Sig Mejdal

Sig Mejdal (born December 31, 1965) is an American assistant manager, and sabermetrics analyst for the Baltimore Orioles and a former NASA engineer. He previously helped the St. Louis Cardinals make draft picks. Mejdal turned his personal interest in baseball into a career after being inspired by Moneyball in 2003.

Sig Mejdal
Sig Mejdal
Born (1965-12-31) December 31, 1965
San Jose, California, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Davis; San Jose State University

Biography

Sig Mejdal grew up in San Jose, California. His mother was a nurse and his father was a career army officer. In his youth, Mejdal played little league baseball for six years.[1]:43 He was a fan of the Oakland A's and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.[2] According to UC Davis magazine, Sig Mejdal was "fascinated with the stats on the backs of baseball cards."[3] Mejdal graduated from University of California, Davis with bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering and aeronautical engineering. He later earned master's degrees in operations research and cognitive psychology[4] from San Jose State University.[5] While attending college in the late 1980s, he worked as a blackjack dealer at High Sierra in Lake Tahoe.[4]

After graduating from UC Davis in 1989,[3] Mejdal worked for Lockheed Martin's satellite operations unit at the Onizuka Air Force Station.[1]:113[6] Mejdal's interest in baseball was recreational until 2003, when Moneyball inspired him to consider pursuing a career in sabermetrics.[3][7] He attended the Winter Meetings in search for a job in baseball,[8] but ended up working for NASA as a biomathematician in the Fatigue Countermeasures Group.[1]:23 Mejdal studied sleep patterns of astronauts on the International Space Station[9] in order to optimize their sleep schedules.[8][10]

While working for NASA, Mejdal had a side job as the chief quantitative analyst for Sam Walker's fantasy baseball team Streetwalkers Baseball Club,[10][11] which was participating in the Tout Wars competition's "Battle of the Experts."[10] The fantasy team would later become the subject of Walker's book: Fantasyland: A Sportswriter's Obsessive Bid to Win the World's Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball.[9]

In 2005, Sig Mejdal was recruited to do sabermetrics for the St. Louis Cardinals' new analytics department.[12] He took 22 months of data from college baseball games and ran it through an algorithm to determine the likely performance and stats baseball players would achieve.[13] According to Sports Illustrated, "[o]ver the next seven seasons the Cardinals would draft more players who became big leaguers than any other organization."[4] He was promoted to senior quantitative analyst in 2008[14] and director of amateur draft analysis in January 2011.[15][16] Mejdal created a formula to predict the risk of injury to baseball players[17] and contributed a section on injury probability to The Bill James Handbook.[18]

In 2012, Mejdal became the Director of Decision Sciences for the Houston Astros, where he supported recruitment decisions based on physical tests and historical player performance.[2][7][19] Hiring Mejdal to apply an analytics-based decision tree on their player choices was part of the effort to revitalize the team and address performance issues in prior seasons.[4] He helped the team create the STOUT system, named after the combination of "stat" and "scout," for making player choices.[20] The system was criticized for de-humanizing players, but after trading off some players and making new recruits, the Astro's farm system became ranked among the best in baseball.[4] The Astros also used analytics to persuade players that were uncomfortable with non-traditional positions on the field to embrace shifts, which the team now uses very heavily.[4][21]

In 2015, Mejdal was one of the team's advisers whose login credentials were believed to have been used to hack into the team's database.[22]

When Mike Elias was hired from the Astros as general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Elias hired Mejdal as his assistant general manager.[23]

Bibliography
  • Mejdal, Sig; Melissa M. Mallis; Tammy T. Nguyen; David F. Dinges (March 2004). "Summary of the Key Features of Seven Biomathematical Models of Human Fatigue and Performance". Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine. 75 (3): 4–14. PMID 15018262.

Further reading

References
  1. Sam Walker (27 February 2007). Fantasyland: A Sportswriter's Obsessive Bid to Win the World's Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball League. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-303843-6. Retrieved 13 January 2013.
  2. McTaggart, Brian (January 31, 2012). "Analyze this: Astros' Mejdal takes on unique role". MLB.com. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  3. "A numbers game". UC Davis Magazine. pp. Volume 28, Number 2, Winter 2011. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  4. Reiter, Ben. "Astro-Matic Baseball". SportsIllustrated. Retrieved June 27, 2014.
  5. Dorsey, David (April 17, 2006). "Teams turn to numbers crunchers". The News Press. pp. CC.1. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  6. Matthews, Alan (October 2, 2006). "BA's Alan Matthews attends the Major League Scouting Bureau's "Scout School"". School's In. Baseball America. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  7. Cohen, Jason (January 5, 2012). "Astros GM Makes Up a Fancy Title for His "Moneyball" Stat Guy". Daily Post. Archived from the original on January 15, 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  8. Booher, Kary (April 23, 2008). "Cards turn analytical for draft decisions". News-Leader. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  9. Levine, Zachary (February 11, 2012). "Astros' Sig Mejdal to utilize diamond data in projection game". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  10. Walker, Sam. "Reality Check". Sports Illustrated. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  11. Walker, Sam (June 15, 2006). "A Different Kind of Draft Day". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  12. Walton, Brian (January 13, 2012). "Interview: Cards Scout Head Kantrovitz: Pt. 1". Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  13. Enterprises, Lee (July 3, 2015). "Analytics at heart of Cards' success, federal probe : Sports". stltoday.com. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  14. Everson, Darren (March 7, 2008). "Baseball Taps Wisdom of Fans". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  15. "Cards Promote Two in Baseball Ops". CBS. January 7, 2011. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  16. Carroll, Will. "Cardinals Team Healthy Report 2011". Sports Illustrated.
  17. Carroll, Will (March 4, 2008). "Team Health Reports". Baseball Prospectus.
  18. Carroll, Will (April 11, 2006). "Under The Knife: Danger is Will's Middle Name". Baseball Prospectus. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  19. Rogers, Phil (January 7, 2012), "Time for Big Z to step to plate", Chicago Tribune, retrieved December 14, 2012
  20. Goold, Derrick (June 7, 2007). "Baseball Draft: Cardinals get STOUT". St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
  21. Waldstein, David (May 12, 2014). "Who's on Third? In Baseball's Shifting Defenses, Maybe Nobody". New York Times. Retrieved June 27, 2014.
  22. Schupak, Amanda (June 24, 2015). "What the Houston Astros hack can teach you about cybersecurity". CBS News. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  23. https://www.mlb.com/orioles/news/orioles-using-analytics-sign-of-culture-change
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