Astrophysicist helps turn A’s pitching into a science
Team’s young analyst Samantha Schultz translates data into real-life strikeouts
OAKLAND » Samantha Schultz called her mom from college in the middle of a meltdown, frustrated with the complicated math she needed to master for her degree in astrophysics from St. Mary’s College.
Her post-graduate plan had been to get her Ph.D. in particle physics. That wasn’t her plan anymore. Through tears over the phone, Schultz told her mother the new one: to work in baseball. Huh?
That her science-obsessed daughter wanted to go in another direction was shocking enough. But getting where she wanted to go in baseball was harder than math.
“You look at the front office names, and going off first names, 98 percent of women are in marketing or something similar — not baseball operations,” Schultz’s mother, Elizabeth Baldwin, said last week. “I told her, ‘You might have to start out with something boring like cricket, or hockey.’
“She said, ‘Nah, I’m gonna do baseball.’”
Now 26, Schultz is a pitching analyst for the A’s. In four years, she has gone from the Big Bang to the big leagues.
“She was confident it would be baseball and not some other sport she had minimal interest in — and she did it,” Baldwin said. “She astonishes me.”
When it came to baseball, the Giants were Schultz’s first love.
While other baseball fans in the Bay Area and around the globe were engrossed by Barry Bonds’ home run chase and enigmatic stardom, Schultz was
drawn to the pitching — Jason Schmidt, Robb Nen and, later, Matt Cain. But it was the undersized Tim Lincecum, with his powerful delivery and the supernatural movement on his pitches, that gave flight to her love of pitching.
“It was the dominance,” she said. “Watching him be dominant with mechanics that are not routine and something you wouldn’t teach. The beauty of his change-up. The way he used his pitches, it made me fall in love with pitching as its own art form.”
After leaving St. Mary’s with her astrophysics degree and math minor, Schultz enrolled in the sports management program at Columbia University. It was there, while working with the baseball team, that opportunity began to knock. And knock. And knock.
The woman who had worked without pay for the St. Mary’s baseball team, serving as official scorer and in any other capacity, had been recruited by Major League Baseball’s diversity fellowship program. She had an internship with the New York Mets and was juggling offers from the Tampa Bay Rays and the San Diego Padres. She had been a runner-up for a uniformed position as a traveling analyst with the Cincinnati Reds, which would have made her the first uniformed woman on an MLB coaching staff — a few years before Giants trailblazer Alyssa Nakken.
In a baseball landscape where teams are constantly looking for a unique edge and expertise, an astrophysics background was proving attractive.
“Every team that I’ve ever interviewed for has been very interested in the physics degree,” Schultz said. “How I can leverage the degree, how they can apply it to pitching and even beyond the actual pitching. I think as someone with a physics degree — my brain works a bit differently than somebody with, say, a computer science degree.”
Wanting to return to California, Schultz accepted the Padres job — where she mostly worked on base running, some hitting, or helped out assistant coaches with information. But her passion for pitching called. In 2019, an opening popped up as a pitching analyst for the Oakland A’s.
Though an early pioneer in analytics-based research and development, the A’s operate with one of Major League Baseball’s smallest but most eclectic departments of research scientists and analysts. Assistant Director of Research & Analytics Ben Lowry is an economics major and Baseball Systems Developer Ben Lewis a computer science major. Research scientist David Jackson-Hanen has a Ph.D. in applied math.
“Part of the reason for hiring Sam was that I don’t understand physics, so it’s nice to have someone who does,” A’s general manager David Forst said. “We try to build a group with various strengths and with people who have the ability to fill in the gaps in our department. The physics side was different than anyone else we had here, but she spoke intelligently about pitching in a way that I hadn’t heard and we didn’t have in our group.”
San Diego was the site of baseball’s annual winter meeting in 2019, so Schultz attended. She met with a group from the A’s front office, including Forst, who asked if it would be OK for team president Billy Beane to join them at lunch.
Of course, Schultz said calmly while her excitement surged.
“Don’t bring up ‘Moneyball,’” she told herself. “That’s cliché.”
She had read the book as a high schooler, and the book became a movie with Brad Pitt starring as Beane, then the A’s general manager. The book, which detailed Beane’s revolutionary thinking on player evaluation, had surfaced in Schultz’s mind during those days and nights of complicated math problems.
At lunch, Schultz barely touched her crab sandwich — not because of nerves, but because she just couldn’t find time to take bites between conversation. When Beane asked Schultz what brought her from physics to baseball, she had no choice but to tell him. “Moneyball,” she said. The book had shown her that she could pursue her passion for baseball with her physics education as a strength.
“I’m glad you brought it up,” Beane replied. “Because the thing I’m most proud about from ‘Moneyball’ is that people like you read that story and think, ‘Hey, I can do this.’”
Two days after her interview, the A’s offered her the position of pitching analyst.
A’s relief pitcher Lou Trivino has a pitch — a cut fastball — that was widely considered to be one of the best in baseball a few years ago. Somewhere along the way, he lost it. Schultz is helping him find it. That’s her job.
“She really understands numbers and is able to communicate it well,” Trivino said. “I usually don’t like talking to people that only look at numbers because it’s data-driven, and I’m like, ‘OK, cool, my cutter sucks. I obviously know it sucks. How can you help me figure it out?’”
To get his cutter back to its elite form without inundating him with numbers, Schultz gave Trivino a simple course of action: throw it negative-2 or negative-3 inches more toward his glove side.
During bullpen sessions, Trivino will tinker with grip tweaks or throw it at a slightly different angle while Schultz, monitoring the movement on an iPad, replies with a simple “good” or “bad” grade.
“One of my biggest strengths is to take this complicated stuff and put it into baseball language,” Schultz said. “It’s not like I’m on the mound doing equations with the pitchers.”
Schultz understands a breaking ball can be more effective when its gyro spin — or bullet spin — is high. Or a two-seam fastball can be more effective when it creates turbulent pockets of air. She’ll suggest a pitcher adjust his grip or throw harder at a different angle to create the wanted movement.
“If I say, ‘OK, we need to get more gyro spin on this ball,’ what I might say to a pitcher is to roll it off your middle finger,” Schultz said.
She knows Trivino’s cutter needs to have force that creates movement to the negative side. That means Trivino must apply different pressures or throw at different angles to get his cutter to actually cut off his other pitches.
With Schultz’s help, Trivino is finally seeing negative movement on his cutter again. He knows in Schultz’s terms, those negatives are a positive.
“That’s the beautiful thing about Sam,” Trivino said. “I’m getting negative numbers now.”
Her 2020 season was limited by the pandemic. Not only fewer games — 60 instead of 162 — but limited contact with players. What is happening this season, with Trivino in particular, is the start of something.
“I hope my career and story inspires any underrepresented group to get into baseball,” Schultz said. “Not just women and physicists, but anyone who has a passion for the game.
“A lot of people, when I said I wanted a career in baseball, didn’t think it made a lot of sense. But it was a natural fit for me. … Now I’m at the A’s, working with the ‘Moneyball’ people.”