Featured Speakers
The SABR Analytics Conference will be held on March 10-12, 2023, in Phoenix, Arizona, as we bring together the top minds in the baseball analytics community to discuss, debate, and share insightful ways to analyze and examine the great game of baseball.
Learn more about our featured speakers and panelists on this page.
Dana Bennett is a Data Visualization Engineer at Major League Baseball. He works on all things related to the Baseball Savant website. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Bates College. His previous work was with the Atlanta Braves and Chess.com.
Jason Bernard is a Manager, Baseball Research & Development at Major League Baseball, where he has worked since 2015. He has also served as an adjunct professor at the NYU-Tisch Institute for Global Sport. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sports management from St. John’s University and a master’s degree in sports business from New York University.
Dallas Braden is a former major-league pitcher and television analyst from Stockton, California. He spent five seasons with the Oakland A’s from 2007 to 2011, and pitched the 19th perfect game in MLB history on May 9, 2010, on Mother’s Day against the Tampa Bay Rays. He has worked for ESPN and NBC Sports California as a broadcaster since 2014. He co-hosts the “Baseball is Dead” podcast and a SiriusXM radio show, “Dialed in with Dallas Braden.”
Colin Cahill is in his fourth season as the San Francisco Giants’ Vice President of Player Performance and Wellness. In his role, he works across Baseball Operations to help drive the organization’s efforts in medicine, sports science, and technology. Previously, he spent 20 years working at the intersection of healthcare and technology in the Bay Area and in Boston. He has a master’s degree in Biological Sciences and an MBA from Stanford University.
Roger Caplinger recently retired after spending 33 seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers. As Vice President, Medical Operations, Health & Safety for the club, he oversaw all medical operations, player health and psychological services, and health and safety initiatives. He was the Brewers’ head athletic trainer from 2002 to 2011, and the training room in the Brewers’ home clubhouse is named after him. Since 2009, he has served as the chairman for the Major League Baseball Electronic Medical Records Committee. He is a licensed athletic trainer in the states of Wisconsin and Arizona. He graduated from the Metropolitan State University of Denver in 1991.
Ben Clemens is a writer at FanGraphs. His work has also appeared at Viva El Birdos. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their wonderful but nervous dog, Ruby.
Jonah Gardner is the Product Marketing Manager at Sports Reference, where he’s responsible for coordinating marketing campaigns for Stathead, Sports Reference’s suite of advanced research tools. Before that, he worked as Social Media Manager for Sports Reference, providing live coverage and up to the minute statistical research for the biggest games of the season from Baseball Reference’s social media accounts. Jonah lives in Philadelphia with his dog, Berman, and roots for the World Champion Atlanta Braves.
Vince Gennaro is the former President of SABR’s Board of Directors, author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball, and host of a weekly national radio show, Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM. He is also the Associate Dean and Clinical Associate Professor of NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport. He is a consultant to MLB teams and appears regularly on MLB Network. He is also the architect of the Diamond Dollars Case Competition series, which brings together students and MLB team and league executives and serves as a unique learning experience, as well as a networking opportunity for aspiring sports executives.
Kyle Glaser covers Major League Baseball and top prospects for Baseball America, where he also assists with West Coast draft coverage. He previously covered the San Diego Padres, the California League and amateur baseball for the Riverside Press-Enterprise and Orange County Register, and freelanced for the Associated Press. He is a graduate of Arizona State University.
Graham Goldbeck is a Product Manager, Baseball Data Platform, for Major League Baseball. Before joining MLB in 2018, he spent seven years managing data and analytics for Sportvision. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from the University of California at San Diego.
Brian Hall is the founder of Tidal Quantitative Research, an applied research company dedicated to AI and machine learning. He also teaches undergraduate courses on analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning at NYU. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Brian served as Vice President at Two Sigma Investments, a New York City-based hedge fund primarily known for its use of artificial intelligence. At Harvard University, Brian’s graduate studies combined his passion for sports with advances in computational programming, machine learning, and neural networks.
David Hyland is a professor at Xavier University’s Williams College of Business in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has worked since 2004. He also developed a course on sabermetrics, “Teaching Statistics with Baseball Data,” at Xavier. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Florence Y’alls club in the independent Frontier League. His research has been published in journals such as Financial Management and Financial Analyst Journal. He earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University, a master’s degree from Purdue University, and a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University.
Ari Kaplan has been a major-league front office executive for more than three decades. He created and led the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers analytics departments, and served as a special consultant to the GM with the Baltimore Orioles. He has also worked with many Fortune 500 companies as a leader in the IT industry, including Oracle, 3Com, Hallmark, and Merck, among others. He received Caltech’s “Alumni of the Decade” distinction for his groundbreaking sabermetric work and he has co-authored five best-selling books on analytics, databases, and baseball.
Nicholas Kapur is a Senior Data Scientist at Zelus Analytics. Previously, he worked in the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees front offices as a quantitative analyst for five seasons. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Applied Mathematics and a master’s degree in Statistics from North Carolina State University.
