Let me be very clear: This doesn’t matter. What I’m about to show you is small sample size theater. It’s not statistically significant. It has no bearing on what’s actually going to happen in the World Series. We are here for a fun fact rather than a learning opportunity. Are we all in agreement? Okay, then let me show you something wild. Here are Aaron Judge’s career numbers against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, uh, yeah. A .389 batting average is good. A slugging percentage in the thousands is good. A wRC+ over 300 is also good. Just in case you were wondering how good those numbers are, here’s a table that shows the best career numbers against the Dodgers, minimum 40 plate appearances, courtesy of our splits leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

Player Development Affiliate Intern

Locations: Charlotte, NC – Birmingham, AL – Winston-Salem, NC – Kannapolis, NC – Glendale, AZ

Summary:
The Chicago White Sox are seeking multiple seasonal Player Development Affiliate Interns. This entry level opportunity will provide individuals with a wide range of experiences across professional baseball. These positions will report to the Minor League Video Coordinator, while supporting Minor League coaching staffs at affiliate locations throughout the season. There will also be opportunities to work on various baseball operations projects depending on skillset. 

Program Details:

• The internship is an hourly, non-exempt position. Housing or a housing stipend will be provided.
• The position will take place at one of our 5 affiliate locations: Charlotte (AAA), Birmingham (AA), Winston-Salem (A+), Kannapolis (A), or Glendale (RK).
• All positions will start during Minor League Spring Training and end upon the conclusion of the Minor League season with the potential of extending into Instructional League.
• Candidates must be fully available for the duration of the internship (March 1 – September 30).
• Hours for this position may vary week to week; candidates must be available and prepared to work irregular hours, including nights, weekends and holidays.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Directly support players and coaching staff with all day-to-day video and information needs
• Film and chart each game and any early work requests
• Compile advanced scouting reports to be utilized prior to each series
• Manage the setup, operation and data management of all baseball technology
• Travel with the team on all road trips
• Aid in the execution of players development plans
• Complete independent projects as assigned by scouting/analytics/player development/front office staffs

Qualifications:

• Strong communication, organization skills, and eagerness to learn
• Strong knowledge pertaining to information technology including proficiency with all Microsoft Office software
• Knowledge of baseball technologies such as Hawkeye, Motion Capture, TrackMan, Edgertronic Cameras, Rapsodo, Blast Motion, etc. is strongly encouraged
• Must have a valid driver’s license and ability to lift and carry up to 50 lbs.
• Ability to work evenings, weekends, and holidays

Additional Skills:

• Prior coaching/playing experience
• Advanced understanding of hitting/pitching biomechanics
• Ability to speak conversational Spanish a plus
• Video editing skills
• Prior baseball/performance related research. Use of SQL/R/Python languages.

To Apply:

• Please email PDJobs@chisox.com with the subject line “PD Affiliate Intern” and include your resume, a PDF of the application questions below and two references. 

Application Questions – answer 5 of the 10 that best showcase your overall skillset (limit 250 words per question): 

1. What is your favorite defensive metric to use when evaluating a position player and why?
2. How would an automated strike zone at the MLB level affect how catchers are valued?
3. Identify one player the White Sox should look to acquire via trade or free agency this offseason. What would it take to acquire this player? Why do you recommend the White Sox target this player?
4. In a hypothetical situation you are the Amateur Scouting Director of an MLB team. Your team has the first overall pick and the top two players available are a high school position player and a college pitcher. Both players project to have the same career WAR and neither has any known injury history. Assume both will sign for slot value. Which would you select and why? What other factors would you consider in making the selection?
5. Who is one prospect outside MLB.com’s Top 100 that you believe is underrated? Provide a brief scouting report.
6. Willy Adames and Luis Severino are impending free agents for the upcoming offseason. Project their next contracts (years/dollars) and support your answer.
7. You’re a pitching coach preparing for a series against a new team. What are some of the key statistics/metrics on the opposing hitters that you would consider in compiling an Advance Scouting Report? Please support your answer.
8. In terms of analytics and technology, where can MLB organizations look to gain a competitive edge in the coming years?
9. In recent years, baseball has seen a move from more traditional marker-based motion capture systems (Motion Analysis, Qualisys, Vicon) to marker-less systems such as Hawkeye and KinaTrax. What are some of the pros and cons to each? If you were in charge of putting one motion capture system in a team’s Spring Training facility, which motion capture system (marker-less or marker-based) would you choose and why? 
10. Using the dataset in the link below, write a function to create the following measures of performance: Contact Rate, Exit Velocity, and OPS.

