Jim Cassandro
Psychology and Baseball
June 21, 2006 | by brett | Permalink
When Jim was in the third grade, he wrote an essay about how he wanted to be a professional baseball player when he grew up. Throughout elementary, middle, and high school this dream never faded. That is, until he broke his wrist one year in high school and was unable to play. That year he ended up playing tennis, which moved him away from baseball and geared him more towards an academic career.
After high school, he attended the University of Santa Cruz where he really got into quantitative research as a “Banana Slug.” He began to realize how much fun academics could be. He loved to pose questions about certain topics, his favorite being the realm of psychology. With his love for research, he entered graduate school at UC Davis where he worked towards a doctorate in psychology.
Baseball was a backdrop for Jim while he was in school, and he spent much of his time quantifying baseball. A San Francisco Giants fan, he loved to study their trends and analyze the numbers that the team produced. His wife noticed this passion for baseball research while he was striving for his doctorate in psychology. She asked him why he spent 10% of his time on his dissertation and 90% of his time studying baseball. She encouraged him to find a career in baseball, but Jim felt that there wasn’t much out there in the way of baseball research positions.
After obtaining his PhD he taught in Buffalo, NY and later at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He began noticing that people like him were infiltrating baseball to help general managers with decisions pertaining to baseball operations. While lecturing at the U of A, he started to pester the Arizona Diamondbacks organization with work that he was doing that related to the club. He explained to them that his research had the possibility of improving the decision-making processes of their baseball executives. He offered to perform a variety of quantitative studies and send them their way to show examples of his expertise.
The work that he turned in was placed in the hands of the right people and he was offered a consultant position. In his time as a consultant, he worked extremely hard to keep his foot in the door. In 2004, he was offered a full-time position. He is now the Director of Research for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
His job entails providing statistical evaluations of players. By evaluating them in all types of different scenarios, he is able to supply a quantitative analysis that goes along with a scouting report to help baseball executives with decisions on trades, signing free agents, and the amateur draft as well.
I asked Jim about how someone gets into baseball, to which he replied:
“There are many different ways to get into baseball. Some people are lawyers, others are marketing, some people worked their way in through an internship, others played the game and retired and now are with the organization. There is no one route in, but you have to work really hard to get in, and you have to be willing to take “no” and persist through it, and keep persisting. I felt like I was knocking on this enormous door of the ball club for two and half, three years. And if you count back to when I was doing research it was five to ten years. But when those doors opened up it was like hey, where have you been? But it’s wonderful! It’s a unique place and a unique business.”
I also asked him what is something students should work on while in school. Jim replied:
“Baseball is a people oriented sport. Every organization is people oriented. So you have to get along with people, you have to know how to network, and you have to know how to play on a team. Know what a good a niche is for yourself, and know how to help people out. So one thing you can definitely work on as an undergraduate is networking, and having people know you.”
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