The Best in Baseball

When he initially joined the Cardinals as a member of their scouting department, decisions on prospects were made purely by the scouts’ conversations. Problem was, no one scout could see all the prospects, so often the loudest person in the room prevailed. Girsch and his colleagues developed a new method of systematically combining information from all scouting reports and game statistics to make the process more scientific. 

“We had all of this performance data, and it seemed silly to ignore it,” he says. “No model is going to be perfect, but this way, we had a starting point.” 

At first, the data was sparse enough that Girsch could do all of his calculations in Excel. But over the years, the sport has been flooded with information. 

“We track all players on the field, taking snapshots 30 times per second,” he says. Data can break down every moment of every game, from the speed of a fastball to the angle of a swing.

Now, teams need advanced coding to analyze massive databases and spit out useful information—spurring an arms race among teams to see who can eke out just a bit more of an edge. 

“You are making a whole lot of decisions a whole bunch of times, and you hope in the long run you come out on top,” Girsch says. The St. Louis Cardinals have a laudable record. They won the World Series in 2011, and are one of only two teams in the MLB to have been above .500 (meaning they’ve had more wins than losses) every year for the past 15 years—something only the New York Yankees can also say. “It’s definitely not like we’re always brilliant; sometimes we’re just lucky,” Girsch says. “But we’ve had a long run of success.”

Aldrich has worked with the Pirates’ research and development operation to create an industry-wide database that combines what teams have said publicly and privately about their players to understand the teams’ needs. “We then try to manage all that information to identify where these low-cost acquisition opportunities are for us to take advantage of,” he says. 

Aldrich has worked in some aspect of baseball operations since he was a 17-year-old video intern for the Syracuse Mets. He continued to intern during his undergrad at Loyola University Chicago, with Major League Baseball, the Dominican Prospect League, and baseball agent Bob Garber, before landing gigs after graduation with the Seattle Mariners, the Tampa Bay Rays, and the Chicago White Sox. The diverse experiences helped give Aldrich a well-rounded understanding of the sport, with knowledge of statistics, contract analysis, and roster construction. “It’s allowed me to play a utility player role,” he says—able to adapt as needed within organizations.

He earned his MBA at Booth after taking some advice from Garber to heart. “He told me once: ‘At a certain point you’ve got to move past just having a really good understanding of baseball and know how to manage an organization,’” Aldrich says. 

Aldrich took part in the Chicago Business Fellows Program, which gave him a supportive group of like-minded peers at Booth and allowed him to get his MBA while continuing to work in baseball. “I was so passionate about achieving in baseball,” he says. “This allowed me to join a community of young people with a similar mindset of knowing what they wanted to do.” 

Aldrich has used the strategic thinking and management skills he learned at Booth to help develop new systems for setting job expectations and providing employee feedback at the Pirates, in the hopes of fostering more employee satisfaction and engagement. 

“I’m passionate about making the culture one where people feel good about the work they are doing,” he says. 

The book launched a new chapter for Gennaro as a baseball analyst. Though long involved in the sports world, Gennaro was now consulting for MLB teams and working as a commentator on sports business and MLB shows, and he spent eight years as president of the board of the Society for American Baseball Research. Today, he hosts a weekly radio show, Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM, and serves as associate dean and clinical associate professor at the NYU Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport.

Gennaro’s analysis has applied risk valuation models to compare the benefits of acquiring a steady but middling player versus a player who is exceptional but inconsistent. He’s also advocated over the years for new incentive structures for the game, some of which are being adopted this year in sweeping new rule changes. 

“One of the things that I’ve been a long-time sponsor of is finding ways to create more action during the game,” he says. This year, the MLB is implementing a pitch clock to speed up play, bigger bases to encourage stolen bases, and limits on infielders “shifting” position to anticipate where a batter will hit the ball. These changes should help decrease strikeouts and homers, which can reduce games to just a few big moments, and encourage more action in the infield. 

Gennaro would also like to see efforts to “deaden” the ball to discourage the narrow focus on home runs. “If you reduce the incentive to swing for the fences because the ball doesn’t carry as far, eventually hitters will respond,” Gennaro says. 

Gennaro is also excited about efforts by teams to explore virtual reality for fans at home, or think beyond the classic bleacher seats and luxury suites at stadiums.

“If we can turn stadiums into a version of an on-site sports bar or spaces where fans can build community, we’re really hitting the mark with Gen Z and millennials,” Gennaro says. “It’s about giving people choices for how they want to experience the game.” 

In 2018, however, she got a big break when she applied for the inaugural MLB Diversity Fellowship Program and got an interview. Her interviewer was Kim Ng. “I was just stunned,” she says. “I’m some random 20-year-old student, and she is the Michael Jordan of female sports executives.” Krall was selected out of 1,300 applicants for a position in the commissioner’s office, where she got an inside view of baseball operations. 

She worked as a baseball operations analyst for the Cincinnati Reds while earning her Booth MBA part time, frequently applying the quantitative analysis she was learning in her classes directly on the job. 

And in 2022, Krall made history as the first on-field female coach in Double-A baseball. As a development coach for the Sea Dogs, she frequently had mere seconds between at-bats to give players the information they needed. While having the data at her fingertips was essential, it was just as important to know how each individual processed information. 

“The storytelling component is super important,” she says. “You have to know the players well enough to understand what is going to stick and resonate—to build a narrative and explain things in a digestible way.”

After leaving the Sea Dogs at the end of last year, Krall is now poised to start a new position at Hawk-Eye Innovations, a role created to identify paradigm-shifting developments coming up in baseball and figure out how to anticipate MLB team needs with new products leveraging the company’s data.

“As a former coach I have unique insights as to what clubs are working on, related to seam-shifted wake, biomechanics, and injury prevention,” she says. “So I felt that this was the perfect confluence of baseball strategy and my experiences in big tech at Google.”

While she is excited about progress in the industry, she acknowledges there is still a long way to go. 

“When I was in college, there were zero female coaches in professional baseball, and now we’ve reached double digits,” she says. “But we are nowhere near gender parity or equality, and that’s not going to happen organically. It needs to be spearheaded by the commissioner. It has to come from the top.”