Of the 12 teams in the playoffs in 2022, only one was projected by both ZiPS and FanGraphs in the preseason as a sub-.500 team: the Cleveland Guardians. But this lone Cinderella in a sea of mean stepsisters toppled the White Sox handily this year, pulling away from the pack late to finish with an 11-game cushion in the AL Central. As the league’s No. 3 seed by virtue of winning the division, Cleveland now hosts the Tampa Bay Rays in the three-game Wild Card Series.

Broadly speaking, there are broad similarities between the Guardians and the Rays. Both play in smaller markets and, depending on how you look at the issue, have a payroll attitude somewhere on the spectrum from admirably thrifty to Ebenezer Scrooge on tax deadline day. However they got there, these teams embraced modern analytics early on, long before it was de rigeur in baseball, and have seen advantages. The Rays were the league doormat during the early, very non-sabermetric days of the franchise, but after an abrupt change in direction, they have the fourth-most wins in baseball over the last 15 years. The Guardians are not far behind.

Despite both teams regularly making the playoffs, they’ve only met in the postseason once before, in the 2013 AL Wild Card Game. Things didn’t go Cleveland’s way then, as Alex Cobb and Tampa’s bullpen combined for a shutout, causing a quick exit from October. Now Cleveland has a three-game series to get its revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Cal Quantrill epitomizes the term “pitcher.” Twenty-seven years old and in his fourth big-league season, the Cleveland Guardians right-hander not only attacks hitters with a multi-pitch arsenal, he does so with a combination of aggressiveness and guile. Mixing and matching with aplomb, he’s won 23 of 32 decisions and logged a 3.16 ERA in 336 innings over the past two seasons. As my colleague Michael Baumann pointed out just last month, Quantrill isn’t overpowering, but he gets the job done.

Drafted eighth overall in 2016 by the San Diego Padres out of Stanford University, Quantrill was acquired by Cleveland at the 2020 trade deadline as part of the nine-player Mike Clevinger deal. He’s expected to start against the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday if their Wild Card Series requires a deciding Game 3.

Quantrill discussed his evolution as a pitcher and his it’s-all-about-getting-outs approach this past weekend.

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David Laurila: We discussed your repertoire in spring training of 2018 when you were in the Padres system. How have you changed as a pitcher since that time?

Cal Quantrill: “If we’re looking at it from a literal standpoint, I flattened out the slider and turned it into a cutter. I went to more of a 50/50 mix with the two-seam and four-seam. I’ve kind of kept a little curveball wrinkle to keep them off the hard stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Bo Naylor made his MLB debut with the Cleveland Guardians on Saturday, and if all goes according to plan, he’ll be a mainstay in their lineup as soon as next year. His tool box and present performance are equally eye-catching. The 22-year-old Mississauga, Ontario native logged a 140 wRC+ between Double-A Akron and Triple-A Columbus, and a pair of counting stats were even more notable. Displaying unique athleticism for a backstop, Naylor swatted 21 home runs and swiped 20 bases in 24 attempts.

His emergence as Cleveland’s catcher of the future came on the heels of a confounding 2021 campaign. Returning to action following a minor-league season lost to COVID, the 2018 first-round pick struggled to the tune of a .612 OPS in Akron last year. A flaw in his left-handed stroke was the primary reason for concern. As Eric Longenhagen wrote last spring, Naylor’s swing “can really only cut through the heart of the zone.”

This past Sunday, I asked the younger brother of Guardians first baseman Josh Naylor if he felt that our lead prospect analyst’s assessment was valid. Read the rest of this entry »

Data Scientist

Department: Baseball Research & Development

Primary Purpose
The Cleveland Guardians Baseball Research & Development (R&D) group is seeking data scientists at a variety of experience levels, including senior, entry-level, and interns/fellows. Prior experience with sports is not necessary if you have some curiosity or interest in learning about data science applications in baseball.

If you enjoy tackling challenging problems, using interesting real data, collaborating with smart people, and having a direct impact on what happens on the baseball field and in our business, this may be the opportunity for you!

People in this role will use statistical and machine learning techniques to better understand and quantify the game of baseball. You will analyze video, player tracking, and biomechanics data as well as traditional baseball data sources like box scores to help us acquire and develop baseball players into a championship-caliber team. You will work alongside the rest of the R&D, data engineering, and IT groups, and interact with coaches, scouts, and executives from across the organization.

