Lab Analyst, Foundational Research and Applied Biomechanics

Department: Baseball Research & Development
Reports to: Director, Foundational Research and Applied Biomechanics
Status: Regular Full-Time
Location: Clearwater, Florida

Overview:
At the Phillies, we want our biomechanics lab to be the heart of self-improvement for players and staff alike—a space where every visit feels like a step toward greatness. As our Lab Analyst, you will be responsible for creating an environment that motivates players to put in the work needed to win championships.

Your role is not just to maintain the lab but to transform it—making it a hub for player improvement and cutting-edge biomechanics research. By combining your biomechanics expertise, baseball knowledge, and technical skills, you’ll help develop the tools and deliverables that keep coaches and players excited to use the lab every day.

What You’ll Do:

• Energize the Lab: Cultivate a high-energy environment that makes our lab the go-to space for players and coaches.
• Design and Execute Experiments: Design, collect data, and analyze experiments to solve key player development challenges and advance research.
• Deliver Insights: Provide actionable biomechanics insights and use technical skills to build interactive tools and reports.

Required Qualifications:

• Organizational Skills: Ability to keep the lab organized, efficient, and inviting.
• Soft Skills: Strong interpersonal skills to engage with coaches, players, and staff.
• Experimental Design: Experience designing and running experiments, conducting baseline analyses, and documenting findings.
• Technical Proficiency: Proficiency with scripting languages such as Python, statistical software (R, S-Plus, SAS, or similar), and databases (SQL).
• Biomechanics Knowledge: Skilled in analyzing biomechanical data and providing actionable insights on movement patterns, aligned with department best practices.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Front-End Product and Technical Skills: Experience with interactive tools (e.g., Dash, Streamlit, Shiny), report generation (e.g., pypdf2), and data visualization (e.g., plotly).
• Predictive Modeling: Skilled in model selection, feature engineering, validation, and performance evaluation for generating actionable insights.
• Educational Background: Master’s Degree or Ph.D. in Sports Science, Data Science, or a related field.

What We Offer:

• Competitive Salary & Benefits: A benefits package that includes health insurance, retirement plans (Non-Uniformed Personnel Pension Plan and 401k), and paid time off.
• Access To The Cutting Edge: Exposure to advanced tools and proprietary data.
• Dynamic Team Environment: Work with a team committed to excellence.
• Personal Growth: Learn from colleagues within a supportive and driven environment.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Philadelphia Phillies.

This past Saturday, the Arizona Fall League played host to a tripleheader, with start times staggered enough to see at least most of all three contests at the various ballparks in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. My notes and thoughts on the standouts from that day, as well as Monday’s solo game in Peoria, are below. You can find the end-of-year reports and grades on the 2024 Fall Leaguers on the Fall League tab of The Board. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that’s not how it was supposed to go. The Phillies came into this season as one of the World Series favorites, having won the pennant in 2022, then reached the NLCS in 2023. They were the best team in the National League for most of the year, and — having won the club’s first NL East title since 2011 — were expected to at least repeat the deep playoff runs of the past two seasons. Ideally, they’d improve on it and go all the way.

Instead, they’re out on the first hurdle, having lost 3-1 in the NLDS to — and this might be the most galling part — a hated division rival who sneaked into the playoffs on the final day, then needed a lightning strike of a rally off Devin Williams to eke out a three-game win in the Wild Card series. But over four games, the Mets were comprehensively the better team. If Nick Castellanos hadn’t had his eyes glaze over white and milky as he accessed a higher plane of consciousness in the last four innings of Game 2, this could well have been a sweep.

