Moneyball's Second Act

"All the analytics nerds are looking for jobs with Meta."
"No, dude, they're working for the Brewers."

Moneyball's second act

Three of baseball's lowest payrolls built some of its biggest analytics departments, and they keep beating the big spenders. Here is what those analysts actually do, and what an athletic department competing against richer conference rivals might borrow.

Brewers
103–59
$125.5M payroll · 46 analysts · World Series champions
Rays
98–64
$89.6M payroll · 39 analysts
Guardians
85–77
$70.0M payroll · 30 analysts

2026 regular season. The Brewers beat the Rays 4–1 to win the World Series on Oct. 28, the first title in franchise history; Cleveland reached the ALCS. MLB average analytics staff: about 28.

Not a one-year story

Small payrolls, steady winners

On Oct. 28, Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay in five games to win the first World Series in franchise history, with a payroll that ranked 19th in baseball. It was not a one-year run. This was the Brewers' eighth postseason in nine years, the Rays' sixth in eight and the Guardians' eighth in eleven. Since 2005, the three rank sixth, seventh and eighth in regular-season wins, according to The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal. They have done it against payrolls three to five times their own.

Rival owners have noticed. Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci reports that one club's owners put the question to their general manager directly: "What do we need to do to be like the Brewers?"

Spending on analysts does not explain it alone. The chart below plots each club with a published staff count. Tap or hover a dot for details.

The three red clubs sit at or above the league-average staff line with payrolls at the low end. The Mets carried the largest payroll in the sport and finished 74–88.

Staff counts: Four Rings Consulting via Beisbol.love, Oct. 2026. Teams rarely disclose these figures, so treat them as estimates. Payrolls: MLB Labor Relations via USA Today.

Inside the department

What the analysts actually do

A 40-person analytics department is not 40 people looking at spreadsheets. Most clubs call it Research and Development, and it spans engineers who build the databases, modelers who forecast careers, and analysts who travel with the team. Milwaukee's own front-office directory shows the scale.

14 R&D ~12 engineers 42 other baseball ops
"Baseball research and development" titles Software, data and principal engineers Systems, player info, scouting, coaching support and more

68 people listed under baseball operations on MLB.com. Scouts and minor league staff are counted separately.

Meet the department

Six jobs, one operation

Pick a role to see what the job involves, who it works with and where it shows up on the field.

Pay for these roles typically runs about $55,000 to $130,000, per a 2026 industry salary guide. Postings that list pay this fall range from $22 an hour for associates to $180,000–$200,000 for an AI engineer.

Read the postings

What 12 clubs are hiring for this fall

Real job descriptions from across MLB, most posted in September and October 2026. Open any posting for the highlights, or follow the link to the full description. Two newer kinds of jobs stand out: product managers who decide what the R&D group builds, and AI engineers building tools staff can query in plain language.

Three clocks

The work runs on a schedule

Recent job postings describe the rhythm. Choose a view.

    The habits behind the edge

    Why the money isn't the whole story

    Every team has an analytics department now. These clubs stand out for how consistently they use it.

    1

    They keep the message small

    The analysis is extensive, but what reaches the player is not. Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook calls it "the dosage of the medicine." Some pitchers need only a few of the proposed changes, and coaches decide when to share them. Cleveland routes each pitcher to whichever of four coaches fits his problem. Coaches keep the final say even on the lineup: against the Rays' Freddy Peralta, Brewers manager Pat Murphy passed over his analysts' suggestion to start Luis Lara and played Sal Frelick for his competitiveness, Verducci reports.

    2

    They hire communicators

    One MLB analyst who hosted a Reddit AMA said he spends most of his time on the field and in the clubhouse. The Athletic's Eno Sarris argues that clubs which bought the same technology fell short on process and on people who can turn data into something a coach will use.

    3

    They pair analysts with scouts

    Entering 2026, the Rays employed 84 scouts and the Brewers 78, among the most in baseball. Nine of the last ten World Series teams had scouting staffs larger than the league average.

