Passan: The baseball employment revolution
From Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports on May 29, 2014, with mention of SABR members Andy Andres, Josh Herzenberg, Peter Bendix, and Mike DeBartolo:
Over the last month, since registration opened for the free online course Sabermetrics 101, a 13,464-person army of the curious, the dreamers, the scholarly and all other kinds signed up and turned a clever idea into a rousing success. The course launched Thursday morning. Nerdery went massively mainstream. The world did not end.
Actually, it got better, much better, and not simply because the brains behind the course, Boston-based professor Andy Andres, has put together a curriculum that explains the importance of baseball analytics, their history and even offers a tool through which students themselves can code projects. SABR101x, as it’s called, is the latest signpost of the ongoing employment revolution in baseball, one that stretches from analytics to scouting and will continue to upend the makeup of front offices across the sport.
It’s well underway already, with students parlaying math talents into internships and low-level baseball-operations positions while writers for mainstream sites Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs land higher-up gigs with striking frequency. The combination of their contributions and a far more qualified pool of applicants only encourages teams to look beyond the typical hire of the past – former ballplayer – and consider those like Andres’ students from the in-person sabermetrics seminar he has taught at Tufts University since 2004.
Read the full article here: http://sports.yahoo.com/news/baseball-employment-revolution–why-thousands-have-signed-up-for-free-online-course-173025914.html
Originally published: May 29, 2014. Last Updated: May 29, 2014.