The Cleveland Guardians prefer our employees (or teammates) reside in Cleveland, Ohio, but we will consider and discuss the possibility of remote work.

If you meet some of the qualifications below, we encourage you to apply or reach out for more information. We know that historically marginalized groups – including people of color, women, people from working class backgrounds, and people who identify as LGBTQ – are less likely to apply unless and until they meet every requirement for a job. We encourage you to reach out if you have questions about the role or your qualifications. We are happy to help you feel ready to apply!

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, and deploy statistical and/or machine learning models to support all facets of baseball operations, including scouting, player development, and the major league team.
• Explain methods, results and corresponding actionable insights to key stakeholders across the organization.

Basic Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a quantitative field such as Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Machine Learning, or Operations Research.
• Demonstrated understanding of statistics and associated quantitative methods, including the tradeoffs between different techniques.
• Demonstrated experience completing statistics and/or machine learning projects from beginning to end.

• Demonstrated experience working with large data sets in a programming language such as R or Python.
• Desire to learn about data science applications in baseball. Prior experience with baseball data is a plus but not necessary.

Preferred Experience

• Advanced degree or equivalent experience in a quantitative field such as Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Machine Learning, or Operations Research.
• Demonstrated research experience in a sports context (baseball is a plus).
• Demonstrated experience with a database language such as SQL.
• Demonstrated experience with deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or PyTorch.
• Demonstrated experience with computer vision.
• Demonstrated experience working with high-dimensional spatiotemporal data.
• Demonstrated experience with Bayesian statistics.

Standard Requirements

• Represent the Cleveland Guardians in a positive fashion to all business partners and the general public.
• Ability to develop and maintain successful working relationships with members of the Front Office.
• Ability to act according to organizational values and service excellence at all times.
• Ability to work with multicultural populations and have a commitment to fairness and equality.
• Ability to work in a diverse and changing environment.

About Us
Our teammates are at the core of what we believe in: People, Collaboration, Learning, and Excellence (PeopleCLE). We look to hire individuals who are committed to our purpose of uniting and inspiring our city with the power of team. Our mission is to win the World Series while creating a compelling fan experience.

We believe that we will achieve our goals by making evidence and model-based decisions and creating environments that support our people and empower them to continuously learn. This role might be for you if you are looking to join a team that works together to learn new ways to make model-based decisions that lead to excellent outcomes.

We also pride ourselves on creating an attractive work environment highlighted by a healthy work-life balance, exceptional benefits such as health, vision, and dental coverage, and competitive 401k plan with employer contribution and match.

Our Hiring Process

1. A short, three question questionnaire to help us get to know you better than we do from just your application. No coding involved.
2. Two approximately 30-minute phone calls.
3. A longer take-home questionnaire to help us learn how you think through problems. No coding or project involved.
4. A final round of interviews with our R&D department as well as teammates across Baseball Operations.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Software Engineer

Department: Baseball Systems
Employment Type: Full-Time, Exempt

Primary Purpose
The Cleveland Guardians are seeking a Software Engineer to join their Baseball Systems Engineering team. In this position, you will have the opportunity to gain exposure to a variety of tasks – including, but not limited to, software engineering, data warehousing, and UX/UI design & development – that directly impact the organization’s ability to acquire, develop, and deploy players. Depending on your preferences, we will work with you to craft a role that either specializes in one of these areas or allows you to contribute across multiple areas. The software and data products you help build will facilitate operations and enhance decision-making across all areas of the organization, helping to answer questions such as “which trades should we execute,” “who should we select with our next pick in the draft,” and “how can we show players their data from yesterday’s game?” The position offers the opportunity to collaborate and help craft innovative solutions to challenging problems, grow from both an engineering and leadership standpoint, and work with teammates side by side in pursuit of the organization’s ultimate mission – winning the World Series.

