SABR 54: Listen to highlights from Cleveland Guardians Analytics Panel with Sky Andrecheck, Kyle Burris, Keith Woolner
On Saturday, August 1, 2026, the Cleveland Guardians Analytics Panel was held at SABR 54 at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.
Panelists included Sky Andrecheck, Assistant General Manager of the Cleveland Guardians; Kyle Burris, Vice President of Baseball Research and Development with the Cleveland Guardians; and Keith Woolner, Principal Data Scientist in Baseball Research and Development for the Cleveland Guardians. The panel was moderated by Zack Meisel, Senior Writer at The Athletic.
- Audio: Click here to listen to the Cleveland Guardians Analytics Panel at SABR 54 (58:24; MP3)
Here are some highlights:
On the evolution of baseball front offices
- Andrecheck: “I think it’s amazing just to think about how much the game has changed and how much more emphasis there is on analytics than there ever was before. When I was growing up, I was a huge baseball fan, a huge math guy, and had always dreamed of working in a baseball front office, but there was really no path. But we all know Moneyball happened, and I was lucky enough to have Keith hire me in 2010. At that point, there were not that many jobs in the game. And now we’ve seen front offices explode with the number of analysts. But what’s also amazing to me, that I didn’t necessarily foresee, is the explosion of data that’s available. When I first walked into the Cleveland offices, we pretty much just had the box score data, and pitch effects had just come online. We were starting to get some data about pitch characteristics, but besides that, we didn’t have a lot else to work with. And now, just the explosion of data, everything that’s being tracked with Statcast, biomechanics, and everything else, it’s created so many more interesting things to look into throughout the game.”
- Woolner: “I collected baseball cards. I was good at math. But there was never an indication there would be a place in the baseball front office for someone with my skill set, particularly someone who was a very bad baseball player. When I got to college, just on a whim, I did send a resume to the commissioner’s office and I got two letters back. The first one was a very polite form rejection letter, and the other one was a misdirected memo that was supposed to be sent to umpires about how long the breaks between innings were going to be in the upcoming season. And to this day, I’m still not sure which one I’m supposed to frame.”
On using data to support player development and on-field strategy
- Burris: “It’s a little bit of everything, right? Everything from thinking about things like pitch design, if this guy were able to throw 1 mile an hour harder or get his cutter to cut 1 inch more, how much more effective would that pitch be? Or something along the lines of defensive positioning, in order to maximize the likelihood of an out or minimize the expected run scored by the offense, where would be the best place to position the fielders? … What’s really kind of cool since I’ve started is how much of a complicated engineering problem solving some of the baseball analytics problems have been. The biomechanics data, especially when you’re processing that data at scale, that’s going to be a real engineering bear to have to work through. So it’s not just a growth in the analytics departments, it’s a growth in baseball systems. Folks who are working with the data on the back end and then also folks who are working with the data on the front end. That way we can essentially take the data in, harness it, apply analytical tooling to that, and then be able to display that for folks throughout the organization.”
On the pressures of the trading deadline
- Andrecheck: “I think your organization is trying to capture all the information about all the players that we could potentially acquire, and of course, about our own information on our own players as well. So our decision makers, Chris Antonetti and Mike Chernoff, are really canvassing our entire organization to try to leverage that information, gather as much information as we can, and then bring that into an ultimate decision. The analytics we provide are a big part of that. Obviously, also our scouting or player development group, we have a lot of different inputs that go into that in order to hopefully make the best decisions we can at the deadline.”
On the path from writing to working in a front office for a team
- Woolner: “When I first got this job in 2007, I thought, ‘Wow, this is so cool. I have one of 30 jobs that will ever exist in this industry.’ At the time, I could not conceive of a team really needing more than one — there were certainly no teams that had gone and gotten more than one. I look at it now, and it’s a genuine career path that people can aspire to that. There are sports analytics tracks in colleges that can prepare people for the kind of work we’re doing. And the hiring has not let up. We have hundreds of people now in R&D and analytics groups across front offices, and that’s not including all of the vendors and other companies supplying technology and information and services to help us do our analytics. So it’s grown much bigger than I ever thought it would, and it makes me doubt whether people should ever trust anything I forecast.”
For more coverage of SABR 54, visit SABR.org/convention.
Originally published: August 17, 2026. Last Updated: August 12, 2026.