A team this talented and well-resourced would be within its rights to shrug and run it back in 2025. Indeed, that’s what the Phillies did a year ago, when they were nine outs from going up 3-0 in the NLCS, then lost consecutive would-be clinchers at home. Now, having spit the bit twice in as many playoff series, the Phillies are going to have to at least consider changing more than their postgame playlist. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — With his sixth-inning grand slam off Carlos Estévez, Francisco Lindor was the clear hero of Game 4 of the Division Series, providing the New York Mets with all the runs they needed to knock off the Philadelphia Phillies and advance to the National League Championship Series with a 4-1 win. Not to be lost in the spray of champagne — the first postseason clincher at Citi Field since the ballpark opened in 2009, incidentally — is the work of Jose Quintana. For the second time in as many starts this October, the 35-year-old lefty took the ball in a potential clincher and turned in a stellar effort, continuing a remarkable run that began in late August. As in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against the Brewers, Quintana received a complete lack of run support, but once again the Mets’ bats came to life in the late innings while the bullpen held firm enough for the team to advance.

In five-plus innings, Quintana held the powerful Phillies lineup to just two hits, walking two while striking out six over the course of 90 pitches. The only run he allowed — the only run of the game until Lindor’s slam — was unearned. Including his six shutout innings in the Wild Card Series, and the 36.1 innings he threw over his final six regular season starts, he’s allowed three runs over his last 47.1 innings, good for a microscopic 0.57 ERA.

“It’s been hard for him, he’s been through a lot of ups and downs, and he always found a way to get the job done,” said manager Carlos Mendoza after the game, eyes red from some combination of champagne spray and emotional release. “We felt really good going into this game because of who he is, how much he prepares, how much he cares, and he went out there and did it and gave us a chance. [I’m] proud of him because he never gave up, never put his head down, kept working, and he’s been amazing for us the whole year.” Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — As Francisco Lindor stepped in against Phillies reliever Carlos Estévez with the bases loaded, one out, and the Mets down a run in the sixth inning, the Citi Field fans were still singing his walk-up song:

When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May.

The Mets shortstop called time, retreated, and regrouped. The singing continued.

I guess you’d say,
What can make me feel this way?
My girl, my girl, my girl
Talkin’ ‘bout my girl, my girl

They punctuated their sweet serenade with three letters, shouted repeatedly in succession. “M-V-P! M-V-P! M-V-P!”

Lindor returned to the batter’s box, tapped the outside edge of the plate, then the inside one. Now, he was ready to break the game open. Read the rest of this entry »

Mets fans have their narrative: Sean Manaea was remarkable in Game 3 of the NLDS, keeping the Phillies in check over seven-plus innings and leading his club to a resounding 7-2 victory. Phillies fans have their narrative, too: The NL East champs played uncompetitive baseball all evening, pushing them to the brink of elimination. The former narrative gives the Mets all the agency (they won because they played well!), while second gives the Phillies all the blame (they lost because they played so poorly!), but that doesn’t mean they both can’t be true. The Mets were firing on all cylinders in Game 3, and the Phillies didn’t do much to stop them.

Entering play on Tuesday, all four Division Series were tied up 1-1. That effectively turned each series into a three-game set – and a three-game set in which the lower seeds held home-field advantage. It’s no secret the Phillies love playing at Citizens Bank Park; their 54-27 (.667) record at home this season was the best in baseball, while their 41-40 (.506) record on the road was tied for 13th. However, the Phillies still had an ace up their sleeve as they packed their bags and left for Queens. They only had to win one game at Citi Field and they could come back home to another Zack Wheeler start at the Bank. That’s a big reason why they came into tonight’s game with a 61% chance to advance to the NLCS, as well as the highest World Series odds among the eight remaining teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Hang it in the Louvre:

Oh, and this one too:

The playoffs were absolutely wild this weekend. Out of the six games played Saturday and Sunday, two were all-time classics. First, the Yankees and Royals traded blows before Alex Verdugo produced a game-winning single after a controversial stolen base call. Then the Phillies and Mets traded home runs and blown leads right up until the last play of the game, Nick Castellanos’s walk-off hit.

If you wanted to, you could read our game stories for these games, or any number of other fine pieces about them across the internet. You could watch highlights or condensed recaps. But this is FanGraphs, so I thought I’d cover another angle: where these games fit in the history of wild playoff games.