Hannah Keyser is a writer and reporter with Yahoo! Sports. She has covered sports and food for Major League Baseball, Deadspin, and Vice. She lives in New York, after growing up outside of Philadelphia and getting an ancient history degree from the University of Pennsylvania that almost never comes up in her current line of work.
Sean Lahman is SABR’s Data Projects Manager and the creator of the Lahman Baseball Database, an open-source collection of baseball statistics. He has edited or contributed to more than a dozen sports reference books, including Total Baseball and the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. He is an award-winning investigative journalist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in New York.
Allison R. Levin (MA, JD) is a consultant and professor at Webster University in St. Louis. Her research builds upon an eclectic background in political science, economics, women’s studies, communications, and law. In recent years her focus has been on the effects of social media on pop culture, communications, and sports, primarily baseball. Starting with that framework, she has looked at Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from a communication and experiential aspect, as seen in her article in the 2022 National Pastime entitled “Baseball in 2040: The Digital Viewer.” In addition, she built an interactive database of baseball players’ walkup music which she presented at the 2019 SABR Convention. In addition to serving as co-chair of the AI/ML research committee, Allison is the President of the Bob Broeg St. Louis SABR Chapter and on the SABR Board of Directors.
David Loving is a Machine Learning Engineer at Sage, where he builds AI tools to power the future of finance and accounting for SMBs. Previously, he led machine learning development at Camugo to deliver a fully-automated sports event broadcasting camera system. He is finishing up his graduate studies at Harvard University by working with Harvard’s StellarDNN group to apply AI to black hole images from the Event Horizon Telescope.
Rob Mains is a writer for Baseball Prospectus. His “Veteran Presence” column focuses on analytics, history, and finance topics. He also manages BP en español, the site’s Spanish-language content. He is a former Wall Street equities analyst.
Stuart Neilson is a data scientist working on risk models in the banking industry. Previously, before data scientists were called data scientists, he built similar models in the economic consulting field. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Victoria University in New Zealand and master’s degrees from Tufts University and Harvard University.
Clay Nunnally is a Baseball Scientist at Major League Baseball, where he has worked since 2018. Previously, he served as the Chief Operating Officer at Applied Physical Electronics. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Abilene Christian University, a master’s degree in engineering physics from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri.
Mike Petriello is a Stats Analyst for Major League Baseball and host of the Statcast podcast. He partnered with Jason Benetti and Eduardo Pérez on the popular “Nerdcast” TV broadcasts for ESPN. He can regularly be seen on MLB Network and across all MLB platforms. Prior to joining MLB, he wrote for FanGraphs and ESPN.
Meg Rowley is the managing editor of FanGraphs and co-host of the Effectively Wild podcast. Previously, she served as managing editor of The Hardball Times and wrote for Baseball Prospectus, where she won the 2017 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Bryn Mawr College and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin.
Bobby Scales currently serves as a Vice President at Sports Info Solutions, where he is responsible for advancing the future product, research and strategic direction in the baseball division. After he was drafted out of the University of Michigan, he played professional baseball for 14 years and spent parts of two seasons with the Chicago Cubs in 2009 and 2019. He also played in the Padres, Red Sox, and Phillies organizations, and in Japan for two seasons. He worked in the player development departments for the Los Angeles Angels and Pittsburgh Pirates before joining Sports Info Solutions in 2022.
Jake Schuster is the founder and CEO at Gemini Sports Analytics, which provides sports-specific, end-to-end Automated Machine Learning tools to sports organizations around the world. Previously, he was a Senior Sports Scientist at Vald Performance. He has also worked in strength and conditioning with Florida State University, USA Field Hockey, and other sports programs. He holds a Ph.D. in sport science from the Auckland University of Technology, a master’s degree in sport and exercise nutrition from Loughborough University, and a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science from McDaniel College.
Shanna Shi is an Associate Data Quality Analyst at Major League Baseball, where she has worked since 2021. She previously worked with the Toronto Blue Jays as a Baseball Operations Fellow and as a research assistant at McMaster University. She holds a master’s degree in Public Health, Epidemiology, from Emory University and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Union College.
Ethan Stewart is the Lead Sport Scientist and Biomechanist with the Oakland A’s. Previously, he spent time with the Cincinnati Reds, Baltimore Orioles, and Tampa Bay Rays. He is a founding member and board member for the American Baseball Biomechanics Society. He completed both his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Kentucky in Kinesiology and Biomechanics, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Mississippi State University studying Biomechanics/Neuromechanics.
Zoe Surma is a Software Engineer at Sports Reference. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Computer Engineering. She is a Cubs, Fighting Irish and Formula One fan.
Nick Wan is the Director of Analytics for the Cincinnati Reds, where he has worked since 2017. In this role, he oversees the day-to-day analytics operations for the Major League team, Player Development, Health & Performance, Professional Scouting, and Amateur Scouting. He previously spent three years as a Data Scientist with the Reds. He earned his Ph.D in Psychology from Utah State University and earned his B.S. in Psychology from Saint Mary’s College of California. He is also the game show host for SLICED, a competitive data science competition which is streamed on his Twitch channel.
For more information on the 2023 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.