2026 SABR Analytics: Watch highlights from Vince Gennaro’s talk
At the SABR Analytics Conference on Friday, February 27, 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona, Vince Gennaro delivered a talk on The Next Edge: Where the Competitive Advantage is Moving in Baseball.
Gennaro is the founder and Executive Director of the Lab for Transformative Leadership at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. He is the author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball; host of a weekly national radio show, Behind the Numbers: Baseball SABR Style on SiriusXM; and the former President of SABR’s Board of Directors. 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.
- Watch: Click here to watch a video replay of Vince Gennaro’s talk (YouTube)
Here are some highlights from Gennaro’s talk:
On using data to gain a competitive advantage
- “There is no question that baseball has gone way farther than any one else, than any other sport, in terms of using data to gain competitive advantage. … This tailwind of technology, the new data‑capture devices over the last 10 or 15 years, combined with inexpensive cloud storage and advances in computing power, have really launched baseball.”
On asking the right questions
- “The quality of questions that are posed — and then, are they going to be applied against the highest leverage points that we can really impact? — I think it’s worth remembering this from time to time. The quality and the framing of the question is likely to be the ceiling on the answer that you’re going to generate. It’s very hard to generate a better answer than the quality of the question you pose.”
On team chemistry
- “It’s not team chemistry … it’s really the environment that determines how people interpret decisions, how they respond to pressure, and how they learn and adapt in real time.”
On the impact of managers and coaches
- “It’s critical that the affect, the projection, physically, visibly, that the manager and coaching staff exude is one of common control. … It’s doing it in a way that doesn’t create angst. Because it sends an enormous signal to every player and everybody on the coaching staff as to whether or not we’ve got a big problem here. … This is going to turn into some sort of fracture that’s going to be bigger than this moment.”
Transcription assistance from Carla Martínez Santiago.
For more coverage of the 2026 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Originally published: May 1, 2026. Last Updated: March 11, 2026.