DESCRIPTION

This panel features industry professionals who focus on evaluating teams and personnel from an analytical perspective. Their work experience ranges from prominent roles for MLB teams to creators of statistical simulation models to authors of baseball analytics books. Topics may include evaluative techniques, the evolution of analytics in player analysis, and other research.

 PANELISTS

Joe Bohringer is currently a Major League Scout for the Arizona Diamondbacks. A 1993 graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the 2008 season will mark his 19th season in professional baseball. In his current role, Joe is responsible for the talent evaluation of professional players at both the Major League and minor league levels. The Diamondbacks use these evaluations as part of their decision-making process with regard to roster formation and player acquisition.

Prior to joining Arizona in 2006, Bohringer served as an Area Scouting Supervisor for the Seattle Mariners, first in southern California and then in the upper Midwest. His main responsibilities included evaluating all draft-eligible high school and college players in his region of the country. Upon the completion of baseball’s annual June draft, he would spend much of his summer reporting on Major League and minor league players on various professional teams.

Before embarking on a full-time scouting career, Joe spent three years as Senior Manager of Player Development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In this capacity, he assisted with all day-to-day operations for the Dodgers’ six minor league affiliates. These duties included budget formation, roster management, contract negotiations and serving as a liaison with the offices of Major League Baseball.

Bohringer began his professional career though internships with the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates while completing his undergraduate degree at MIT. His first full-time experiences after graduation were in the area of team operations with minor league baseball clubs in Buffalo, New York and then Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Joe and his wife Kathleen currently reside west of Chicago with their two-year-old daughter Lauren.


Bill James is a senior Baseball Operations Advisor for the Boston Red Sox and famed author of Bill James Baseball Abstracts. He is a baseball writer, historian and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed sabermetrics in reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically evaluates statistical data in attempting to determine why teams win and lose. In 2006, Time magazine named him in the Time 100 as one of the most influential people in the world.


Vince Gennaro is the author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball and is currently a consultant to Major League Baseball teams. He also teaches in the Graduate Sports Business Management program at Manhattanville College. This follows a successful business career that includes diverse roles—CEO of an early stage public company, a 20-year career at PepsiCo, and ownership of a pro sports franchise.

At PepsiCo, Vince was President of Pepsi’s Fountain Beverage Division, and headed a billion dollar bottling business, in addition to holding senior positions in marketing, sales and operations. Some of his biggest marketing “wins” were the launch of Cool Ranch Doritos and the Jay Leno advertising campaign for Doritos.

An entrepreneurial startup endeavor early in Vince’s career complements his success with a blue chip Fortune 50 company. At the age of 27, he raised capital, led the purchase of a franchise in the Women’s Pro Basketball League—the forerunner of today’s WNBA—and served as its President and General Manager.

Vince began analyzing the business of baseball as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. In 1979, The Sporting News featured his inventive approach to determining a player’s dollar value to a team. His recent innovative analysis of the business and economics of baseball has been the subject of articles in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN Money. He has also written for The Hardball Times, Yahoo! Sports, and Maple Street Press’ Red Sox Annual, and is a frequent guest commentator on CNBC-TV. Vince is a member of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and has served on the Board of Trustees of the Women’s Sports Foundation. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and resides in Purchase, NY with his wife and their daughter.


Tom Tippett - For more than twenty years, Tom Tippett has been developing tools for the analysis and modeling of baseball player and team performance.

Tom was the founder and President of Diamond Mind, Inc., maker of the industry's leading baseball simulation software, where he led all baseball research and software development activities. In 2003, Diamond Mind began working with the Boston Red Sox on projects related to simulation, player skills analysis, and projections of future performance.

In 2006, Diamond Mind was acquired by Imagine Sports, a California company that offers online baseball games. Since then, Tom has served as a consultant to Imagine Sports and the Red Sox baseball operations group.

Tom co-authored the DiamondWare scoring software that is a key component of the system used by MLB for all major- and minor-league games. The DiamondWare software has also been used by Retrosheet.org to capture play-by-play accounts of more than 100,000 current and historical major-league games.

A longtime member of the Society for American Baseball Research, Tom won the USA Today Baseball Weekly prize for the best research presentation at the 2002 national SABR convention. From 1998 to 2004, he wrote and/or edited more than a hundred articles for ESPN.com.

Tom was born and raised in Toronto. He earned a degree in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 1981 and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1985. He lives in Lexington, MA, with his wife and daughter.

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