#2: A white man runs every baseball operations department except one
Plus Paul Skenes' best pitch last year
Hi, it’s Hannah and I’m going to keep this intro a whole lot shorter than the last because, once again, Zach and I managed to write so many words. And that’s without actual baseball to react to!
A white man runs every baseball operations department except one
by Hannah Keyser
For the first time in at least 20 years, Major League Baseball will open the season with only one non white man in charge of baseball operations for a team. Dana Brown, hired by the Houston Astros as general manager before the 2023 season, is the only non white male GM, president of baseball operations, or similar title to indicate the top decision maker in a team’s baseball hierarchy.
I noticed this because I was looking back at the coverage from when the Marlins made Kim Ng the first woman in charge of a major American men’s sports team. That was before the 2021 season. At the time, the New York Times noted:
Only four heads of club baseball operations are identified as nonwhite by M.L.B.’s diversity goals — about 13 percent of M.L.B.’s 30 teams. They are Kenny Williams, who is Black, of the Chicago White Sox; Farhan Zaidi, who is of Asian descent, of the San Francisco Giants; Al Avila, who is Latino, of the Detroit Tigers; and Ng. That is a stark contrast to the demographics on the field, where 40 percent of major-league players are identified as nonwhite by M.L.B. — the majority of whom are Latino.
Four years later, none of those people are still employed in those same roles or in analogous roles with other teams.
Using information from the annual report put out by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, I looked back at every season starting in 2005 to see how many GMs/PoBOs came from outside the white male norm.
It’s not an especially sophisticated chart so if you’d rather just read the highlights, they’re as followed: Until this year, the number of non white men leading baseball operations ranged between two (2005-2007, 2023) and five (2009, 2010).
(It’s worth noting that there’s been better recent progress in the coaching ranks. In 2015, TIDES wrote, “The 2015 Major League Baseball season began with two managers of color, a decrease from five in 2014. The number of managers of color had been decreasing since the 2009 season, which started with 10 people of color and equaled the all-time record set in 2002.” But that trend has reversed over the past decade and this year there will be eight non white managers on Opening Day.)
As recently as the start of the 2023 season, there were four non white men heads of baseball operations: Ng with the Marlins, Kenny Williams with the White Sox, Farhan Zaidi with the Giants, and Brown with the Astros. Williams was fired in August of that season. Ng departed the Marlins in October 2023 after the team indicated they would hire someone over her. Zaidi was fired at the end of September 2024.
All of that was before Donald Trump was elected and ushered in a wave of explicit white supremacy. The new administration’s broad, blunt, plainly racist, and often stupid attack on diversity is not responsible for the lack of women or people of color working as GMs or PoBOs right now in baseball. But it is concerning that, at a time when any non white man could conceivably be labeled an unqualified “DEI” hire, baseball is starting with so few of those people already in the highest baseball ops roles.
Especially if the league is no longer enthusiastically supporting diversity initiatives designed to create more qualified candidates. As Craig Calcaterra first noted and The Athletic further reported on, references to diversity — including all information about the highly effective Diversity Pipeline Program — have been scrubbed from the MLB Careers page.
“As the commissioner stated, our values on diversity remain unchanged. We are in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward,” an MLB spokesman said in a statement to The Athletic.
MLB declined to comment further when I asked them about the lack of diversity among team decision makers.
I want to note that this is not a scoop or breaking news. It’s just a publicly knowable fact about the game right now that I happened to notice. There’s no particular culprit or smoking gun. Without any overarching intent, the sport simply sorted itself so that the top decision makers in the vast majority of team front offices are white men. That happened despite the Diversity Pipeline Program, despite the Selig Rule, despite an era of wokeness apparently so oppressive and intrusive that it bequeathed an entire very successful political party premised on being able to hate people different than you more loudly than you could previously. You don’t need to delete references to Jackie Robinson to make sure white men are getting opportunities to work in sports. Homogeny in the highest ranks happens passively and it has a head start. Now, the political headwinds will make it harder for anyone else to break in.
The best pitch of Paul Skenes’ historic rookie season is the tip of the iceberg
by Zach Crizer
When Hannah was reporting out her feature on Paul Skenes for The Ringer, Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin relayed a rapturous account of a single pitch, the one that stuck in his memory from Skenes’ seismic arrival in the majors.
It was a fastball, a two-strike pitch to punch out Juan Soto. And it’s a great example of why Skenes is at the forefront of the pitching world.
“He threw a fastball inside where Soto just bailed, completely,” Marin said. “Soto typically is a guy that holds his ground. He saw a ball out of hand and it was strike three. That was impressive.”
Here’s what it looked like:
That’s a pretty spectacular pitch on its own — 99.8 mph, bending onto the black and tricking the sport’s most finely tuned eye. It’s broader significance, though, comes in context. Here’s how that full at-bat went, Skenes’ first time facing Soto.
