Applied AI Engineer

Summary
The New York Mets are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to build and ship production-grade AI capabilities that improve decision-making and streamline workflows across Baseball Operations. This role sits at the intersection of Baseball Systems (software engineering), Data Engineering, Baseball Analytics, Performance Technology, and modern generative AI. You will develop reliable AI-powered applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), secure tool/data integrations (MCP-style patterns), and agentic workflows that can support deep work and research, while ensuring strong standards for quality, security, privacy, and operational excellence.

This is a hands-on role for an engineer who can translate ambiguous baseball operations and player development needs into working software, iterate quickly with stakeholders, and harden solutions into durable systems used daily by analysts, coaches, scouts, and baseball operations staff.

Note: This role will require extensive in-person collaboration and innovation alongside stakeholders, analysts, and engineers. Applicants must be local to NYC (or willing to relocate) and be able to travel to Citi Field regularly. Travel to Spring Training and affiliates may also be required.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain AI-powered product experiences that provide intuitive access to baseball information and statistics and workflows across internal systems.
• Develop end-to-end RAG pipelines (ingest, chunking, embedding, retrieval, generation) with strong attention to answer quality, baseball relevancy, analytics accuracy, latency, and cost.
• Implement secure tool and data connectors for AI assistants and agents using standardized patterns (MCP-style), enabling safe interaction with internal APIs, data warehouses, and services.
• Build agentic workflows that can execute multi-step tasks (research, analysis, synthesis, report generation) with clear guardrails, auditability, and human-in-the-loop approvals.
• Partner closely with Product, Analytics, Performance Technology, Player Development, and Baseball operations stakeholders to frame problems, define success, and deliver measurable impact.
• Contribute to shared engineering standards and reusable components so AI capabilities scale across multiple products and teams.
• Ensure strong security and privacy practices (access control, data boundaries, logging and auditing, and safe handling of sensitive information).
• Participate in high-availability support expectations as needed during critical operational periods throughout the baseball season, and during feature releases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including building and operating production services.
• Demonstrated experience building LLM-powered applications in production (prompt/program design, structured outputs, tool calling, reliability patterns).
• Practical experience with retrieval systems (search, embeddings, vector databases, ranking, chunking/indexing) and applying them to real workflows.
• Strong experience with modern backend and data integration fundamentals: APIs, SQL, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS/Azure)
• Proficiency in one or more production languages commonly used for AI applications and services (e.g. Python and/or Typescript)
• Approach work as highly collaborative and stakeholder-driven, with the ability to operate in ambiguity while iterating quickly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working in sports, health, finance, or other high-stakes analytics-heavy environments, preferred.
• Strong interest in baseball and comfort working within the culture of a professional sports organization, preferred

he above information is intended to describe the general nature, type, and level of work to be performed. The information is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required for this position. Nothing in this job description restricts management’s right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time. The individual selected may perform other related duties as assigned or requested.

The New York Mets value the unique qualities individuals with various backgrounds and experiences can offer the organization. Our continued success depends heavily on the quality of our workforce. The Organization is committed to providing employees with the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential.

Salary Range: $180,000 – $200,000

For technical reasons, we strongly advise to not use an .edu email address when applying. Thank you very much.

To Apply
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the New York Mets.

Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting rotations have five slots.

Yes, every once in a while a team will pretend to have four or six slots, but that team must inevitably confront the truth: Starting rotations have five slots. It’s a matter of policy, preference, and just plain practicality, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said last year in an interview with Lookout Landing.

“The unfortunate thing about the roster rules is you only get 26 spots, and you only get 13 pitchers. And when you add a sixth starter, you take away a reliever. When you add a sixth starter, sometimes your starters pitch every six days, sometimes they pitch every eight or nine days. Starting pitchers are fussy. They don’t like that. They like to stay on a regular schedule. They like to know when they’re pitching.”