As a Software Engineer with the Cleveland Guardians, you will have the opportunity to:
From a front-end engineering perspective…

• Learn from experienced engineers and work within a modern web stack, using Vue, Node, Nest, D3, etc.
• Work closely with your product team to discover competitive advantages in player acquisition and player development, and build interactive software and web pages to realize those advantages

• Identify inefficiencies in our users’ processes that can only be solved with user-friendly software

• Rapidly prototype new/innovative solutions and demonstrate them to your product team, end-users, and Baseball Operations leadership
• Contribute to the holistic design process and help shape how we work in the future
• Have regular opportunities to engage with, and learn from, our Baseball Operations leadership group

From a back-end engineering perspective…

• Build robust data systems that improve the backbone of our data-first applications
• Transform both internal and external data sources into our central data warehouse
• Work closely with your product team and other software engineers to determine technical requirements and turn them into accessible and secure data endpoints (e.g., direct SQL, BI tools, REST)

• Collaborate with our R&D team to help move statistical/machine learning models into production

• Collaborate with our Infrastructure team to troubleshoot/enhance performance and query costs across both cloud and on-premises environments
• Be an active participant in identifying, evolving, and evangelizing data engineering best practices, constantly challenging the status quo and improving our data engineering standards

Base Requirements Needed, you should have:

• Demonstrated experience or degree in a field such as Computer Science or another STEM program
• Demonstrated experience writing user-facing application code
• A proven ability to work within tight timelines and iterate quickly
• Effective communication skills and the ability to collaborate within a cross-functional team
• A desire to learn and grow not only as a programmer, but also as a person
• A passion for baseball/sports, or a willingness to learn more about the game

Standard Requirements

• Represents the Cleveland Guardians in a positive fashion to all business partners and the general public
• Ability to develop and maintain successful working relationships with members of the Front Office
• Ability to act accordingly to organizational values and service excellence at all times
• Ability to work with multicultural populations and have a commitment to fairness and equality
• Ability to work in a diverse and changing environment

About Us
In Baseball Operations and Baseball Systems, our shared goal is to identify and develop diverse players and front office teammates who contribute to our mission. By working together effectively and collaboratively, we create a family atmosphere that supports learning as we strive for excellence in everything we do. We believe that we will achieve our goals by making evidence-based decisions and creating environments that support our people and empower them to learn.

We know that people from historically marginalized groups and those who have not yet had direct experience in the sports industry are less likely to apply for a job unless they meet every requirement. That being said, we encourage anyone who meets some of the qualifications above to apply or reach out for more information.

The Cleveland Guardians are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Cleveland Guardians.

Oh, did that title get your attention? I thought it might. Bad news, though! It was just a trap to get you to read this. I’m here to talk about the same thing we talk about around this time every year: projections offending people. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just the name of the game when October comes around. We post playoff odds before the season, which means we’re always missing on some team or other. That’s right: as best as I can tell, Cleveland fans are upset that we gave their team a 93.3% chance of making the playoffs in 2019, only to have them miss out on the postseason.

Okay, fine. I’m actually talking about the Guardians making the playoffs this year after starting the season with a 7.5% chance of winning their division, as the league helpfully noted on Twitter earlier this week:

That's why they play the games. ? pic.twitter.com/X0KkQwgPr1

— MLB (@MLB) September 26, 2022

I brought up the 2019 example to make a point: our odds miss in both directions. They’re not biased for or against the Guardians specifically. I thought it might be useful to look into a few things our model doesn’t handle particularly well that might have understated the Guardians’ chances, a few things the team did well to improve its odds, and a few breaks along the way that Cleveland deftly took advantage of. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, on your way to your local coffee shop or the train station, you probably passed two guys writhing around on the sidewalk, one screaming “Aaron Judge!” while trying to wrap up his counterpart in a figure-four leg lock; the other, attempting valiantly to squirm out of his predicament and refusing to tap out, shouting “Shohei Ohtani!”

Such is the nature of this year’s AL MVP discourse, the most spirited awards debate since the halcyon days of Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera a decade ago. And that’s appropriate — these are two of the most recognizable names in the sport, both accomplishing things we only see once every few decades, and both doing it in major markets. (I’m framing it this way on purpose in order to provoke a second argument: Is Anaheim really part of the Greater Los Angeles area, or is it something else?)

But they name three MVP finalists, not two, which leaves us a little less than two months from a hilarious television moment: Judge and Ohtani, on MLB Network, awaiting the results of this contentious election while the host runs down the credentials of some joker with no shot at all of taking home the hardware.

So who should that joker be? Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the 1950s, Hall of Fame slugger Ralph Kiner famously said that “singles hitters drive Fords and home run hitters drive Cadillacs.” Michael Massey’s grandmother may or may not have been familiar with the quote, but she did her best to send the 24-year-old Kansas City Royals rookie down the right road. I learned as much when I asked Massey about his first big-league blast, which came on August 18 against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field.

