, Dodgers and Mariners. In the name of baseball, he has spent time in Holland, Belgium, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Iraq and Kuwait. After attending De La Salle High School in Concord, CA, John was a walk on at Cal in 2000, and he later earned a scholarship for the 2002 season. He was drafted by the Oakland A’s in the fourth round of the 2002 MLB draft and made it the Major Leagues in 2008 with the Florida Marlins. Besides writing about and discussing baseball, John enjoys reading, playing the guitar, exercising, watching MMA and spending time with his two young children. He lives in Danville, CA.
Ben Crockett became the Red Sox Director of Player Development in 2012, after serving as the Assistant Director in 2010 and 2011. Ben joined the Red Sox organization as an intern in baseball operations in 2007 and served as Advance Scouting Coordinator from 2008-2009. Prior to his work with the Red Sox, Ben was selected by the team in the 10th round of the 2001 First-Year Player Draft but did not sign. He was drafted the following year in the 3rd round by Colorado out of Harvard University, and is a veteran of five professional seasons (2002-06) as a pitcher.
Amiel Sawdaye is the Red Sox to Vice President, Amateur and International Scouting. In this role, he oversees the amateur and international scouting directors. Over a five-year span from 2010-14, Sawdaye was Boston’s Director, Amateur Scouting. Over that time, he oversaw the amateur drafts that produced prospects and current Red Sox Matt Barnes, Mookie Betts, Henry Owens, Travis Shaw, Blake Swihart, and Brandon Workman. A native of Baltimore, MD, Sawdaye is a 1999 graduate of the University of Maryland with a degree in decisions information systems. He and his wife, Danielle, live in Boston with their two daughters, Lily, and Mia. In his spare time, Sawdaye is active with the Williams Syndrome Association.
Adrian Lorenzo is a Major League Staff Assistant with the Boston Red Sox. A native of Miami, FL, Lorenzo first joined the Red Sox organization in 2013 as a player development department intern in Fort Myers, FL. This past year, he interned in the baseball operations department, in the areas of international scouting and player personnel. Lorenzo also spent part of 2014 as a translator for several Spanish-speaking players on the major league roster. Before coming to the Red Sox, Lorenzo worked in the baseball division of the Wasserman Media Group from 2011-13.
Dr. Arthur Shapiro specializes in the areas of visual perception and cognitive neuroscience. He did his undergraduate work in Mathematics (Computer Science) and Psychology (Cognitive Science) at U.C. San Diego. He received his PhD in Psychology from Columbia University and did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. His research concentrates on color, motion, visual camouflage, and low-light-level vision. He is best known for creating a series of visual phenomena (“illusions”) that have arisen from this research. The illusions elucidate the connections between perception, the brain, and the physical world, and have been regularly recognized in international contests associated with vision science conferences.
Ben Lindbergh is a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight and, with Sam Miller, the cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus. He lives in New York City.
Sam Miller is the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, the coeditor of Baseball Prospectus’s annual guidebook, and a contributing writer at ESPN The Magazine. He lives on the San Francisco peninsula with his wife and daughter.
Scott Powers is a PhD student in statistics at Stanford University, where he teaches a sports analytics class and recently finished his term as co-president of the Sports Analytics Club. He is a part-time consultant for the Oakland Athletics and the Dutch professional soccer club AZ Alkmaar. To pretend he is not a nerd, Scott plays adult league baseball (as a catcher) in San Jose and competitive doubles beach volleyball tournaments in Santa Cruz.
Kyle Boddy is the President and Founder of Driveline Baseball, which aims to produce the world’s best applicable pitching research. Kyle has worked for multiple MLB teams as a draft/player development consultant and his training facility in Seattle, WA is home to hundreds of elite level collegiate and professional pitchers for both performance training and injury rehabilitation.
Dr. Peter Fadde is a professor of Learning Design and Technology at Southern Illinois University. Dr. Fadde investigates perceptual-cognitive aspects of expert performance in military, law enforcement, and sports domains. In baseball, Dr. Fadde’s research focuses on the Pitch Recognition component of baseball batting. Dr. Fadde has tested and trained the pitch recognition skills of several hundred college, Cape Cod Baseball League, and professional batters.
Dr. Michael Richmond grew up on the South Shore and, after a brief rebellious phase involving the Baltimore Orioles, has been following the Red Sox for several decades. He received a Ph.D. in Astronomy from U.C. Berkeley in 1992 and is presently a member of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He enjoys trying to apply the physics he teaches in class to one of his favorite subjects.
