2025 SABR Analytics: Watch highlights from Balance of Analytics and Culture Panel
At the SABR Analytics Conference on Saturday, March 15, 2025, in Phoenix, Arizona, a panel discussion was held on the Balance of Analytics and Culture.
Panelists included Burke Badenhop, Arizona Diamondbacks; Michael Girsch, St. Louis Cardinals; Max Glick, Arizona Diamondbacks. Moderator: Brian Kenny, MLB Network.
- Watch: Click here to watch a video replay of the 2025 Balance of Analytics and Culture Panel (YouTube)
Here are some highlights from the panel:
On communicating data to everyone on the team
- Glick: “We’re hiring a lot of former players, but also we want people with technical skills to be able to build the models and put everything together. … The ability to communicate it is probably more important than the ability to put it all together. It needs to be in the language of the players, the coaches, the scouts, as well as being digestible. Whether that’s visuals where everyone understands the picture or being able to translate it to Spanish, Japanese, Korean, whatever language the player speaks.”
- Badenhop: “We can dive as deep as we want into analytics stuff. It’s what we give to the player. It’s what we give to the coach. It’s knowing who our audience is and who can handle it and who necessarily can’t handle it. Because we want to get a result out of a player. We want to get a result out of the coach. So it doesn’t really matter how far we go in the front office as long as we know what is the right amount to give to that player.”
- Girsch: “I think the challenge for teams is building a culture of trust where analytics people can make mistakes in front of coaches and not be kicked out of the room, and coaches can ask silly questions to analysts and not be mocked.”
On how players respond to receiving new information
- Badenhop: “In meeting these kids, you can tell who has a chance to be a big leaguer. You can tell kids that maybe need to mature or maybe need to develop a lot of other interpersonal skills or some makeup stuff. So finding the kids that are big leaguers and then understanding who needs more data, who needs less data. I was a person who was very much a paralysis-by-analysis type guy. At Bowling Green State University, if you would have given me the expected OPS and all this stuff, I would have never gotten anybody out. … So we’ve got to know who can handle it, who can’t handle it, that type of stuff.”
- Girsch: “We have all that data, but not everyone in the organization has access to or uses all the data all the time. Our Double-A pitching coach needs to know the player as a person, as a human being, what makes him tick, how to give him advice, when to give him advice. … That coach needs to understand the player that way. The guy in the office whose job is to scrape the data from every college game that happened last night, to make sure it’s all in our database, doesn’t need to know any of those college kids. … Everyone’s got a role and those roles are different. I don’t think the importance of personal connection and knowing players as human beings has been diminished at all. It’s just the group who needs that is separate from the group who is sitting in the office working through code.”
- Kenny: “As you have so much data on a certain player, at what point do you try to [say], ‘Hey what kind of kid is this?’ … I love to see the statistical profile of a player, but … what’s motivating those numbers? Is this someone who can keep increasing, getting better? Is this someone who will go through a wall for you?”
On preparing for game environments
- Badenhop: “I like to think that all these numbers, it’s for practice. When we get in the game, we’ve got to get outs. … And thinking about, ‘Where’s that dot on my slider? I wish I had my iPad with my Rapsodo behind me right now, where would that be?’ The hitter in the box doesn’t care about that. That’s more of the me vs. you, mano y mano type of stuff. … Understanding that getting the player on the field, getting him to compete, having him prepared to make the best swing decision, the best pitch decision, or the best adjustment from the previous pitch decision, that’s all data. But at the end of the day, it’s getting it done on the field at that time.”
Transcription assistance from Eric Matsumoto.
For more coverage of the 2025 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Originally published: May 1, 2025. Last Updated: March 31, 2025.