2020 Diamond Dollars Case Competition
The 2020 Diamond Dollars Case Competition winners were announced Friday, March 13 during the SABR Analytics Conference at the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown in Phoenix, Arizona.
The winning teams selected were from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Syracuse University, and Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School.
The Virginia Tech team — which was picked to deliver an encore presentation in front of the full SABR Analytics Conference on Saturday — included Jack Byrne, Matthew Dorris, Ieuan Isreal, Jack Silk, and Harman Takhar (pictured above with SABR CEO Scott Bush).
Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School sent six teams to participate in this year’s Case Competition; the winning team consisted of Tom Blue, Nicolas Ferree, Dominic Gammino, and David Winters.
Syracuse University teams sent five teams to participate; the Team 1 winners were Ben Ayers, Joey Deaton, Steven DiMaria, Cam Mitchell, and Hughston Preston.
Syracuse University’s Team 3 winners included Sean Kenney, Brendan McKeown, Drake Mills, Joe Pickering, Cooper Shawver.
In this year’s case, students were asked to prepare an organizational philosophy on dealing with the “third time through the order” problem.
In the Diamond Dollars Case Competition, undergraduate, graduate and professional school students from colleges and universities across the country compete against each other by preparing an analysis and presentation of a baseball operations decision — the type of decision a team’s GM and his staff is faced with over the course of a season. The cases are developed by former SABR Board President Vince Gennaro, co-founder of the SABR Analytics Conference, author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball, and consultant to MLB teams. The Diamond Dollars Case Competition is the first national competition to be based solely on baseball operations issues.
Four- to five-person student teams are asked to evaluate a baseball operations case problem. The student team presents their analysis and recommendations to a panel of judges that includes MLB front office executives.
This year’s judges included T.J. Barra (Major League Baseball), Paul Bien (San Francisco Giants), Cody Callahan (Arizona Diamondbacks), Tani Cohen (MLB), Evan Eshleman (Colorado Rockies), Ben Jedlovec (MLB), Katie Krall (Cincinnati Reds), Travis Petersen (MLB), Joe Rosales (Baseball Info Solutions), Kevin Tenenbaum (Cleveland Indians), Max Weinstein (Los Angeles Dodgers), and Keith Woolner (Cleveland Indians).
Callahan and Tenenbaum are former winners of the Diamond Dollars Case Competition at the SABR Analytics Conference.
Other participating schools were: Elon University; Johns Hopkins University; NYU-Tisch Institute for Global Sport; St. John Fisher College; and University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
For more coverage of the 2020 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
More than 120 alumni from the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 Diamond Dollars Case Competitions have secured internships or permanent positions within Major League Baseball.
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