Dataset: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/rk96asjrnf9r59ie9nf3s/ACHi4oHJh5OKWw9gGtF5nSY?rlkey=r63x6xbr07l9dhjujwi7c2ahv&st=86vgbb3s&dl=0

• Which player with at least 100 PAs has the highest OPS? Contact%?
• What percentage of players with at least 100 PAs have an OPS of .800 or greater?
• What is the correlation between Contact% and OPS for players with at least 100 PAs?

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Chicago White Sox.

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

There’s been some long-term decline, but nothing earth-shattering.

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrés Muñoz has been one of baseball’s best relievers over the past three seasons. During that span, the Seattle Mariners right-hander has a 2.49 ERA, a 2.68 FIP, and a 34.7% strikeout rate over 176 games, comprising 173 1/3 innings. Acquired from the San Diego Padres as part of a seven-player trade in August 2020, Muñoz missed the entirety of that year and all but the final game of the 2021 season recovering from Tommy John surgery. He posted a 2.12 ERA and 22 saves in the just-completed campaign, both career bests.

Muñoz’s M.O. on the mound is power. Per Statcast, his four-seamer averaged 98.4 mph this season, while his two-seamer averaged 97.5 mph and his slider 87.6 mph. The velocity — but not his overall effectiveness — was actually down from the previous two years. In 2023, Muñoz’s four-seamer averaged 99.2 mph, and in 2022 it averaged 100.2 mph. His slider is his most-thrown pitch, and its speed has also ticked down a tad, although not to his detriment. With a caveat that his slider wasn’t always sharp this season, it elicited a .138 BAA, a .191 wOBA, and a 48.5% whiff rate.

The 25-year-old native of Los Mochis, Mexico sat down to talk about his repertoire and approach at Fenway Park earlier this year.

———

David Laurila: The last time we talked, you told me that you’re a bit of pitching nerd. To what extent?

Andrés Muñoz: “Yes. We have all this information, but I don’t want to put it all in my head. I try to make it simple. At the same time, I want to know where to attack the hitters. Where are their weaknesses? I use that. Like everybody, I like to have the information, but by the time I am on the mound, I’m not thinking about all the information. I’m thinking more about, ‘OK, where am I supposed to throw the pitch?’ I feel like that is the best thing for me, to have a plan for every hitter.”

Laurila: What about your pitch profiles and how you can optimize them? I assume you pay attention to that when you’re not on a game mound. Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing.

At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or nine times. Anything you’ve read about this year’s AFL so far has encompassed just two weeks of part-time play for any given player. Remember this is a hitter-friendly league for a number of both developmental and environmental reasons, and that triple slash lines in this league are not a reliable proxy for talent.

Tre’ Morgan, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays

Offensive standards at first base are quite high, and even though the collective performance of this year’s group was down relative to recent norms (by kind of a lot), it’s still a position from which we expect good players and prospects to provide impact power. Morgan has been a relevant prospect since high school, but a relative lack of power has tended to cap his projection into more of a part-time first base/outfield role.

During the 2024 regular season it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan has been more balanced, really taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He’s still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seems less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter. (An aside: Watch A’s prospect Denzel Clarke go first-to-third at the video’s 1:55 mark.)

