Position: Junior Analyst, Baseball Operations

Summary:
The Baseball Operations team of the Los Angeles Dodgers is responsible for supporting the Major League Coaching Staff and Baseball Operations leadership group with data and information needed for strategic decision making. As a Junior Analyst, you will work with other members of the Baseball Operations team to build reports and visualizations to communicate insights clearly and concisely to stakeholders. This position offers the opportunity to push the boundaries of conventional thinking, grow analytically by solving challenging problems, and collaborate with some of the best baseball minds in the sport. As a member of the Baseball Operations team, you will see your work impact the Major League team on a nightly basis.

Job Functions:

• Develop and deliver reports to the Major League Coaching Staff and Baseball Operations leadership group in a timely manner
• Build new tools and improve existing ones, to optimize workflows and quality of information
• Perform ad-hoc research as requested, summarizing key findings
• Utilize statistical tools and metrics to analyze the Dodgers and upcoming opponents
• Perform other related duties as assigned

Basic Requirements/Qualifications:

• High school diploma, GED or equivalent
• Experience using R to wrangle and visualize data
• Familiarity with SQL and Git
• Knowledge of sabermetric research and principles
• Ability to work a varied schedule including evenings, weekends, and holidays
• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field preferred
• Passion for a field outside of analytics that could be applicable to baseball (web or app development, design, or physics, to name a few) preferred

To Apply:
To apply, please use this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This is the sixth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

As noted in the boilerplate introduction above, it is the primary goal of the Team Entropy project to root for extra baseball beyond the 162-game regular season. While the complicated scenarios involving more than a single isolated head-to-head tiebreaker game may be farfetched, appreciating the sense of possibility for greater things as events unfold is part of the package. This is as much about the journey as it is the destination, which so often remains abstract. There have been just three winner-take-all tiebreaker games played since I began this project in 2011.

The secondary goal of the Team Entropy project, and part of appreciating that sense of possibility, is to have at least some portion of the playoff picture at stake on the final day of the season. On that note, we have already achieved some level of success, as we enter the final day of the 2021 season with four teams still battling for the two AL Wild Card berths — one of which is attempting to make its first postseason in 20 years — and with the NL West title still in doubt as teams with 106 and 105 wins attempt to avoid a do-or-die Wild Card game. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick Sunday update. The Yankees lost on Saturday, furthering the potential for chaos, and the four-way tie is an increased possibility, at 6.5%. The chances of bonus baseball overall now stand at 57.6%. Good news for us and good news for the Rays, who will play one of these four teams later this week. It’s not something that’s captured in projections, but it’s interesting that if the Rays go full B-team, it reduces the chances of a tie, and as a result, a slight reprieve for the team they eventually play. Jameson Taillon is back in as the starter and Joan Adon looks to be Washington’s starter, which is to Boston’s benefit according to the projections.

The NL West remains unresolved, but simple: if the Dodgers win and the Giants lose, they play a tiebreak game. ZiPS has a 19.8% chance of a tiebreaker game, with the overall division as San Franciso 90.0%, Los Angeles 10.0%. Freddy Peralta is being held back for the playoffs with Brett Anderson going today. It makes sense too; it’s in Milwaukee’s interest to leave one of these teams more susceptible to getting knocked out of the playoffs by the Cardinals later this week.

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Below you’ll find today’s ZiPS stretch run update. For details on just what’s going on here, please refer to my original article describing all these mathnanigans.

American League Wild Card

The Yankees and their bats were largely quiet against the Rays on Friday, but they still basically control their own destiny as the team in the first Wild Card spot, albeit the one with by far the toughest opposition. The Blue Jays fended off a late-inning Baltimore rally and held on to the win, but the Red Sox winning was just as damaging to Toronto’s playoff hopes as the Jays’ win was helpful. Toronto’s still one-in-five to make the postseason, but needs some help now; since the Blue Jays are already assumed to be strongly favored to beat the Orioles, they get an even larger boost from a Nationals win. Read the rest of this entry »

Below you’ll find today’s ZiPS stretch run update. For details on just what’s going on here, please refer to my original article describing all these mathnanigans.

American League Wild Card

The Yankees have now reached the point where a win nearly clinches a playoff spot, though it doesn’t make one a mathematical certainty. With one more win, the Mariners and the Red Sox would both have to sweep their weekend series and the Yankees would have to lose out in the tiebreaker in order for New York to miss the playoffs. Similar to our probables grid, I’ve tentatively put in a short outing for Luis Severino on Sunday. The Yankees have been mum about their starter plans for that game, and as the team most likely to cement the top Wild Card spot before Sunday, they could also go total slop time so that they have as much strength as possible before next Tuesday’s play-in. Read the rest of this entry »

Below you’ll find today’s ZiPS stretch run update. For details on just what’s going on here, please refer to my original article describing all these mathnanigans.

American League Wild Card

Seattle beat Oakland on Wednesday, sweeping the series and knocking the A’s out of playoff contention. As such, Oakland is no longer a participant in these charts. The Blue Jays won the second game of their series against the Yankees, preventing them from falling to fourth in the playoff probabilities, behind the Mariners. We’ll be a lot closer to knowing who makes the playoffs in the AL after tonight’s games, as those contests — the last contender vs. contender matchup, as well as the biggest creampuff game for a contender — are the two highest leverage games remaining. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I wrote about projections and the stretch run, using ZiPS to project each individual game and estimate its relative importance for the final standings. With just a few games remaining, most have the potential to drastically swing the disposition of the race. For example, the Mariners saw their playoff probability quintuple with last night’s win over the A’s! Let’s break down the latest and greatest.