Mike Ferrin, our returning Saberseminar MC, is in his first season with the D-backs, serving as the pre- and postgame show host and secondary radio play-by-play announcer. It is also his 10th season with SiriusXM’s MLB Network Radio. A Chicago native, Mike has also hosted on field Pregame shows for the ALCS & NLCS, and served as the Play-By-Play for SiriusXM’s coverage of the SiriusXM Futures Game and of the Arizona Fall League. He currently lives in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Erika and the World’s Best Labrador, Pops.
Dr. Meredith Wills is an astrophysicist who spent many years staring at the Sun before transitioning into sports data science. She specializes in player- and ball-tracking analysis and data visualization, with the goal of providing information that is both useful to the front office and easily applicable on the field. When not sitting in front of her computer, Dr. Wills is a knitting designer, and her work is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. Really.
Peter Bonney is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Vendorful.com. He is a below-average but above-replacement-level coder, a graduate of Harvard College, an amateur data nerd and a contributor to the Hardball Times. He lives in New York City with his wife and dog.
Jonathan Judge is a product liability and regulatory lawyer who enjoys modeling baseball events. Jonathan’s work with mixed modeling has been published at Baseball Prospectus and Hardball Times, and has resulted in the catcher framing metric CSAA, the pitcher talent metric cFIP, and the pitcher value metric Deserved Run Average (“DRA”). He lives in Chicago and hopes that someday the Brewers will rise again.
Alex Speier is a columnist and reporter for The Boston Globe. Previously, Alex covered the Red Sox for several New England and national publications, including the New Hampshire Union Leader, Boston Metro, Boston Herald and Baseball America. Alex graduated from Harvard, where he served as the captain of the debate team, an experience that has been of surprisingly little use in press boxes across the country.
Brian MacPherson has covered the Red Sox for the Providence Journal since 2010. He worked for the New Hampshire Union Leader, ESPNBoston.com and the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times before that. An Exeter, N.H., native, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Michael Silverman has been covering the Red Sox and Major League Baseball for the Boston Herald since the middle of the 1995 season. A native of Kansas City, Michael is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Michael is the Vice Chair of the Boston chapter of the Boston Baseball Writers Association of America and has had a vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame since 2007.
Pete Abraham joined the staff of the Boston Globe in 2009 after spending nearly 10 years in New York covering the Mets and Yankees for The Journal News. A Massachusetts native, Abraham covers the Red Sox. He also covered the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team for the Norwich Bulletin.
Jen McCaffrey has covered the Red Sox for MassLive.com/Springfield Republican since May 2014. Prior to that, she spent three years as a sports reporter for the Cape Cod Times. She graduated with a journalism degree from Syracuse University.
2015 Speakers
Ben Cherington is the GM Boston Red Sox. Previously, he held positions as an area scout, baseball operations assistant, coordinator of international scouting, and assistant director (and then director) of player development from 1999–2005. He later became vice president, player personnel, through January 2009, then senior vice president and assistant GM from 2009, before his promotion to general manager after the 2011 season. He was previously named Major League Baseball Executive of the Year by The Sporting News and guided the team to a World Series title in 2013.
John Farrell became the Boston Red Sox’ 46th manager after serving as the club’s pitching coach from 2007-2010 and Toronto Blue Jays’ manager from 2011-2012. In 2013, he lead the team to a World Series title in his first year as manager. John pursued his love for baseball and dream to play in the big leagues at Oklahoma State University. He was drafted out of Oklahoma State in the second round of the 1984 draft by the Cleveland Indians. John enjoyed much success as a starting pitcher for the Indians with a 90-plus mph fastball, and he finished his days pitching for the Angels (1993-94), Indians (1995) and Tigers (1996). Following his playing career, Farrell returned to Oklahoma State to earn his degree and serve as the school’s assistant coach and pitching and recruiting coordinator. He was inducted into the Oklahoma State University Hall of Fame in 1995. Respected for honesty and integrity in the clubhouse, Farrell says he plans to find success with the Red Sox through communication and effort: “One thing we have full control over is the effort that we give.”
Tyler Tumminia Cherington is Senior Vice President of the Goldklang Group which owns 5 Minor League Baseball teams. She also is co-owner of the Pittsfield Suns located here in Massachusetts. Tyler was recently named Top 25 Female Executives in Sports by Bleacher Report and received the Game Changer award by Sports Business Journal as a Female Owner in Baseball. Tyler also serves on the Board of Trustees for Boston Children’s Hospital
Dr. Sam Sommers is an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University. He is a social psychologist who studies everyday perception and judgment, including group dynamics, decision-making, and intergroup relations. His new book, Your Brain on Sports, is co-authored with L. Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated and will be published in January 2016. The book explores what the sports universe has to teach us about human nature, from the appeal of the underdog to the value of rivalry to why teams are too trigger-happy when it comes to firing head coaches.