    4

    They buy what the market underprices

    The Brewers valued catcher pitch framing before most teams measured it, and lead MLB in framing value since 2008. Both clubs built lineups around contact, walks and speed instead of paying for power.

    5

    They keep their people

    Rays manager Kevin Cash, hired in 2014, is baseball's longest-tenured manager. Pat Murphy was Milwaukee's bench coach for eight years before he took over. Owners limit payroll but trust and equip their front offices.

    6

    They move on before rivals catch up

    The Rays introduced the opener, then went back to traditional starters, and this year led baseball in bunt hits. The champion Brewers broke from a decade of analytics orthodoxy too. While most teams chased home runs, Milwaukee led MLB in ground-ball and opposite-field rate and posted the lowest average launch angle of any team in nine seasons. Its 154 home runs were the fewest for a 103-win team since the 1986 Mets, per Verducci. As The Athletic's Tyler Kepner put it, by the time others imitate the Rays, "the Rays themselves have moved on."

    The limits

    Head count is not a guarantee

    The Phillies reportedly employ the most analysts in baseball and carry a top-five payroll. Their front office has pointed to how data is produced and used, especially by hitters, and overhauled its research staff this fall. The Mets, Blue Jays and Tigers all reported staffs larger than Cleveland's and missed the postseason.

    At the bottom, the pattern is clearer. The Rockies and Athletics reportedly have about 11 analysts each. They went 58–104 and 64–98, two of baseball's three worst records. A very small department lined up with falling behind, even if a large one did not guarantee getting ahead.

    Beyond baseball

    Does this travel to football and basketball?

    Baseball is the easiest sport to measure, so a fair question is whether any of this applies to football, basketball or Olympic sports. The answer depends on what a reader takes from the MLB clubs. The specific tactics don't travel. The habits behind them do.

    The habit worth borrowingThe baseball detail that isn't the point
    Collect clean data and keep it in one placeTrackMan feeds from amateur ballparks
    Keep the message small and give coaches the final sayWhich pitch a Brewers pitcher should throw more often
    Pay for what the market undervaluesCatcher framing, stolen bases or more bunts
    Put analysts next to the coachesA dugout seat during a bullpen change
    Develop players, with a written plan for eachA pitching lab with motion-capture cameras
    Move on before rivals copy youThe opener

    What other leagues show

    Baseball is not the only league where teams have hired analysts in large numbers. Basketball and hockey analytics staffs have grown roughly tenfold since the early 2010s, and the best evidence of a payoff comes from the NBA.

    NBA, 2009
    ~10
    NBA, 2023
    132
    NHL, before 2014
    ~15
    NHL, 2024
    ~150

    League-wide analytics staff. NBA: MIT Sports Lab study using NBAstuffer counts. NHL: theScore, 2024.

    The NBA study

    About 0.8 of an analyst ≈ one extra win. So does about $9.6 million in player salary.

    MIT researchers tracked every NBA team's analytics head count from 2009 to 2023 and published the results in the Journal of Sports Economics in 2025 (MIT's summary). Even after accounting for payroll, roster experience, coaching continuity and injuries, more analysts meant more wins. The authors also found a ceiling. As co-author Henry Wang put it, "You can't hire 100 analysts and expect to go in 82-and-0 next season."

    Football. NFL staffs are smaller and the evidence is thinner. ESPN's Seth Walder counted about five analytics staffers per team in 2024, from 10 in Cleveland to one each in New England and Tampa Bay. The Kansas City Chiefs won back-to-back Super Bowls with three. In football, a large staff has not been a requirement for winning. The areas where the work gets used, such as fourth-down calls, roster building and the salary cap, line up closely with a college department's decisions.

    Hockey. NHL analytics staffs grew roughly tenfold in a decade. Most teams now employ two to five people, and Chicago led with 11 in 2024. Carolina promoted Eric Tulsky from outside analyst to assistant general manager, and Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy reviews 10-game segments with his stats staff.