I think the absolute ceiling for his production looks something like Brandon Belt’s or Daniel Murphy’s pre-Juiced Ball era statline. More likely Morgan’s output will look something like Ji Man Choi’s or LaMonte Wade Jr.’s. Morgan is not a guy who is going to hit 20 homers per year, but a heady, well-rounded offensive skillset coupled with his excellent, profile-seasoning first base defense make him better than the 40 FV grade player I evaluated him as during the year. He is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.

Caleb Durbin, UTIL, New York Yankees

I gave Durbin short shrift last year even after his .353/.456/.588 line in the 2023 Fall League. He had a good 2024 at Triple-A Scranton, including a strong second half after he returned from a fractured wrist. Durbin is short — really short, he’s 5-foot-6 — but he’s not small; he’s built like a little tank. His compact, stocky build helps keep his swing short and consistently on time to pull the baseball. His quality of contact in 2024 was commensurate with a guy who slugs under .400 at the big league level, but he was dealing with an injury that typically impacts contact quality for a while after recovery.

Perhaps most importantly, Durbin looks fine at both second and third base and has also been playing all over the outfield. Defensive versatility might be his key to being rostered consistently. Durbin ran a jailbreak 4.10 for me last week, but his home-to-first times have been close to 4.4 seconds on normal swings. That’s not blazing and slower than what’s typical of a decent center fielder, but any kind of outfield viability would help the former Division-III standout become an improbable big leaguer. Durbin has played sparingly in center field during his career, and it’s going to be very difficult to evaluate him there this Fall League unless he starts getting reps there every day, which I think is unlikely. It’s more of a thing to watch develop into next spring.

Kemp Alderman, OF, Miami Marlins

Alderman, a 2023 second round pick out of Ole Miss who had some of the best exit velocities in that draft class, is currently leading the AFL with six home runs. He hit one on Friday at a whopping 119.5 mph. It went out on a line, ricocheting off the side of the batter’s eye, which you can see in this frame:

Friday, Marlins outfielder Kemp Alderman hit a homer that left Salt River Fields in a real hurry, at 119.5 mph. pic.twitter.com/HBvj2F0oud

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 22, 2024

Like Durbin, Alderman missed time in 2024 with a broken hand. It’s good to see Alderman hitting with elite peak power coming off of this particular injury, but I’d advise everyone to pump the breaks on his overall prospectdom at this time. He loads his hands so deep, high, and late that I worry he’ll struggle against better velocity as he climbs the minors. Though Alderman’s regular-season strikeout rates don’t raise alarm, I don’t think 30-ish games at each A-ball level is a meaningful sample, especially for a draft pick out of an SEC school. It’s fine to be hopeful that I’m wrong or that Alderman will make necessary adjustments once better stuff starts beating him, and he clearly has the power to clear the offensive bar at a corner outfield spot. But even though he’s raking out here, he does not have an opinion-altering look. I know Marlins fans have gone through this a lot lately, where they have a minor leaguer with elite power but an insufficient hit tool to profile (Peyton Burdick, Griffin Conine, Jerar Encarnacion), and I worry Alderman is another of this ilk.

Devin Kirby, RHP, Minnesota Twins

Alert Ben Lindbergh, we have a knuckler. The 25-year-old Kirby was an undrafted free agent out of UConn in 2023 and spent most of 2024 in Fort Myers either on the Complex or FSL roster. His knuckleball needs to be more consistent for him to be considered a prospect at all, but for now it’s a lot of fun to watch a guy whose primary pitch is his knuckler.

The Arizona Fall League has a knuckleballer this year, Twins righty Devin Kirby. pic.twitter.com/Z6c7ik6vH4

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 18, 2024

Board Additions

Ryan Birchard, RHP, Milwaukee Brewers
Henry Bolte, OF, Oakland Athletics

These players have had their scouting reports added to the Fall League tab on The Board. Head over there to check out their tool grades and scouting reports.