We have win probability charts going back to 2002, which means we have data on total win probability changes going back to that year as well. If you take the absolute value of these and sum them up, you can see exactly how much each team’s fortunes changed throughout the contest. The more total win probability changes, the wilder things are. For example, the least exciting game by this measure occurred on October 9, 2019. The Cardinals beat the Braves 13-1 in the NLDS, and they opened things up by scoring 10 in the first inning. No drama, and thus very few changes in win probability. A 2023 contest between the Diamondbacks and Dodgers (11-2 Arizona, 9-0 after two innings) is the runner up.
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a scene in The Way of the Gun where Ryan Phillippe’s character is torturing some dude — the details are unimportant but gruesome — and he’s leaning over his poor victim, describing all the horrible things he’s going to do if he doesn’t talk. One line has always stuck with me: “Whatever I do after that, I’ll pour gasoline in your eyes from time to time just to keep you from passing out.”

Baseball can be like this. You can check out of a blowout, but a failed comeback only makes defeat hurt worse. No hope isn’t as bad as false hope. Is your team showing signs of life, or are you about to get another splash of gasoline in your eyes?

Either the Mets or Phillies could’ve gotten the splash on Sunday, as Nick Castellanos and Mark Vientos, among others, traded clutch hits, and both teams watched their high-leverage relievers get torched. In the end, the Phillies bounced back one more time than the Mets, salvaging a home split with a 7-6 walk-off win in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. It was an instant classic in its own right, and a victory of immense import for a team that looked dead on its feet. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — I suppose coming back from a 1-0 deficit is child’s play to a team that, last time out, overturned a 2-0 ninth-inning deficit against one of the best closers in the league. A team that clinched its playoff berth with a six-run eighth inning in Atlanta, coughed that lead up, then took it back for good an inning later. A team that, on August 28, was just five games over .500, with a 13.1% chance of making the playoffs.

And this was supposed to be a rebuilding year anyway. After beating the Phillies in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, 6-2, and weathering the best starting pitcher they’re going to see at least in this series, maybe for the rest of the postseason, the Mets now have a chance to go up 2-0 in enemy territory on Sunday. With two advancement-clinching wins already in the bag, and as many iconic victories over the team’s two most hated division rivals, this is the best week the Mets have had in… well, it’s been a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Can anyone stop the Mets? That’s not a question I expected to be asking this year, unless it was “Can anyone stop the Mets from signing marquee free agents?” or “Can anyone stop the Mets from imploding in the most Mets-y way imaginable?” But as the National League Division Series starts, the Mets are on one of those team-of-destiny runs that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s no deficit they can’t overcome, no lead they can’t squander and then retake in the next inning. They’re upping the degree of difficulty significantly starting Saturday, though: The Phillies have been one of the best teams in baseball all year, and they’re rested and ready for what promises to be an exciting series.

A tale of the tape – Francisco Lindor is good at x, Bryce Harper is good at y, Zack Wheeler and Kodai Senga will square off in Game 1, so on and so forth – doesn’t feel like the right way to describe this series. Instead, I’m going to focus on how each team tries to win, and how these plans are most likely to go awry.

The Mets have thrived offensively this year with a simple blueprint: power at the top of the lineup and Jose Iglesias somehow doing everything else. Lindor is so good that he’s almost an offense unto himself: He led the Mets in runs (107), RBI (91), steals (29), on-base percentage (.344), slugging percentage (.500), and pretty much everything else you can imagine, except for home runs (33). In that category, he finished one off the team lead behind Pete Alonso. Alonso had a down year in 2024, but he’s very good at the skill the Mets most need from him: clobbering homers to drive in Lindor, Brandon Nimmo, and sometimes Iglesias. Mark Vientos functions as a second Alonso; he’s there to hit homers or advance runners with situational hitting, but he’s fresh out of situational hitting.
Read the rest of this entry »