In February I was hired part-time by MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) as a stats stringer. I'm one month into the job and I wanted to share my experience.
We're responsible for entering data into MLB’s software following the outcome of every pitch. MLBAM then posts that data real-time on MLB Gameday and sells it to their clients. We’re essentially glorified stats keepers, but stringer sounds a little sexier than ‘keeper,’ so here we are. After my Spring Training, I started stringing an actual, real-life game.
My first solo game was on April 30 for the Red Sox vs. Cubs on Sunday Night Baseball -- no pressure. I arrived at Fenway 90 minutes before first pitch and got ready to go. Our day-to-day schedule starts with checking the 25-man roster and making sure what we have in our system matches the official lineup cards. Then we go through and enter the lineups, umpires and weather conditions. All of this takes about 30 minutes, after which we are free until the first warm up pitches in the bullpen.
During this time I’ll usually head to the cafeteria (where they have a sundae bar better than Sundae Sunday at Carm) and wander the halls. I recently got to meet John Smotlz, Dennis Eckersley and Dave O’Brien in the press box. I’m also pretty sure I peed next to Joe Castiglione once. Very cool stuff. I get to chat with the Boston press during this pregame free time. Evan Drellich and Alex Speier are awesome, as expected.
Once the game starts, I head back to my seat in the third row of the press box and get ready to work. One thing I didn’t realize about this job going in was just how much you have to focus. You literally can’t miss anything. When a pitch comes in, it’s tracked by TrackMan, which then shows us the pitch location on our screen. We enter in the outcome of the pitch, whether it was a ball, strike or hit into play with multiple subcategories of each. For the most part, the job isn’t too crazy, but there’s always one half inning where things get a little hairy.
Most recently it was the Sox-Orioles game on May 2 in the bottom of the eighth. Jackie Bradley Jr. grounded into the strangest (and only) 6-4-4-3 triple play I’ve ever seen. This caused me so much trouble trying to enter it into our software that the support guy in New York had to take over and enter it. Welcome to the Majors.
Post-game, the official scorer checks what he has with what we entered to confirm we’ve got the same results. After that I pack up our laptop, grab one final cup of free popcorn and head down Yawkey to Kenmore. I love this job. So far I've seen 23 Chris Sale strikeouts, three Hanley Ramirez home runs and a Kris Bryant and a Manny Machado home run each. As stressful as it can be, I’m still getting paid to sit in the press box with everyone I follow on Twitter, meet baseball legends and watch Red Sox games.
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