Beyond offering the rare clash between number one seeds, this year’s World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees is steeped in baseball history and — as anyone who’s read me over the past two and a half decades knows — is of great personal resonance. The last time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, I was an 11-year-old baseball nut hoping his favorite team could avenge its back-to-back World Series losses from ’77 and ’78. I could never have imagined that I’d get to cover their next October matchup. For most of the country, this pairing’s biggest selling point beyond the top-seed aspect and the involvement of the sport’s two most storied franchises is the presence of the game’s two biggest stars. Both the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge are coming off historic seasons that will likely net them MVP awards, though things haven’t come quite so easily for either of them in the postseason.

We won’t officially know until November whether Judge and Ohtani both won the awards, but even working from the assumption that they will, this is hardly the first time that two likely MVPs have squared off in the World Series. In fact, it’s happened 25 times since 1931, with four such pairings from among the 11 times the Yankees and Dodgers have met. That said, it’s just the second such meeting since the start of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) and the sixth since the start of the Division era (1969 onward). MVP choices may be driven less by team success these days, but even when they are, the expanded playoff field makes getting to the World Series much harder:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m trying out a new format for our managerial report cards this postseason. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. Today, let’s talk about the first of that quartet to be eliminated: Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians.

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but David Fry and Kerry Carpenter were also great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Juan Soto is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Intern, Sports Science

Location: San Diego, CA
Department: Sports Science
Reports To: Director, Sports Science
Status: Seasonal; Non-Exempt

*This seasonal position will end after 6 months but less than 1 year from the start of employment.*

San Diego Padres Commitment:

The San Diego Padres are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment for our employees. We strive to create an environment for everyone by including perspectives from backgrounds that vary by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, and national origin

We strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, historically marginalized or underrepresented groups to apply.

If you are not sure you’re 100% qualified but are up for the challenge – we want you to apply. We believe skills are transferable and passion for our mission goes a long way.

Your role as an Intern, Sports Science:

You will collect, organize, analyze and report player measurables including ball, bat, and body tracking data to help deliver actionable insights to stakeholders across multiple departments. You will aid in the creation, implementation, and monitoring of individualized Player Development goals.

All the responsibilities we will trust you with:

• Overseeing the implementation of various technologies at affiliates or spring training complex
• Obtaining expert-level knowledge of the interfaces of each technology. Ensuring the collection of data is seamless and unintrusive to the normal flow of the day
• Conducting and ensuring proper and timely administration of tests/retests to evaluate physical and physiological responses to training
• Working within an interdisciplinary team to build and generate accurate and actionable reports. Assisting with the interpretation of data & reports for multiple stakeholders
• Contribute to the continued education of all players, coaches, and other staff on the technologies and analytics being used by the Padres and the meaning of their output for all facets of the game
• Leveraging SQL and research skills to quickly conduct ad-hoc queries for PD coaches and staff
• Assisting in the implementation and operation of Hawk-Eye data collection
• Ensuring the Hawk-Eye unit is functioning properly for all games and relevant bullpen sessions, live BPs, etc.
• Ensuring the accurate and organized collection of Hawk-Eye data for medical and/or R&D processes
• Overseeing the transfer of Hawk-Eye data to all pertinent downstream users
• Obtaining required knowledge to support the understanding and implementation of Hawk-Eye ball-, bat-, and player-tracking data to coaches
• Timely interpretation and communication of pertinent data to key stakeholders
• Assisting Player Development personnel with the integration of information provided by the other departments of Baseball Operations
• Overseeing the implementation and use of the player dashboard, obtain expert level knowledge of its functions, and support in the communication of advance reports and other relevant data
• Represents the Club in a positive and professional manner at all times
• Other duties as assigned

Your areas of knowledge and expertise that matter most:

