Associate – Baseball Systems – User Interface/Experience UI/UX
Location: Milwaukee, WI
Position Summary:
The Associate – Baseball Systems – UI/UX will work closely with the Software Engineering team within the Baseball Systems department. This position will be responsible for supporting the creation of intuitive, accessible, and visually appealing user experiences that enhance existing web and mobile technologies and creation of new tools.
Core duties for this role include, but are not limited to:
Create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes for web and mobile applications.
Participate in user research activities (e.g., user interviews, surveys, usability testing).
Analyze user feedback and research to refine designs.
The ideal candidate will be currently enrolled pursuing a bachelor’s degree (B. A.) in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Design, Digital/Graphic Design, or related field from four-year college or university; or related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
Our Team
Baseball Systems is the software backbone of Baseball Operations. We provide data and decision-making tools for analysts, coaches, and front office personnel to help win a World Series. Our department consists of a team of data engineers and a team of software engineers who work across all different aspects of Baseball Operations providing support and tools relevant to each group. We work directly with stakeholders in every department of Baseball Operations to ensure every project we work on drives value to the organization and helps us win more games on the field. We help drive technical innovation to find new ways to solve baseball problems.
Our Pitch
You come here to make a difference. We are a purpose-led organization, focused on building an inclusive and engaging culture that fosters excellence, collaboration, and ingenuity. We strive to be a model employer and cultivator of talent, empowering our teams to drive innovation through the inclusion of diverse thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. We operate at the highest standard of excellence, investing in the development of our staff across all levels and embracing differences through a culture of respect and understanding.
We are proud to offer a highly competitive perks and benefits package including:
League wide medical insurance plan
401(K) match and an additional annual contribution from the Club
Collaborative recognition program and incentives
Online educational platform for personal and professional development
Employee Resource Groups
Paid time off for volunteering
Year-round diversity, equity and inclusion training and development
Brewers Home Game tickets, promotional giveaways and other discounts!
For more information about our Crew, other benefits and insight into our Club culture please visit our Careers Page
While the Cubs are 22-15 and own a three-game lead in the NL Central — the largest of any team at this writing — the rotation that’s helped them to that perch has taken its hits recently. Last month, 2023 All-Star lefty Justin Steele underwent surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament, and Javier Assad suffered a setback while rehabbing to return from an oblique strain. And then on Monday, the Cubs placed 2024 All-Star lefty Shota Imanaga on the injured list due to a left hamstring strain. While his injury isn’t considered to be major, his loss could tighten the division race and test the depth of the already-depleted rotation.
After leaving his April 29 start against the Pirates after five innings due to cramps in both quadriceps, Imanaga cruised through the first five innings against the Brewers on Sunday in Milwaukee, allowing just three singles while striking out four without a walk. The 31-year-old’s afternoon ended on a sour note, however. With the game still scoreless in the sixth, he yielded a leadoff single to Jackson Chourio and then a one-out walk to William Contreras. It looked as though he might escape unscathed when he got Christian Yelich to ground to first baseman Michael Busch, who started a potential 3-6-1 double play. Imanaga ran to cover first base, but not only was Dansby Swanson’s throw a bit late, the pitcher came up limping, forcing him out of the game.
Reliever Julian Merryweather entered, threw a wild pitch that allowed Chourio to score from third, and by the time he got the final out, three more runs had scored in what ended as a 4-0 loss for the Cubs. They suffered a much more gruesome defeat on Tuesday, when reliever Ryan Pressly allowed eight straight Giants to reach base in what became a nine-run 11th inning and a 14-5 drubbing. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, James Fegan wrote a great story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth became one of the most patient players in baseball. The White Sox want Meidroth to be more aggressive, but after a recent call-up, he’s running a minuscule 17.3% chase rate. He ran that exact same chase rate last season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the 381 players who saw at least 500 pitches outside the zone. Here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann also covered Meidroth’s overabundance of patience a couple weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured something Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining characteristic of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. But Meidroth isn’t the only Chase in baseball. Maybe he’s an outlier. Maybe the other players named Chase rack up chases, if only out of a sincere desire to obey the fifth commandment.
