While a member of the baseball team at Pomona College in Claremont, California, Jack Hanley turned to technology to get a better understanding of his competition. The former catcher developed an app that uses data to show the hitting trends of every player in the NCAA Division III level.
While no longer a college baseball player, the 23-year-old Hanley is still using data to help influence decisions on the baseball diamond. Today, he is an analytics engineer with the St. Louis Cardinals, where he began working in 2020. In this role, Hanley helps the Major League Baseball club with how it collects and shares data between its front office, coaches and players to drive on-field success.
Did you always envision working in the sports industry? Not always. A lot of friends and family had seen it as a natural fit since I loved math, physics, and baseball, so if you ask them they’ll probably say it was something I was always going to do. I certainly thought it would be an interesting career path, but for a long time baseball was something I loved and enjoyed as a fan and that was the extent of it. Baseball has a reputation of being a difficult industry to get a foothold in, and it was definitely scary to get my hopes up anyway. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I started to seriously consider pursuing a career in sports, and even then, I still pursued non-sports opportunities until my senior year.
How has your past experience as a college baseball player helped with your role with the Cardinals? It’s been invaluable. It’s the same as having an applied background in any industry; you build experiences and skills that can then be generalized and applied to a variety of new perspectives. In our industry you need a diversity of backgrounds and opinions in order to succeed. I have the privilege of working with some incredibly talented and diverse individuals, and my playing experience is its own small part of that diversity.
What’s your proudest accomplishment? At the end of college, I was able to build a beta version of an app that scraped data and visualized and compiled the hit distribution of every hitter in Division III baseball in 2019. The project started by simply wanting to update some code written by a former student-athlete at my college and hopefully use it for advance scouting in my last year of baseball. Unfortunately, Covid-19 hit and ended my baseball career early. Even though I wasn’t able to end my career the way I would have liked, I was able to finish that app. To see all that hard work come together in the midst of a global pandemic is something I’m very proud of.
Where do you see yourself and your career in five years? At this point in my career, it’s important for me to learn as much as I can and get exposed to as many different aspects of our organization as possible. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know, so right now I’m doing my best to be a sponge and absorb it all as best I can. Continuing with this will ideally see me specialize and take charge of some section of our analytical process.
What can St. Louis do to engage more young technology employees like yourself? I’m continually impressed by the intelligent and motivated individuals I meet in St. Louis. Most of them are from the area or have gone to college here, but several of them have moved to St. Louis to pursue unique opportunities they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. For example, the chances to gain more direct experience at a firm, better access to capital to start or build a company, or simply a higher salary relative to cost of living. I think then that the key to increasing engagement with young tech talent is to continue to offer these unique opportunities, specifically through funding, mentorship, or whatever outreach is necessary.
Who are your biggest mentors? I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had some great mentors and resources across both industry and during my education. There are too many people to name everyone, but a couple I’d like to highlight are my academic and thesis advisors at Pomona College, Professors Jo Hardin and Gabe Chandler, and the numerous mentors I had during my internships for the Oakland A’s and New York Yankees. Here in St. Louis, two other individuals I continue to have the privilege of learning and working with are our Senior Analytics Engineer Todd Heitmann and our Director of Analytics Kevin Seats.