Wendy Thurm writes about sports and the business of sports. Her work has been published by FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Deadspin, ESPN.com, Vice Sports, and the New Yorker, among others. Before launching her writing career, Wendy practiced law and worked in politics for 20 years. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.
Dr. Jason Sherwin is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of deCervo, a startup based in New York City that focuses on brain imaging of high-speed decision-making. Since its founding in March 2014, deCervo’s work has been featured in both the popular and scientific press (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Tech Graphs), while its user base in sports has spread through NCAA Division I and Major League Baseball, as well as the National Hockey League and NCAA Division I Football. He is also Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. Prior to this faculty appointment, Jason completed his post-doctoral training at Columbia University under the direction of the brain-computer interface expert Prof. Paul Sajda, and received his Ph.D. (2010) and M.S. (2006) in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also holds a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago (2005). Furthermore, he is an active composer and performer in the music industry.
Jordan Muraskin has worked in the brain-imaging field for 10 years. He is co-inventor on the intellectual property at the base of deCervo. An expert and pioneer in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), he holds multiple patents in brain imaging and has extensive experimental and analytic experience. He has previously worked on projects involving MR-capable motion-correction devices, as well as HIV and Alzheimer’s Disease and Aging neuroimaging. He holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University and he is expected to graduate with his Ph.D. this spring.
Dr. Bryan Cole is a featured writer for Beyond the Box Score and a contributing writer for TechGraphs. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University in electrical engineering, where his research focused on wearable sensor signal processing and machine learning. He currently works as a research engineer for Delsys, Inc., developing applications for wearable inertial measurement units and electromyographic sensors.
Jeff Zimmerman has been a vagabond in the baseball circles covering a wide range of topics including injuries, fantasy, scouting and in-depth research. Currently, he writes for FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire and his own website, Baseballheatmaps.com. Recently, he has done scouting reports for both Prep Baseball Report and Baseball America. He has won several awards including SABR’s Research Award with Bill Petti and the Fantasy Sports Writers Association award for Best Baseball Ongoing Series. Additionally, he has provided information to several college and professional teams. This summer his baseball knowledge (and patience) is being put to the test as he helps coach his daughter’s softball team.
Dr. Aaron Gray is an assistant professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Orthopedics at the University of Missouri. He is a team physician for the University of Missouri baseball team. He has served as a team physician for United States National Soccer teams on international trips. He is board certified in family medicine and has a Certificate of Added Qualifications in primary care sports medicine. He specializes in pediatric and adult sports medicine and non-operative treatment of musculoskeletal injuries. His specific areas of interest include stress fractures, overuse injuries, pitching injuries and concussions. A graduate of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center-College of Medicine, Dr. Gray completed his residency at the University of Missouri and a sports medicine fellowship at University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. David Somers employs functional MRI, psychophysics, and computational modeling to investigate the mechanisms underlying visual perception and cognition. His laboratory performs experiments to identify the human brain circuitry which support different visual tasks, and to study how different cognitive factors such as attention modulate these circuits. Modeling work investigates the computational mechanisms at work in these circuits.
Jared Porter serves as the Red Sox Director of Professional Scouting, and has worked for the Red Sox in Baseball Operations since 2004 when he was a Player Development Intern in Ft. Myers, FL. Jared graduated from Thayer Academy (Braintree, MA) in 1999 and Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME) in 2003 where he was the Captain of the Baseball and Hockey teams his senior year.
Bill Petti works as a research consultant focused on analytics, modeling, and helping organizations use their data more effectively. In his free time, he has conducted research into a number of baseball topics, including the aging of hitter and pitcher skills, the edge of the strike zone the value of consistent team performance, and how MLB teams can get the most out of analytics. He often writes about his research at The Hardball Times. Bill also occasionally consults for a Major League Baseball team.
Rob Arthur is a writer for FiveThirtyEight. Before that, he wrote for Baseball Prospectus on everything from entropy to injuries to projections, and also consulted for a major league baseball team. He resides in Chicago, where he splits his fandom equally between the White Sox and Cubs.
Dan Turkenkopf is a cloud software architect from Apprenda living in Saratoga Springs, NY. He recently returned to the public baseball community after a stint in the Tampa Bay Rays front office. He’s been active in sabermetric circles for many years now, writing for Beyond the Box Score, the Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus, where he did some of the early PitchFX work around catchers.