Chase Utley was the first major league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently just a year after Sports Info Solutions started tracking pitches. That means that we can track the chase rate of every Chase who’s ever played. I went through his year-by-year chase rates in order to calculate a league-adjusted figure, which we’ll call Chase Rate Plus for the remainder of this article. Utley’s Chase Rate Plus was 88, 12% below the league average, and it helped him run a walk rate that was 6% above the league average. In other words, the first Chase in history didn’t chase much either. What about the rest of the bunch? Read the rest of this entry »
When the Yankees lost Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil before the season started, I thought they were screwed. Turns out, at least so far, that New York’s stripiest sports team is right where it ended last year: First place in the AL East. That’s because the Yankees, as of this writing, lead the league in home runs, OBP, SLG, and (by a pretty big margin) wRC+. It helps that the rest of the AL East (especially the Orioles) has started slow, but the best defense is a good offense and all that.
If you are familiar with Andrés Muñoz, the baseball player, you may know that he is good. It may be enough for you to simply witness and bask in his elite performance, and question it no further. (Rarely are we so content here.) You may not realize he is unusual; you may not care. Often in baseball, being good and being unusual go hand in hand. This is a short exploration, albeit one preceded by an exorbitantly long prologue, of why Muñoz is good and unusual.
If you are familiar with FanGraphs, the baseball website, you may know about approach angles. If not: A pitch’s approach angle is the three-dimensional angle at which it crosses the front of home plate. Broken down into its two-dimensional vectors, it becomes vertical approach angle (VAA) and horizontal approach angle (HAA).
VAA is a description of pitch shape and thus depends on other physical attributes of the pitch — namely, its velocity and acceleration in all three dimensions. While representing the most distilled measurements of a pitch’s movement through space, the velocity and acceleration vectors themselves are functions of release height, release angle, release speed, spin rate, spin axis, spin efficiency… it goes on. VAA, as it happens, is very sensitive to pitch height. Reporting a pitch’s average VAA is not especially meaningful without either providing locational context or stripping it of that context all together.
To accomplish the latter, I developed VAA Above Average. It’s a simple recalculation that communicates a fastball’s flatness or steepness irrespective of pitch height. Through this it’s much easier to see that, for example, flatter VAAs induce higher swinging strike rates (SwStr%) at all pitch heights compared to steeper VAAs (forgive the half-baked visualization):
Though they’ve lost two straight to trim their AL West lead to a single game, the Mariners are a first-place team thanks to a recent 16-4 stretch that has boosted their record to 20-14. As I noted last week, their success for a change hasn’t been driven by the strength of their rotation, which has been without George Kirby thus far due to shoulder inflammation and is now without Logan Gilbert, who landed on the IL in late April with a flexor strain. Rather, Seattle been carried by an exceptionally potent offense, a marked contrast from recent years, particularly 2024, when the team’s failure to score contributed to the August firings of manager Scott Servais and hitting coach Jarret DeHart. These Mariners have benefited not only from Cal Raleigh’s heavy hitting, but from the ongoing presence of Randy Arozarena, who was acquired just before last year’s trade deadline, and rebounds from players who struggled due to injuries last season, such as J.P. Crawford and Jorge Polanco. The return of Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez to their coaching staff has helped, and it does appear as though T-Mobile Park has been a bit more forgiving than usual.
Raleigh and Polanco are the hitters getting the headlines. Raleigh is currently slashing .240/.359/.574 with a major league-high 12 homers, and he ranks third in the AL in slugging percentage behind only Aaron Judge and Alex Bregman, and fourth in the league in wRC+ behind those two and Jonathan Aranda(!). While Polanco doesn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title because an oblique strain has limited him to swinging left-handed and to DHing instead of playing the field, he’s hit a ridiculous .369/.407/.750 (233 wRC+) with nine homers in just 92 plate appearances (14 short of qualifying). Crawford is batting .294/.417/.404 (151 wRC+) and Arozarena .224/.366/.414 (136 wRC+). Both players are walking over 15% of the time, with Raleigh drawing a pass 14.4% of the time; the team’s 11.2% walk rate leads the majors.
All of that has helped the Mariners withstand a comparatively slow start by Julio Rodríguez (.206/.308/.375, 103 wRC+) and a wave of injuries that has forced right fielder Victor Robles, outfielder-first baseman Luke Raley, utilityman Dylan Moore, and second baseman Ryan Bliss to the injured list alongside the aforementioned rotation stalwarts [Update: Moore was activated just after this article was published]. Even so, the Mariners have gotten a 100 wRC+ or better from every position besides first base (where Rowdy Tellez, Donovan Solano, Raley and Moore have combined for a 60 wRC+) and right field (where six players, among them the injured Robles, Raley and Moore, have combined for a 90 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »
Bailey Ober wasn’t highly regarded when our Minnesota Twins Top Prospects list was published in December 2019. The towering 6-foot-9 right-hander was ranked no. 40 with a 35+ FV. And our prospect-analyst team at the time wasn’t alone in having relatively low expectations for him. Baseball America’s 2020 Prospect Handbook didn’t include Ober in its 30-deep rankings of the Twins system, nor did MLB Pipeline find room for him in its own top 30.