AL Wild Card

This one is still very wide open, with the main difference from 48 hours ago being that the Mariners have pushed the A’s to the brink of elimination. Oakland can still make the playoffs, but the path is narrow and would require Oakland to win three or four games while Toronto, Boston, and Seattle mostly lose, and then perhaps survive a tiebreaker. Oakland can no longer catch the Yankees, so it’s in the A’s interest for the Yankees to finish a sweep of the Jays: Read the rest of this entry »

9/28 Late Morning Update

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The original data and methodology are below.
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We’ve reached the final week of the 2021 regular season, and for fans of high-intensity, stretch-drive baseball — a group I think we can refer to as “everyone” — there’s still quite a lot to play for. Only five of the 10 playoff spots are claimed, with two of those five teams in a battle for a division title. And since there are just a handful of games left to play, we can move the ZiPS projections from the macro to the micro. In April, it’s always hard to project specific pitcher matchups, but with a week left to go in the season, it’s a more reasonable task of extrapolation. As a result, that allows me to adapt the ZiPS model into a game-by-game projection of the final week of the season for the relevant teams.

I’ve focused on three of the playoff spots, the two AL wild cards, and the NL East, along with the division versus wild card battle in the NL West. The Astros can still technically lose the division to the Mariners (one-in-about-1,800) or the Athletics (one-in-about-2,150), and the Cardinals could still have an epic collapse in which they lose six, the Reds win six, and they lose the tiebreaker (one-in-about-3,300). These could also become mathematical impossibilities quickly; if they become plausible rather than proverbial lottery tickets, I’ll update with the data.

Let’s start with the easy races.

NL East

The Braves enter the final week with a 2 1/2-game lead in the division but three games remaining against the Phillies. Their schedules are similar in strength, with Atlanta getting home games and Philadelphia on the road, something that’s largely canceled out by the former getting the slightly harder opponent (the Mets versus the Marlins). The edge comes from the cushion.

With the edge in the standings, ZiPS projects just over a four-in-five chance that the Braves will not have to play the Rockies in a makeup game on Monday. Overall, the Braves win the division 87.7% of the time without the makeup game, and the Phillies stick the Braves in at least a 1 1/2-game hole 1.0% of the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer couldn’t quite pull off a trifecta for the ages on Sunday, but he was utterly dominant nonetheless. Facing the Padres in Los Angeles, he entered the history books with a flourish by becoming the 19th pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts, and just the third to record three immaculate innings — nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts — in a career. Along the way, the 37-year-old righty retired the first 22 batters he faced, giving chase to a perfect game and his third career no-hitter, but he couldn’t complete that feat, as Eric Hosmer, who earlier in the game had become his 3,000th strikeout victim, broke up his bid with an eighth-inning double into the right field corner.

Not that the hit put a damper on the afternoon given what Scherzer accomplished. Making his eighth start for the Dodgers and needing six strikeouts to reach the milestone, he simply dominated the Padres all afternoon. He got to work quickly, striking out leadoff hitter Trent Grisham and needing just 12 pitches to get through the first, before mowing down Fernando Tatis Jr., Hosmer, and Tommy Pham consecutively on three-pitch strikeouts in the second.

The immaculate inning made Scherzer the third pitcher and the first right-hander to total three such innings in his career, joining lefties Sandy Koufax and Chris Sale. Scherzer previously threw immaculate innings against the Phillies (May 14, 2017) and Rays (June 5, 2018). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s already September, and maybe you’re still processing that fact. I’ll do you one better by pointing out that the Dodgers and Giants are about to play each other for the final time in the regular season. This is the earliest in the year that these rivals’ last series has occurred since way back in 1968, when Willie Mays and Don Drysdale were fixtures of the rivalry.

With Los Angeles and San Francisco tied atop the division and both teams on pace for 100 wins for the first time since 1962, I thought it prudent to break down what we might expect in this big weekend series.

The Series So Far

The Dodgers and Giants have split their 16 games so far (with San Francisco winning five of the last seven), featuring stellar pitching, unlikely heroes, home run robberies and blown saves. A four-game series in mid-July was full of drama, including Tyler Rogers giving up a walk-off homer to Will Smith, his second three-run outing against the Dodgers this season.

The very next night — actually the next two nights — it was Kenley Jansen who was handed a ninth-inning lead but walked off to a booing home crowd both times after giving up seven combined runs.

That’s just how this series has gone; no lead is safe from a disaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been paying close attention to my writing recently, you’ll notice a hidden theme running through my last month or so of work: frequent and bad jokes. But there’s a second theme, too: batters do really well when they swing at pitches over the heart of the plate. Splitting the plate up into the center and the corners does a lot to explain where hitters do best; when you swing at something there, it’s hardly a surprise that the results, on average, are excellent.

Will Smith is a great hitter. He gets my vote as the best catcher in the game, and while I wouldn’t fault you for picking Buster Posey, Smith leads all catchers in WAR and is doing it at a young age. He’s a perfectly acceptable defensive catcher, but he’s valuable because of his hitting, with a .267/.377/.510 line that’s good for a 140 wRC+. Those numbers are great for any hitter, but particularly for one playing the hardest defensive position.

With that in mind, you’d assume Smith is great against pitches in the middle of the plate. That’s how hitters succeed! Well, you’d be wrong. Take a look at his Swing/Take runs, a neat Statcast tool that shows the run value a player has accrued on pitches in each zone:

That’s not how this is supposed to work. What the heck is going on?
Read the rest of this entry »