Featured 2014 Speakers
Jeff Luhnow was named the 12th General Manager in Astros franchise history on December 7th, 2011. With a track record of success in scouting and developing players prior to joining the Astros, Luhnow’s focus has been on creating a player pipeline that will help the Astros win at the Major League level for years to come. Prior to joining the Astros, Luhnow spent eight years with the St. Louis Cardinals, as their Vice President of Baseball Development (2003-2005), Vice President of Player Procurement (2005), and Vice President of Scouting and Player Development (2006-2011). During much of his time with the Cardinals, he oversaw the scouting, international, and player development functions of the club that brought in many players instrumental to the 2011 World Series victory, the 2012 NLCS team and the 2013 World Series team.
Dr. Robert Stern is Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Clinical Core of the BU Alzheimer’s Disease Center. A major focus of his research involves the long-term effects of repetitive brain trauma in athletes, including the neurodegenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He has funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense for his work on developing methods of detecting and diagnosing CTE during life, as well as examining potential genetic and other risk factors for this disease. His other major areas of funded research include the assessment and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, the cognitive effects of chemotherapy in the elderly, and thyroid-brain relationships. Dr. Stern is also the author of many widely used neuropsychological tests, including the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB). Dr. Stern has received several NIH and other national grants, has published over 250 publications, is on several editorial boards, and is on the Medical and Scientific Advisory Boards of the MA/NH Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and Sports Legacy Institute, and is also a member of the Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee of the NFL Players Association.
Dr. Aaron Seitz is an internationally recognized expert on the mechanisms of learning and memory using behavioral, computational and neuroscientific methodologies. His research over the last 15 years has focused on mechanisms of plasticity and learning in the sensory/perceptual systems. A key aspect of his recent research is applying knowledge of plasticity mechanisms in the brain to create brain-training video games that are effective in improving performance in real-world tasks. A notable example is his vision training game ULTIMEYES that leads to vision improvement that positively transfers to on-field performance in baseball.
Vince Gennaro is the author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball, the President of SABR, a consultant to MLB teams, and the Director of the Graduate Sports Management program at Columbia University. He appears regularly on MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential, and is a frequent guest commentator on sports business in the media. This follows a 25-year business career, where he served as President of billion dollar division of PepsiCo. His innovative work in baseball analytics has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNNMoney, and the New York Times. He teaches in the Graduate Sports Management program at Columbia University and has an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Tony Blengino has 11 years of experience in the baseball industry, the last five as Special Assistant to the GM with the Seattle Mariners. During this time, he headed up the Mariners’ analytics department, and had significant involvement in all aspects of the baseball operation, including Pro and Amateur Scouting, 40-man roster management and player development. Previously, Tony worked for the Milwaukee Brewers for six years, three as Northeast Area Scouting Supervisor and three as Assistant Amateur Scouting Director. Tony currently writes for Fangraphs. Prior to working in baseball, Tony was a CPA and authored the book “Future Stars”, an annual preview of top minor league prospects that combined traditional scouting and statistical analysis. Tony resides in Waukesha, WI, with his wife Kathy. They have two grown children, Jessica and Anthony.
Dr. Russell A. Carleton is a mental health researcher who has a secret double life as a baseball researcher. In his real job, he helps to evaluate the development of programs to assist children, adolescents, and transition-age youth in receiving mental health and suicide prevention services. He holds a Ph.D. in child clinical psychology from DePaul University in Chicago. Russell has written about his own baseball research, focusing on the gory mathematical details, at Statistically Speaking and Baseball Prospectus since 2007. He has consulted to two teams in MLB.
Dr. Ben Baumer, co-author of The Sabermetric Revolution, is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mathematics & Statistics department at Smith College. He completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2012. Previously, he was the Statistical Analyst for the Baseball Operations department of the New York Mets, a position he held from 2004 to 2012.
Jared Cross is a Chemistry and Statistics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, and one of the creators of the Steamer Projections, which can be found on FanGraphs. His writing can be found on ESPN Insider. He has a chemistry degree from Amherst College and is in the process of completing an MA in Statistics at Hunter College in New York.
Dr. Matt Swartz writes for The Hardball Times, FanGraphs, and MLB Trade Rumors. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 2009 with a Ph.D. in Economics, and also from UPenn in 2003 with a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics. His current research often focuses on the economics of baseball, as well as other topics. Matt does the arbitration salary projection model for MLB Trade Rumors, and co-created the SIERA pitching statistic available at FanGraphs. He regularly consults for a Major League team, in addition to working in his day job as an economist in the insurance industry. Matt is a native Philadelphian, and lives there now with his wife Laura and his daughter Maya.