Yet despite the lack of hype, Ober is now a mainstay in Minnesota’s rotation. A 12th-round pick out of the College of Charleston in 2017, he made his major league debut in May 2021, and he’s since gone on to log a 3.76 ERA and a 3.89 FIP over 95 starts comprising 510 innings. So far this season, Ober has toed the rubber seven times and has a 4-1 record to go with a 3.72 ERA and a 3.85 FIP.
What did his FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Ober to respond to it.
———
“There’s very little precedent for someone with Ober’s velocity having big league success, but it’s clear why his mid-80s fastball has been dominant to this point.”
“That was the year my velo dipped way down,” Ober said. “I was 92-94 before that. My mechanics were terrible. We were trying to work on some stuff and it just went in the wrong direction. But I also had the best success I’d ever had, stats-wise. My ERA was [0.69] that season, which is why no one was in a rush to change anything. I was able to blow guys up with 88 mph.”
It isn’t supposed to be this easy. When the Phillies traded for Jesús Luzardo over the winter, they did so with the understanding that he wouldn’t be an ace right from the jump. He was coming off a rough and injured 2024, he’d only hit 20 starts in a season once in his career, and every warning light you could possibly imagine was flashing – worst stuff model grades of his career, lowest strikeout rate, lowest whiff rate, highest hard-hit rate.
Those warning signs explain why the Phillies were able to acquire Luzardo for relative peanuts. It also explains why our projection systems were unenthused by him heading into this year, projecting a 4.19 ERA, a distant fifth among Philadelphia’s starters. No one doubts Luzardo’s potential, but after six seasons and 500 innings (itself not a great sign) of roughly league-average work, well, at some point you are what you are.
Right, yeah, Luzardo’s been the best pitcher on the Phillies this year and one of the best pitchers in baseball. I’m not as surprised as I thought I’d be. But given that we’re a quarter of the way through the season and his ERA and FIP are both below 2.00, I think it’s time to take a closer look at what he’s doing differently. Read the rest of this entry »
The Boston Red Sox dropped to a .500 record over the weekend, but that bit of unpleasantness was overshadowed by the loss of starting first baseman Triston Casas to a serious knee injury. Running to first during the first of a three-game set against the Twins on Friday, Casas collapsed suddenly while trying to beat out a slow roller fielded by the pitcher, Joe Ryan. It was revealed on Saturday that Casas had ruptured his left patellar tendon, and on Sunday he underwent surgery. Without Casas, the second-place Sox have to reconsider their short-term options at first base, ideally before they fall too far behind in the AL East.
Boston could find no cause for optimism to put a positive spin on what happened. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow came right out and said the team doesn’t anticipate Casas to return in 2025. So, if you were hoping the first baseman might sneak back in time for the playoffs, that appears to be highly unlikely.
So what does this mean for Casas? Well, from a baseball standpoint — rather than a rehabilitation one, as I’m even less qualified to make medical pronouncements than Dr. Nick Riviera — coming into the season, ZiPS saw Casas as a solidly average first baseman, with a projected slash line of .246/.350/.462, a 125 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR. That last number was on the low side simply because ZiPS projected him to play in only 108 games, partially due to his being platooned in the past but also owing to his history of injuries. I expressed some concern about his profile in the preseason because of his struggles with making contact.
Casas was off to a slow start this year, hitting .182/.277/.303 with a bleak 58 wRC+. That’s worrisome for any player, but even more so for a platoon first baseman without much defensive value. All 27 games he started this season came against a righty. April’s gonna April, but the bad start did put a bit of a damper on his long-term outlook. Crank out some projections, ZiPS-o-Matic!