I’ve been thinking about the fixed-nature of rotations lately after reading this discussion between Eno Saris and Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic. They compare the rotations in Detroit and Boston by assigning each pitcher a label (one, two, three, four, five), sizing them up horizontally and vertically, and confronting the trade-offs in quality and depth. This reflects how many of us compare rotations in the abstract, and I wanted to see if this could be applied more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »

The World Baseball Classic likely provided many fans their first glimpse of Nolan McLean. The 24-year-old right-hander debuted last August and made just eight big league starts. If you missed his work against Italy on March 10 – if you only caught the last six innings, or if you only saw his line at the end of the night – you might have wondered how McLean ended up starting the championship game for the United States against Venezuela. You might have wondered how this prospect with hardly any major league experience, who earned a 9.00 ERA along with the team’s only loss in the tournament to that point, could have possibly earned that honor over the other All-Stars on the roster.

McLean’s line against Italy wasn’t exactly inspiring. He allowed three earned runs across three innings. He struck out four, but he also walked two batters, hit another, and allowed two home runs. Most of the batted balls he gave up were hard hit. And after that ignominy, he was set to face off against Ronald Acuña Jr. in the championship game? The same Ronald Acuña Jr. who did this to the famous McLean sweeper back in August?

Even if that was your frame of reference coming into Tuesday night, it didn’t take long for the pieces to fall into place. As is so often the case with nasty young flamethrowers, McLean looked absolutely unhittable, even when he was getting hit. Eric Longenhagen has described McLean’s pitches as moving “violently,” and I think that’s right on the money. The slider doesn’t look like it’s sweeping so much as it looks like it’s changing its mind halfway to the plate. It’s an optical illusion due to the camera angle behind the pitcher, but it honestly looks like it’s shifting into top gear once it makes its left turn. The sinker looks like it’s teleporting to the catcher’s glove. The curveball looks like it’s suddenly realized that it has left its curling iron plugged in and needs to get back home as soon as possible. (Even a curveball needs to feel pretty every sometimes.) Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, the Padres went shopping over the long weekend and landed a bunch of old guys who seemed pretty washed. I was glib in my appraisal of those moves, suggesting that they’d only work out if A.J. Preller had a time machine.

The Padres live in a perpetual state of roster turnover, which occasionally leaves gaps. That’s how you end up with no. 4 starter Germán Márquez, or platoon first baseman Nick Castellanos. But those two are on major league deals; they were always likely to make the roster in some capacity, regardless of how you feel about those late-2010s stalwarts now.

But nothing so concrete was promised to Walker Buehler, who came to camp in Peoria on a minor league deal with a non-roster invite. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing a lot of looking at depth charts this week. All of us FanGraphs writers have – these positional power rankings don’t write themselves. When you look at the majors through this lens, you’ll naturally do a lot of thinking about floor and ceiling. The Yankees are playing who at third base? The Brewers are getting how much WAR by avoiding weak spots? The Red Sox have that many outfielders?

I’ve written some team overviews this winter. In them, I make the following claim: “Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th to 26th best players being far superior to their counterparts on other clubs might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth guys and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October.” The converse of that claim – that stars matter disproportionately in October – is part and parcel of this depth argument. But is that true?

Some might say that the best time to answer this question is when the playoffs are just around the corner. I’d counter that those people haven’t just spent seven hours staring at a pile of acceptable-but-not-overwhelming third base and starting pitcher options and trying to write something about each one. So in the spirit of doing anything other than looking at power rankings, I decided to test out this assumption. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Teel has some catching up to do.

Teel is set to begin the season on the injured list. He pulled his hamstring while legging out a double for Team Italy last week at the World Baseball Classic. The diagnosis is a Grade 2 strain, which could keep him out for most of April. It’s an unfortunate start to what was meant to be his first full big league season.

In some ways, this answers a crucial question for the White Sox: Who will start at catcher on Opening Day? Teel, 23, would have been the obvious choice for most rebuilding organizations. He was a top 100 prospect last year before his debut in June, and he then posted a 125 wRC+ in 297 plate appearances. He’s at the forefront of Chicago’s burgeoning prospect pipeline and a key figure as the organization searches for its next core.

