2025 SABR Analytics: Watch highlights from Milwaukee Brewers Front Office 360 Panel
At the SABR Analytics Conference on Sunday, March 16, 2025, in Phoenix, Arizona, a Milwaukee Brewers Front Office 360 panel discussion was held to talk about their roles and careers in baseball.
- Watch: Click here to watch a video replay of the 2025 Milwaukee Brewers Front Office 360 Panel (YouTube)
Panelists included:
- Eric Babitz, Director of Player Acquisition
- Andrew Fox, Vice President, Baseball Research and Development
- Phil Hauser, Director of Baseball Data Engineering
- Everett Johnson, Senior Analyst, Baseball Research and Development
- Maggie Noffke, Manager of Baseball Application Development
- Daniel Oh, Senior Software Engineer
- Megan Stewart, Lead Strategist, Movement Solutions
- Dan Turkenkopf, Vice President, Baseball Strategy & Innovation
Here are some highlights from the panel:
On choosing a postgraduate degree
- Babitz: “My advice to people who want to work in baseball is that I wouldn’t recommend getting a degree in any field just because you want to work in baseball. It has to be something that you’re interested enough in where you would want to work in that field if you ended up outside of baseball.”
On balancing independent work and staying informed
- Fox: “I think it would be extremely naïve to think that we hold the secret to all the knowledge out there and that we can just beat everyone with our own internal ideas. We get a lot of our best ideas from seeing other things that are out there, often stuff produced by people in this room. We’re looking at that and seeing: How can we apply that? How can we tweak it? How can we extract parts of it to try and figure out what we can get the most out of for our purposes?”
On the opportunities for Dominicans entering the front office
- Hauser: “I think the biggest is from the Dominican group we’ve got a good set of scouts down there and we have a good set of coaches down there that work and have been down there for quite a while. There are people that go through that move (on the) stat side.”
On the best career advice ever received
- Noffke: “When I first started getting into tech, I had a really strong mentor in my manager. I was really overwhelmed that there was a lot of stuff I’d never seen before, and she just told me, ‘Don’t be overwhelmed by the amount you don’t know, be excited by how much you don’t know and how much you can learn and how much opportunity is out there.’ I really took that to heart, and it really helped me.”
On the most important ability in my current role
- Stewart: “I have the unique and awesome opportunity to deal with almost every single department that we have in the organization. Sometimes, the conversations that you have with the coaches don’t always align with things on a back-end, like data perspective, and so just continuing to develop the skill set to better bridge the gap between the different areas and be able to speak both sides of those languages so that you can cross-communicate when necessary across the organization.”
On whether the status of other teams would affect the team’s season goals
- Johnson: “I think every team probably looks at them to some degree and has an idea going into the season, and naturally, based on injuries and the performance of the players that you have, you need to adapt to that. Where other teams stand is definitely relevant to context.”
On the balance between being a generalist and diving into one specific area
- Turkenkopf: “If you’re doing software in data, be specialized in software and data. But you could actually be even more specialized in those areas, like with computer vision, it could be a focus, and there’s opportunities for people who are very deep there. I think probably in general, some of the communication things we’ve talked about—being T-shaped or U-shaped, where you have depth or breadth across areas—does help, even if you do end up going deep in certain ones.”
How to keep getting better as a software engineer in the organization
- Oh: “It’s you’re always asking questions—how do I build a certain feature, or how do I get it perfectly right for the end users and what you’re trying to build? I think something I can always get better at is asking questions; that’s something you shouldn’t be afraid of.”
Transcription assistance from Yun-Kai Guo.
For more coverage of the 2025 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Originally published: May 1, 2025. Last Updated: March 24, 2025.