• Maintain an understanding of current public baseball research and emerging statistical tools, datasets, and technologies
• Proficiency in data visualization/interpretation and programming is a plus
• Proficient computer skills including experience with MS Office products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and general knowledge of office skills and use of office equipment
• Possess strong communication skills, both written and verbal, and effectively work well with others in a collaborative, respectful manner
• Exceptional time management and organizational skills with capacity to handle high volumes of detailed work, multi-task and manage projects on strict deadlines
• Maintain professional demeanor with a high degree of discretion, integrity, and accountability
• Maintain consistent, punctual, and reliable attendance
• Fluently bilingual in English/Spanish a plus, but not necessary

You will be required to meet the following:

• Must be at least 18 years of age by the start of employment
• 4-year Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree in related field. Course work in biomechanics, sports science, or kinesiology is a plus
• Able to work independently within a larger diverse team requiring constant communication
• Able to work flexible hours including evenings, weekends, holidays and extended hours as needed
• Able to travel as needed
• Minimum physical requirements: able to travel to and gain access to various areas of the ballpark for prolonged periods of time during games and events; able to lift and transport up to 25 pounds
• As a condition of employment, you must successfully complete all post-offer, pre-employment requirements, including but not limited to a background check 

Pay and additional compensation:

The hourly pay range for this position is $14.35 – $16.00, depending on the affiliate location. Seasonal, non-union employees are subject to the respective state Minimum Wage and rates will increase accordingly.

In addition to your hourly rate, the Padres offer PTO, employee discounts, appreciation, and recognition opportunities.

The San Diego Padres 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 San Diego Padres.

Sunday night’s NLCS Game 6 offered quite a contrast in its starting pitcher matchup. With a chance to push the series to a decisive Game 7, the Mets started Sean Manaea, a 32-year-old lefty who made a full complement of 32 starts during the regular season, set a career high for innings pitched (181 2/3), and had already made three strong postseason starts, allowing five runs across 17 innings. On the other side, with an opportunity to close out the series and claim their fourth pennant in eight seasons, the Dodgers tabbed Michael Kopech, a 28-year-old righty who started 27 games last year but hadn’t done so once this year, instead pitching out of the bullpen 67 times in the regular season and four more in the playoffs. The unorthodox choice owed to the Dodgers’ injury-wracked rotation. Los Angeles has barely been able to muster three workable starters for October, let alone four, and so manager Dave Roberts has resorted to sprinkling in bullpen games, with mixed results.

The ballgame turned out to be a mismatch, but not in the way you might have imagined. Kopech struggled with his control, throwing just 12 strikes out of his 25 pitches, walking two, and allowing one hit and one run. If he set a tone for the rest of the Dodgers staff, it was that this was going to be a grind, the outcome hinging on their ability to navigate out of traffic — which they did, stranding 13 runners while yielding “only” five runs. Meanwhile Manaea, who had limited the Dodgers to two hits and two earned runs over five innings in NLCS Game 2, lasted just two-plus innings and was battered for six hits while walking two. He was charged with five runs, four of which came off the bat of Tommy Edman in the form of a two-run double in the first inning and a two-run homer in the third.

The Dodgers weren’t expecting Kopech to go any deeper, leaving Roberts to follow a script that allowed him to utilize his remaining relievers to best effect (such as it was). The Mets harbored hopes that Manaea could at least pitch into the middle innings so that manager Carlos Mendoza could avoid deploying some of their lesser relievers, but the starter faltered so early that they didn’t have that luxury. As it was, the fifth run charged to Manaea scored when Phil Maton, already carrying an 8.44 ERA this October, was summoned with no outs in the third and didn’t escape before serving up a two-run homer to Will Smith. Faced with a 6-1 deficit, the Mets refused to go quietly, but went down just the same in a 10-5 loss that included 14 pitchers combining to allow 22 hits and 12 walks. It was excruciating viewing, and with a pennant on the line, one couldn’t help but wish instead for starters battling deep into the game. Alas, this was hardly atypical October baseball. Read the rest of this entry »