But the same can also be said for Edgar Quero, a similarly rated prospect who debuted last year at just 22 years old. Quero is now set for the starting job right out of camp, and he’ll have the first chance to showcase his development in 2026. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Houston Astros. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s new experimental minor league rules, and the potential downsides of trying to skip straight to a desired on-field result, then complete the 14th annual season preview series by previewing the 2026 Los Angeles Dodgers (35:35) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2026 Colorado Rockies (1:30:13) with Rockies Insider’s Patrick Lyons.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: The Spaghettis, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ward article 1
Link to Longenhagen on the new rules
Link to Stark on the new rules
Link to Stark on second base
Link to disengagement rules
Link to Bois on balks
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Dodgers offseason tracker
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Baumann on Roki
Link to Fabian on Roki
Link to Dodgers first-rounders
Link to field-sponsorship story
Link to Fabian’s author archive
Link to Rockies offseason tracker
Link to Rockies depth chart
Link to Rockies team wRC+ by year
Link to article on Bryant’s back
Link to article on Vodnik’s family
Link to article on Vodnik at the WBC
Link to Brebbia on EW
Link to Patrick’s work

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The hardest-hit ball of the World Baseball Classic semifinal between the United States and the Dominican Republic only traveled 191 feet. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s fourth-inning double left the bat at 116.1 mph, but it was just the 23rd-longest batted ball of the game, a few feet behind a Ketel Marte popout that was hit more than 40 mph softer. None of this was necessarily shocking. After the play, John Smoltz revealed even he was aware that sabermetric types wish Guerrero would find a way to lift the ball more often and turn some of his scorched groundouts into extra-base hits and extra-base hits into home runs.

This decade, 26% of balls hit 116 mph or harder have gone for home runs, and the lowest launch angle among those home runs was 15 degrees. Guerrero hit his double at just five degrees, and over the past five years, he ranks fourth in baseball with 28 non-homers of at least 116 mph. Five degrees is not the optimal launch angle if your goal is to do damage, but hitting a ball that low and that hard can have other benefits.

One benefit is that the ball can really slow down on its way to the wall. When you hit a screaming line drive or a high fly ball to the wall, it maintains much of its velocity and bounces off hard. When you hit a low liner or a grounder, all that contact with the outfield grass slows it down. Hard as it was hit, this ball didn’t have all that much velocity left, and the padding on the wall absorbed much of the remainder. It rolled back across the warning track and likely would have stopped entirely as soon as it encountered the grass. The outfielder has to wait back, wary of a hard carom bouncing past them, so when the ball dies like that, they need extra time to go get it, giving you more time to coast into second or stretch for third.

A weak carom also carries aesthetic benefits. When a ball is moving that slowly, you can’t field it normally. Below a certain velocity threshold, gloves are more hindrance than help. If you’re picking up a stationary baseball, or one moving at anything below a brisk walk, say 5 mph, it’s harder to pick the ball up off the ground with a glove than it is with your bare hand. Stiff leather fingers aren’t as sensitive or as flexible as real fingers, and the ball doesn’t have enough momentum to roll up into the pocket. Since you have to get the ball to your throwing hand anyway, you’re better off cutting out the middle man and barehanding the ball. It happens every day, but usually it happens for infielders who are dealing with bunts or squibbers. They charge hard, then scoop up the ball and throw it in one motion. It’s a thing of beauty, but it works quite differently in the outfield.

How much have you thought about the word toddler? As you can deduce, it means one who toddles, walking “with short tottering steps in the manner of a young child,” according to Merriam-Webster. The word first appeared in the early 16th century. There were tots, and the way they got around became tottering and tottling, which then became toddling. Finally, a good 300 years later, those tots who toddled became known as toddlers. (Who knows, they may have even enjoyed the occasional hot toddy. It was a different time.)

