Ari Kaplan, Baseball Analytics Pioneer

The Work in Sports Podcast - Insider Advice for Sports Careers

Managing and leading people requires a unique blend of patience and expertise.

Patience is paramount to success as a manager because you are inherently managing and leading people who are less experienced in this expertise than you are.

If someday you become the director of group sales for a sports organization, you will be influencing the day-to-day actions of people new to the business, and junior in their experience. This means you must be patient in executing your plans, taking their growth with the logical steps forward and steps backward.

It’s like having a kid - you work on their reading, and as soon as you make progress the next day they look at you like they’ve never seen the word AND before. You want to scream, like, "we did this 25 times yesterday" and then you realize they are 6-years-old and child protective services have already told you to stop yelling so much.

I’m kidding of course, child protective services have never yelled at me, even if that story was slightly autobiographical.

But this is patience in action. No one learns in a straight line, they go up and down. They grasp some concepts quickly and others take longer. They need repetition and acceptance of their shortcomings.

This is a major part of being a thought leader at a company. You can’t write people off as hopeless, you have to work with them, find their learning style, figure out ways to translate your information into their language.

Nowhere is this trickier than in the world of sports analytics. Analytics is one of the roles in the highest demand for the sports industry, and yet it is a very, very different language than most people speak.

The best in this business have learned how to adjust their style to their stakeholders, whether that’s a GM, a coach or a player. Some are visual learners, and need heat maps, others like massive amounts of data and want it all, while others need to be told a singular thing at a time that can help them advance in their skill set.

Everyone learns differently, and as long as they have the passion, the learning will come.

I was watching TV with my wife the other night, and she was watching some competition fashion show and they are talking through designers and styles and sewing techniques -- and I said to her, "How in the world can anyone keep up with all these designers and techniques?"

She looked at me deadpan and said: “So who did the Patriots draft in the 3rd round of the 2007 draft?”

And I said, “trick question, they didn’t have a 3rd round pick”

It took me a minute until I realized she set the trap and I jumped in it.

The point is, everyone has the capacity to learn what they are interested in and is placed in front of them within the right format.

That is the challenge for those in analytics - taking complex data, that their audiences want to understand, and making it understandable. The passion is there, it’s on the analyst to make it more than just numbers.

It takes patience.

Today’s guest Ari Kaplan understands this more than most - over the last three decades he’s been finding ways to give pro sports teams an edge through data AND having the patience to share the information in the right manner so that it can make a difference.

This interview is fascinating - I learned so much because I have the passion, and Ari has the patience… so where do you fit in?

Let’s find out -- here’s Ari Kaplan…