Spring Training

Sharing my bitter lessons in baseball

Over the last five years, I’ve been lucky enough to work in baseball — four years as a data scientist in an MLB front office, and now in a baseball-adjacent field. I learned so much during my time in the organization. And now the distance has given me a new perspective. Some things you can only see once you’re on the outside. Others just come into sharper focus when you’re forced to articulate them. Looking back, I learned a lot of lessons along the way — I just didn’t know it at the time.

I’m not bitter

I loved my time in the org. I met great people - players, coaches, data scientists, scouts, lunch ladies - more people than I can name. Many of the people are still my best friends. My experience was a great one - I’d do it all again.

The “bitter” actually is a nod to the great Richard Sutton’s Bitter Lesson. While there will inevitably be longer posts on this topic, it states briefly that instilling human knowledge into computational systems to help solve problems may help in the short term, but will inevitably be far surpassed by systems that effectively leverage search and learning. The bitterness is in what it takes away: the clever human insight, the hard-won intuition, displaced by scale. Yet for me, there’s something magical in that. The bitter lesson is the ingenuity in the system.

So what’s next?

If I were running an analytics department in an MLB front office today, this is how I’d try to do it. Some posts will be technical. Some will be about structure, culture, and organizations. Some will just be whatever I’m thinking about. My only goal is to get through 162 of these — and maybe earn a shot at some special nights in October, just like the rest of us.