Of course, toddling isn’t the only hallmark of a toddler. Our balance, motor skills, and proprioception evolve (and then devolve) over time, so we end up moving very differently at each stage of life. For example, when adults bend over to pick something up off the ground, they bend at the waist, but they also tend to put one foot in front of the other and go into a slight lunge to bring their torso closer to ground level. Toddlers have a different approach, getting into a deep crouch and reaching for the item while it’s still way out in front of them. They tuck their chests against their knees and they have to stick their elbows out to make room. Because they’re not yet champions of spatial awareness, they don’t often nail the location of their squat, which is the reason they often end up reaching way out or way across their bodies.

I bring all this up because when Roman Anthony, playing left field for the United States at the time of Guerrero’s blistering low-launch-angle double, loped out to the warning track to field the ball, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t exactly look like the Greek god, top-prospect-in-baseball, uber-athlete we’ve come to expect. He looked, uh, different.

Anthony looked either like a toddler playing with a toy dump truck or a grown man doing a pretty convincing impression of an anteater. I’m going to be honest with you. I went through a bunch of pictures of my nieces and nephews, and it didn’t take long to find a photo of a niece in the exact same pose. She’s two years old, and she’s not wearing a shirt or pants because she was just playing in the sprinklers. She’s crouched down to pick up a worm from the garden. She looks exactly like Anthony in the picture above, and I wish I could show you the two side-by-side in the Miami outfield, which I absolutely mocked up in Photoshop. Alas, I cannot do that to my niece, who is no longer two years old.

How did Anthony get into this position? For starters, in the outfield, you’re no longer scooping the ball up gracefully and firing it on the move. The weak carom is the only situation where you have to barehand the ball, and you’re always moving away from the infield to get it, which means you’re running, stopping to pick up the ball, then reversing your momentum to throw it into the infield. It’s a halting, graceless maneuver at the best of times. But other outfielders seem to manage it. Here are Anthony’s Red Sox teammates, Nick Sogard and Wilyer Abreu, making similar plays.

They chop their steps and time things so that the ball arrives between their feet rather than way out in front of them. They get low to field the ball, but their chests aren’t tucked tightly against their knees. They still look like athletes. To be fair, they’re also benefitting from a more flattering angle, but let’s break down the video of Anthony on Guerrero’s double frame by frame just to make sure we understand the progression.

Here’s Anthony running after the ball with his trademark long, graceful strides. He’s a 6-foot-3 miracle with a 55 current value on his run tool.

Next, here he is putting on the brakes. He may be slowing down, but the picture is still alive with movement as he powers down into a hover.

And here Anthony is, settling into a defensive crouch as he awaits the carom off the wall. He’s low, he’s alert, he’s ready for anything. Wherever this ball decides to bounce, he’s about pounce.

Um, so this is Anthony scuttling like a crab. He’s scuttling like a crab now. The ball didn’t so much bounce off the wall as it did die on the wall, and Anthony just kind of stayed in the crouch and started – sorry, scuttling is really the only word I can think of that applies here – toward it.

So this is the difference between a professional athlete and a toddler. When the right leg is still extended, planted in the ground for maximum leverage, the foot digging into the dirt at an angle, Anthony is a force to be reckoned with. Once the right leg is bent, he’s completely flat-footed, knees to his chest, left elbow stuck way out to the side so he can wrap his arm around his leg; he’s everyone’s nephew, powerless to stop himself from befriending a worm.

This is the frame that really takes it over the toddler top. For some reason, Anthony doesn’t grab the slow-moving ball with his fingers. He reaches out with his hand angled back. It looks like he doesn’t know what to do, so he’s just going to slap the baseball. He lets it get deep into his palm and grabs it with his whole hand. Professional baseball players do not grip the baseball that way. They have enormous hands and get a four-seam grip, holding the ball with their fingertips. There’s air between the ball and their palm. When Anthony finally picks up the ball, he holds it the way you might cradle a melon.

After that, sadly, Anthony returned to his usual status as a fearsome baseball warrior blessed with grace and agility.

Anthony has a long career ahead of him, and he will awe us with many astounding feats of power and dexterity. For now, though, let’s make sure we treasure this memory of him as an adorable toddler before he hits the terrible twos.