    Soccer. The closest match to the Brewers and Rays may be Brentford and Brighton. Both owners came from statistical betting businesses and built recruitment around data. Brighton bought Moisés Caicedo for £4.5 million and sold him for £115 million. Brentford, a League Two club in 2009, bought Ivan Toney for £5 million and sold him for £40 million. Both have made an overall pre-tax profit as Premier League clubs while the average club lost £40 million in 2024–25, according to Kieran Maguire of the University of Liverpool.

    The common thread across sports matches baseball's. The staff costs little next to player pay. The biggest department does not guarantee a title. And the clearest returns show up in the decisions that matter most to a college department right now: which players to acquire, what to pay them and how to make them better.

    For athletic directors

    A Brewers-lite department

    A collegiate athletics department now makes the same calls a baseball front office does: who to pay and how much, whom to develop rather than replace, and whom to let walk away. With the House settlement barely into its second year, many departments are still deciding how to staff around revenue sharing. A program that cannot match its conference's biggest spenders on roster pay may still be able to out-build them on the operation that decides how that money gets spent.

    Milwaukee's own leaders describe the edge as an operation, not a single department. Owner Mark Attanasio told ESPN, "We put all of our resources back into the team." ESPN's Bradford Doolittle lists where the club hunts for advantages: domestic and international scouting, player development, analytics, game planning, clubhouse culture, medical science and mental health. Baseball operations president Matt Arnold says the club spends much of its time on acquiring and developing players.

    Here is how the MLB roles might translate.

    MLB roleA college counterpart
    Data engineerSomeone who pulls each sport's tracking, video, medical and recruiting data into one place, so a question about a portal target or a workload gets answered the same way for every program.
    Baseball operations analystA valuation desk for revenue-share and portal decisions, where a department makes dozens of compensation calls a year.
    Embedded analystAn analyst who sits in football or basketball staff meetings and turns findings into a few points a position coach will use.
    Player development analystA written, tracked development plan for each athlete, shared across strength, sports science and coaching staffs, with exit meetings at season's end.
    Research analystStudent analysts and partnerships with campus statistics, computer science and biomechanics departments.

    What would it cost?

    A 40-person MLB department costs roughly $5 million a year in salaries. A college version would be far smaller. Adjust the numbers to compare a central analytics group against the roughly $21 million a school can share with athletes in 2026–27.

    $490K
    Estimated annual cost
    2.3%
    Share of a ~$21M revenue-share cap

    That is 10% of what a 40-person MLB department spends on salaries, and 2.3% of a ~$21M revenue-share budget.

    Salaries and system costs are illustrative inputs, not survey figures.

    Ideas to take back to campus

    Six places to start

    These are not rules. They are the habits the low-payroll MLB clubs share, put in college terms, for departments weighing where an edge might come from.

    1. Price athletes before negotiating

      A consistent, data-backed way to value athletes across sports gives revenue-share and portal decisions a common baseline, and makes it easier to spot the players the market is overlooking.

    2. Put the data in one place

      Most departments already pay for tracking and video systems sport by sport. A small central group serving every program, the way a club's R&D group serves its major and minor league teams, may get more from what the department already owns.

    3. Hire people coaches will listen to

      The MLB clubs that win put analysts next to coaches and value the ability to explain as much as the ability to model. Where analysts sit and who they report to may matter more than how many there are.

    4. Write a plan for every athlete

      Development is the cheaper edge. With short eligibility windows and an open portal, how quickly a staff can turn data into a usable plan for a new arrival may matter even more in college than in MLB.

    5. Build it into the department, not the staff

      The winning MLB clubs keep their people for years. College coaching turnover is far higher, so analytics that belong to the department rather than to one head coach are more likely to survive a change.

    6. Keep moving

      Every edge shrinks once rivals copy it. The Rays introduced the opener and have since gone back to traditional starters. With revenue sharing still new, the departments that build first may have the longest head start.

    Sources