“What I thought of when I hit it was my nana,” said Massey, who grew up in the Chicago area and went on to play his college ball at the University of Illinois. “She passed away toward the end of last season — she was 93 — and growing up she’d always give me a hundred bucks for every home run I hit. She loved it when I hit home runs, and did that for every league I played in.”

Massey has never tallied up his earnings from over the years, although he does acknowledge that the benevolence was bountiful. Along with his homers in youth leagues, high school, and college, he left the yard 21 times in High-A last year.

His grandmother — his mother’s mother — escaped Illinois winters by vacationing in Florida, and eventually became a snowbird. That the Sunshine State became her “favorite place in the world” made Massey’s first MLB home run even more special. And the memories include much more than money. The family matriarch regularly played whiffle ball with him when he was growing up, and she wasn’t just a fan of her grandson. She loved baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

What does it mean that a team is 55% likely to make the playoffs, or 45% likely? It sounds like it means it’ll be right on the cusp of the playoffs at year’s end — the kind of team that spends the last week of the year either sighing in relief at a narrow escape or ruing a few one-run losses that did it in.

Sure, that’s definitely true sometimes. Often, though, the numbers don’t work out quite so suspensefully. Sometimes, your 50% chance decays to zero or climbs to a near certainty far before any dramatic ending. For proof of this, look no further than the race for the AL Central, which went from toss-up to fait accompli over the first half of September.

On September 4, the Guardians had just finished getting their clocks cleaned by fellow AL playoff hopefuls. Over a ten-game span — seven against Seattle, three against Baltimore — they went 2–8, dropping their record to 68–64. In that same span, the Twins had gone 6–3, raising their record to an identical 68–64. Our playoff odds gave the Guardians the better chance at winning the AL Central, but it was close: 43% for Cleveland, 39% for Minnesota. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, the things you find when perusing the leaderboards. While collecting data to discuss the decline in Jeremy Peña’s plate discipline, I went down a rabbit hole of player performances since May. As tends to happen, one thing led to another, and I ended up running my Cy Young predictor using only data since the start of May. Near the top of each league were pitchers whose presence surprised me even though I already knew both to be excellent. Each of them is on a borderline contender that is now very likely to make the playoffs, and each survives in the majors by relying on command rather than throwing 100-mph smoke. That’s right, I’m talking about Aaron Nola and Shane Bieber. Let’s examine each, starting with Nola, the top National League pitcher in my Cy Young predictor since May.

The Phillies look nearly certain to play postseason baseball. With a probability that is now over 90% by both FanGraphs’ and ZiPS’ reckoning, the Phils are on target to make the playoffs for the first time since 2011. While there have been runs that teased contention in past years, the Phillies have always seemed to end up floating somewhere around .500. But despite Zack Wheeler and Bryce Harper missing parts of the season, Nick Castellanos disappointing, and a defense that just begs for a Yackety Sax soundtrack, the team stands at 79-61. And while he’s obviously not the only player to have contributed to the club’s record, Nola’s impressive run makes him one of the key figures of the 2022 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

We should know better by now than to doubt the Guardians. Every year it seems like they shed at least one important player, and every year (not literally every year, but most years) they scheme, finesse, and otherwise inveigle their way back to the playoffs. This year, Cleveland’s position players are playing great defense and striking out less than any lineup in the league. On the other side of the ball, Cleveland — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — has managed to cultivate depth by developing talented starters internally.

You know these pitchers: Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase, Triston McKenzie, James Karinchak (who’s so dangerous umps check his hair for weapons like he’s Milady de Winter from The Three Musketeers). And Cal Quantrill.

During the month of August, when Cleveland asserted control over the AL Central for the first time, Quantrill made six starts, pitched at least six innings each time, and posted a total ERA of 2.13. Bieber and McKenzie get most of the credit for the Guardians’ run prevention success, and deservedly so. But in this age of inch-perfect 98-mph two-seamers and strikeout rates in the 30% range, Quantrill is a throwback: an effective pitch-to-contact innings-eater. That he belongs to a little-celebrated archetype of player does not diminish his value to a team that’s operated all year with little room for error. Read the rest of this entry »