All these pitches could all be lumped together as “straight” in that they aren’t breaking balls. Really, they all run horizontally to his arm side, but distinguish themselves by coming in at different velocities with different levels of drop.
The industry is in the midst of a leap forward in pitching understanding that boils down to the yin and yang of similar and different. You want each pitch to look as similar as possible to what a hitter just saw, and ultimately be different than anything they’ve ever seen.
More than 70% of the times Skenes wound up in 2024, he was going to throw one of those arm-side pitches — the 99 mph fastball, the 94 mph splitter-sinker hybrid or the 87 mph change — but trying to decipher which one was coming was almost impossibly difficult. And that’s before considering Skenes also has three breaking balls that move the other way.
That heater to Soto looked the same. It also looked different, because Skenes’ fastball is weird. It has less “rise” than most four-seamers a major leaguer sees and more than most sinkers. It moves more than the normal fastball horizontally, and the extreme velocity amplifies the effect. Skenes got Soto to stare at it because it was a visibly great pitch, but also because of the invisible effects of what came before it.
Pro organizations and the sport’s omnipresent training facilities have been assessing and improving pure “stuff” for years, and are now getting better at gauging how everything works together. You can pretty much understand the zeitgeist shift by thinking about Braves starter Spencer Strider and then about Skenes. When he broke out, Strider’s plan was big rising fastball, hard trap-door slider, repeat. Two pitches, good luck hitting them. Skenes will throw a minimum of six pitches this year, and he has experimented with two new ones in spring, a cutter and a proper sinker.
A glimpse into Driveline’s internal Mix+ and Match+ models, explained further in some excellent work by FanGraphs’ Michael Rosen, showed Skenes flying well above average in both variety and deception in 2024. That used to be the territory of the “crafty lefty” or the “junkballers.” Guys who were popularly understood to be working more off guile than brute force.
Layering slightly different movement profiles to keep hitters off balance is an obsession for the best of the best now, including AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. The Phillies’ Zack Wheeler, one of Skenes’ rivals for the NL Cy Young, also throws six or more pitches regularly.
If you’re watching a game over the next few weeks, take note of how often an announcer mentions the guy on the mound “adding a new pitch” or “experimenting with a new mix.” Because just as the rich Red Sox once supercharged the approach of the Moneyball A’s, hurlers with stuff to spare are now chucking the kitchen sink.
Because they can. And because it works.
Links that piqued our interest
Here’s that Paul Skenes piece referenced above. I was able to shoehorn in my favorite weird detail about how he listens to Civil War audiobooks before his starts instead of some kind of pump-up playlist, but this quote about music more generally didn’t make the cut: “Music kind of, just for me, is like, it gets repetitive.” Music gets repetitive. I have been marveling on the strangeness of this take for weeks. Paul Skenes listening to the catchiest bop1 of all time only to be like, nice, done with that forever. —HK
Evidently, Cal Raleigh is great at ABS challenges which I believe as the foremost Cal Raleigh defender (Call him José Ramírez cause he’s chronically underrated). But I can’t prove it because — as far as I can tell, and please correct me if I’m wrong — there’s no leaderboard for ABS challenge results. I desperately want this. I’ve asked MLB to no avail! They couldn’t (or at least wouldn’t) tell me who even challenged the most in the minors, regardless of results. I like a lot about ABS — perhaps chiefly that it’s a version of increased technology that could actually make individual behavior more impactful. Give us the leaderboards! —HK
The Mariners agree with my assessment. Good for Cal. —HK
I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that I agree with the sentiment. —HK
Thought about gatekeeping this in case I want to apply for it myself. But I’d rather hear your best Onion-style headline about MLB’s Opening Day 2025. —HK
The Statcast crew at MLB released new tracking data displaying how batters set up in the box. That’s fun for some obvious reasons — a bird’s eye view of weird batting stances! — but also practical analysis reasons. —ZC
The Mariners and Padres, two of MLB’s “natural interleague rivals” who play four times a year, have given their matchup a name: The Vedder Cup, for Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam frontman and former resident of both cities. Props for the charitable aspect, but mostly: Can we get some more rivalry names going? As college football can attest, no crosstown clash, championship level meeting or really anything at all is required to drum up a fun trophy idea. —ZC
Since it’s our last newsletter before Opening Day, I’ll leave you with this smart observation from MLB.com’s Mike Petriello: We might not know much of anything about how this is gonna turn out! Particularly in the American League. So here’s your assignment, join our subscriber chat and tell us who you think is the best team in the AL entering the season.
Tell me in the comments what song you think I’m thinking of.
I attended my first SABR Malloy conference last year. It was fascinating to hear the lectures and discussions about how Negro Leagues stats were integrated into the MLB record books. Even better, it was held at the Hall of Fame which had a fantastic exhibit called Souls of the Game.
We cannot let these attacks on diversity allow us to forget some really important history.
Re: the music, I am going to say Paul has been subjected to his girlfriend (Livvy Dunne) listening to like, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter and coming to the conclusion that it is repetitive.