ZiPS Projection – Triston Casas (Pre-Injury)
Year
BA
OBP
SLG
AB
R
H
2B
3B
HR
RBI
BB
SO
SB
OPS+
WAR
2026
.240
.338
.439
396
49
95
20
1
19
61
57
115
0
113
1.1
2027
.239
.339
.435
402
50
96
20
1
19
63
59
115
0
112
1.1
2028
.240
.341
.436
404
50
97
20
1
19
63
60
113
0
113
1.1
2029
.240
.342
.437
400
50
96
20
1
19
62
60
111
0
113
1.1
2030
.238
.340
.425
390
47
93
20
1
17
59
58
108
0
110
0.9
Without factoring in his injury, Casas’ struggles to start 2025 caused a clear drop-off in his next-five-years projections, though I don’t personally think it was enough to fundamentally change our perception of him. He’s still a power-hitting first baseman you’d be happy to have in your lineup, but he’s not a major star to build around. As an aside, ZiPS is far less worried than the Red Sox are about letting Casas face left-handers; he is projected for a .226/.317/.395 line against southpaws in 2026. That’s not ideal, but it’s also not an unusually large platoon split for a left-handed slugger.
ZiPS is aware of injuries, but mainly in hindsight; it factors in the time missed after the fact because I don’t like being the position of diagnosing current injuries. But in this case, because we know that Casas’ rest-of-season projection is almost certainly going to be zero plate appearances, I don’t mind breaking the rules and telling ZiPS that 2025 is over and Casas missed more than 100 games with a knee injury.
As you can see, the season-ending injury has slightly soured his projection. But if there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Casas’ game isn’t really based on speed, meaning that ZiPS expects the overall long-term impact of the knee injury to be less for him than it would be for a faster runner. By contrast, when I run the same projection for Jarren Duran after giving him a serious knee injury — Sorry, Jarren! — his projected 2026 WAR declines from 3.5 to 2.2 WAR.
Casas ought to be back in 2026, but the Red Sox have to answer the question of what to do at first base for the next five months. Romy Gonzalez has been Casas’ platoon partner this year, and at .327/.382/.449, he’s hit well in his 55 plate appearances as of Monday morning. But he’ll probably lose a hundred points or so from his current .421 BABIP, so it’s unrealistic that he’ll keep up that line. That said, he has been making hard contact this season, with a hard-hit rate approaching 60%, up from 50% last year, meaning that his production is not a stone-cold fluke, either. ZiPS projects Gonzalez to post a 107 wRC+ the rest of the season, a reasonable performance for a Plan B first baseman, but the Red Sox should be a bit more ambitious than settling for reasonable, especially when the player in question is more of a substitute utilityman than a true first baseman.
But whom should they target then? That’s the harder question. Rafael Devers would seem to be the likely internal option, and the team hasn’t explicitly ruled that out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Red Sox decided not to switch his position again considering how he responded when they moved him off third base after signing Alex Bregman. In this case, perhaps discretion is the better part of valor. Boston also does not appear to be inclined to temporarily move to prospect Roman Anthony to first base.
Outside the organization, pickings are slim at the moment, as few teams have completely given up on the season. Andrew Vaughn is probably available, and his peripherals suggest that he’s performed better than his actual numbers during his brutal start, but I’m not sure Boston really wants a reclamation project here. The recently demoted Jake Burger would result in the same objection. If the Nats are interested in trading Nathaniel Lowe, he may be the best option out there, and he’s not a free agent until after next season, though that might make them less likely to move him. And the Brewers probably aren’t yet at a point where they’d let go of Rhys Hoskins for cheap. Anthony Rizzo is still a free agent, and Jon Singleton is now in Triple-A with the Mets, but if those are the two best options out there, I think the Red Sox would be better off just rolling with Romy. (I want to see Marcelo Mayer get some time at first, but that’s mostly so I can make some kind of lame Romy and Marcelo’s High School Reunion joke.)
The injury to Casas doesn’t doom his future outlook too much, nor does it shatter Boston’s chances to contend this season, but the Red Sox need to decide what they want to do here fairly quickly. Sure, the impact of any first base move would be limited, but even a marginal upgrade could make a difference in a tight AL East race.
Random relievers can do crazy things in small samples. Who can ever forget Nationals right-hander Justin Miller striking out 57.9% of the hitters he faced across a three-week stretch of 2018? Or Kody Funderburk’s legendary whiff explosion to close out the 2023 Twins season? Guardians reliever Hunter Gaddis is on one of these incendiary strikeout runs, and it’s driving me to madness.
Gaddis might not strike you as operating at the same level of random as Miller and Funderburk. By any set of reasonable standards, Gaddis broke out last season, appearing in nearly half of his team’s games while delivering a 1.59 ERA. But — forgive me — I didn’t really buy it. His 23.7% strikeout rate matched the league average for relievers, and his arsenal didn’t exactly justify a .205 BABIP. Given his pitch shapes and peripherals, I figured Gaddis would settle in as more of a solid middle-relief type than one of the premier backend arms in the league. And then this April happened. Read the rest of this entry »