Mitchel Lichtman (MGL) is a professional sabermetrician who has been working in the field for over 20 years. He was a senior analyst for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2004 and 2005 and has consulted for other MLB teams. He is co-author of the book, The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, a seminal book on sabermetrics and managerial tactics and strategies. He has a B.S. degree from Cornell University and a J.D. from the University of Nevada.
David Gassko formerly consulted for Major League Baseball teams and was a writer for The Hardball Times. Today, David is an associate with Kainos Capital Partners, a private equity firm focused on the food and consumer sector.
Craig Glaser is an application developer and baseball analyst at Bloomberg Sports. At Bloomberg, he has been instrumental in the development of projection systems for baseball and soccer, algorithms for their fantasy software, and expanding the capabilities of their professional baseball tool to meet the needs of teams and broadcasters both domestically and internationally. He briefly wrote for The Hardball Times before joining Bloomberg, and his Baseball ProGUESTus article on how unlikely it was that the Mets had never had a no-hitter was published mere days before Johan Santana threw the first in team history.
Jeff Sackmann is the co-founder, with Kent Bonham, of College Splits, which has provided Major League clubs with a vast array of data on all levels of college baseball since 2007. He founded minorleaguesplits.com, and has written on baseball for ESPN Insider, The Wall Street Journal, Baseball Prospectus, and The Hardball Times. He is also a columnist for Tennis Magazine, and his website, tennisabstract.com, contains the most comprehensive database of professional tennis results and statistics.
Ben Lindbergh is a staff writer for Grantland.com and the co-host of the Effectively Wild podcast. He was formerly the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to MLB Network and has also worked for the Elias Sports Bureau and Bloomberg Sports. He belongs to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and would have had a Hall of Fame vote in time to vote for Tim Raines if not for the museum’s meddling board of directors, who recently reduced the player eligibility period solely to spite him.
Tim Britton is in his fourth season covering the Red Sox for the Providence Journal. A native of New Jersey, he had previously covered the Mets and Yankees for MLB.com, Duke basketball for the University’s student newspaper, and wiffle-ball games against his older brothers for his own egotistically named outfit as a child.
Scott Spratt is a Research Analyst for Baseball Info Solutions. He regularly contributes to ESPN Insider for the company and also writes for both FanGraphs and Pro Football Focus in his free time.
Joe Rosales is a Research Analyst for Baseball Info Solutions. He is a New England native, and found his way to BIS after internships in Baseball Operations with the Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, and New York Mets. At BIS he contributes to the development of the company’s industry leading defensive analytics.
Evan Drellich is in his first year as the Astros beat writer for the Houston Chronicle. He covered the Red Sox for MassLive.com and the Springfield Republican in 2013. He spent the three years prior at MLB.com, and in 2009 worked for one of his hometown newspapers, New York’s Newsday. Instead of starting his own egotistically named outfit as a child, he took high school agate at the local paper in his college town, the Press & Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, N.Y.
Featured 2013 Speakers
Keith Woolner enters his seventh season leading the Baseball Analytics group for the Cleveland Indians. He is responsible for developing innovative ways to organize, analyze and present information to support baseball decision-making. He leads a team of analysts who study statistical data, scouting reports, medical histories and contract information to assist with in-game strategy, player acquisition and forecasting future performance. Prior to joining the Indians, Keith was Director of Research & Development at Baseball Prospectus. Keith is the inventor of VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), a well-known sabermetric statistic. He worked in the software industry for 17 years before joining the Indians, including stints at Oracle and SAS Institute.
Keith Law joined ESPN.com in June 2006 as the lead baseball analyst for Scouts Inc., covering the majors, minors and amateurs. He appears regularly across the ESPN family of networks, providing analysis on all baseball topics. Before joining ESPN, Law spent 4½ years with the Toronto Blue Jays as a special assistant to the general manager, and was previously a writer for Baseball Prospectus. He graduated from Harvard College and holds an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon.
Dr. Daniel L.C. Mack is an analyst for the Kansas City Royals. His earned his degree in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University while working at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems. Daniel’s research focused on anomaly detection methodologies for modeling early failure detection, specifically in large multi-dimensional sequence data. His dissertation focused on isolating and describing unknown failures in complex systems such as aircraft and in sports like baseball.
Robert Scott is a Negro League veteran who played first base with the New York Black Yankees, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Jackie Robinson All Stars from 1946 – 1950.
Patrick Drane has served as the Assistant Director of the Baseball Research Center at UMASS Lowell since 2003 and has helped lead the center to become an internationally recognized center of excellence in the field of baseball and baseball bat research and a leader among facilities focusing on sports engineering research in the United States. His organization of the 9th conference of the International Sports Engineering Association (ISEA) brought the sports engineering researchers from around the world to Lowell in 2012.