Wiebe Stats

The Cardinals hired the first woman to work it their analytics department. Emily Wiebe earned her way in like so many people before her with smarts and good luck:

It took so much hard work for Wiebe to get here … while also catching a few curveballs of serendipity.

For instance, when Wiebe was in high school in the Bay Area, her history teacher’s husband worked in analytics for the Giants. So they chatted. And at the time, the A’s had a woman, Kate Greenthal, working in their front office. Wiebe reached out. Greenthal gave her a tour of the department, introducing her to all the execs (except for, alas, the famed executive Billy Beane, who was on a phone call). And Wiebe’s mom went to high school with a woman named Jean Afterman. Sure enough, Afterman is one of the highest ranking women in an MLB front office — she’s the Yankees’ assistant general manager.

But Wiebe’s biggest break came from just being nice.

In the summer of 2014, while a student at Princeton, Wiebe was hired as an MLB scout liaison in the Cape Cod League. What a gig. At daily games, Wiebe sat with scouts and picked their brains, enhancing her own baseball brain. She learned strategies from the pitching coach of the Hyannis Harbor Hawks. And one day, early in the season, she spotted a guy with his hands full — video cameras, wires, monitors.

“I had no idea who this was,” she explained. “But I said, ‘Excuse me, do you need some help?’ And he was like, ‘Yes!’ So we got it all set up, chatted a bit. The next night, our team was on the road, I went to the game — he happened to be at the game. Same thing. ‘Do you need help?’ Because it was the first game for him at a new field again. That night we sat together at the game.”

The guy was Randy Flores, the World Series-winning relief pitcher for the 2006 Cardinals. He was starting his scouting company, On Deck Digital. So, he hired Wiebe to help out that summer. Taught her the interface. And the next summer, she was in charge of operations for On Deck Digital at the Cape Cod League.

That fall, Flores got a new gig — scouting director for his old big league team.

At the first MIT-Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the MBA students in attendance kept asking questions about the process of getting a job in sports. Almost all the speakers were like me, someone who loved a sport, but were working somewhere else, doing something else. Many of the people there had a sports opportunity come along by meeting someone, or somehow having the sport intersect with their other work life. Wiebe provides a nice example of how to pursue the gig directly, and how to grab onto an opportunity.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2D4bjnp