Rays Front Office: Five Earn Promotions

The Rays are promoting from within, deciding to reward those who earned it with the team instead of bringing in new personnel

Few people pay much attention to the front office moves made by baseball organizations aside from the General Manager, President, and for some, the Scouting Director. However, the information those leaders have comes from the team they put together. The better the quality of those folks, the better the chances they’ll put a winning team together.

As Rays President Matt Silverman stated:

"“Our baseball operations staff is filled with talented people, and these promotions are further evidence of that,” “Each person in this group is integral to our operations, and their expanded responsibilities will provide them new avenues for growth, development and impact.”"

The Rays recently promoted five of their Operations personnel and we’d like to point each of them out to you. The link to their entire Front Office staff page is here.

Peter Bendix

• Previous position: Coordinator, Baseball Research and Development
• New Position: Director, Baseball Development
• Bio: One of the original Rotographs feature members. Rotograph is “FanGraphs’ fantasy baseball advice and analysis section”.  You can find much of his work here, including praise for Cameron Maybin, Brandon Wood, Zach Duke and Ian Snell. He’s an extremely intelligent guy who is half responsible for the Knuth-Bendix algorithm.

Shawn Hoffman

• Previous Position: Analyst, Baseball Research and Development
• New Position: Director, Scouting Analytics
• Bio: Works out of N.Y., graduated from University of Michigan. His background includes work at Baseball Prospectus, with much of his work available here.
• Recently participated in MLB.com’s Baseball IQ tournament (charitable event), beating out the representative from the Orioles – Jay Moskowitz. He eventually lost to the Red Sox Video Coordinator, Billy Broadbent.
• While at BP, in 2011, predicted the 2016 Yankees would have Hanley Ramirez playing SS, and that their 2018 rotation would include Tim Linecum, Zack Greinke, Stephen Strasburg, Justin Verlander, and Roger Clemens. Thought that was interesting. He’s also a huge Steelers fan and has a picture of Bill Cowher as his Twitter account logo.
• Follow him on Twitter: @shawndhoffman

Kevin Ibach

• Previous Position: Pro Scout
• New Position: Director, Pro Scouting
• Bio: Studied at Lasalle University, was a Midwest Area Scout for the Marlins, as well as the Orioles Baseball Operations Coordinator after working his way up from minor league operations assistant
• Follow him on Twitter: @kevinibach (although he admits to not Tweeting much)
• On a serious note, and to help him and his family out, this is a Tweet from Kevin in September of 2014. So far, $44,361 of their goal of $50,000 has been raised, and it’s still an active fund-raiser:

Josh Kalk

• Previous Position: Analyst, Baseball Research and Development
• New Position: Director, Pitching Research and Development
• Bio: Physicist, Math Professor from Bluefield State College in West Virginia. Apparently, “when Josh Kalk was hired to be a statistical analyst, the Rays didn’t want him revealing anything about where he was going or which organization hired him. They kept him off the main directory and tried to conceal everything about him.” Andrew Friedman hired him after he did much of his work for the Hardball Times.
•  Jonah Keri mentioned this about him: “Kalk’s ability to break down the intricacies of a pitcher’s delivery stood to save the Rays millions of dollars — maybe even tens of millions. All for the price of a Bluefield State professor.”
• This is a MUST READ ARTICLE from Kalk who is noted as one of the best PITCHf/x analysts in baseball. Daniel Kishi at DRB notes here how his idea has evolved over time and helped lead them to the use of KinaTrax.
• One of his theories, as an example of his work, is that he “theorized that minimizing the difference between a slider and a fastball along the beginning of their trajectories might be a key to a slider’s effectiveness.”

Brian Plexico

• Previous Position: Architect, Baseball Systems
• New Position: Director, Baseball Systems
• Bio: Biggest compliment received from Operations Coordinator who stated  “The work that he has done is central to our efforts to improve the organization.”
• Follow him on Twitter: @brianplexico
• If you want to find work with the Rays, it might be an account you want to follow, as he Tweeted the following in July:

Looking through this list, you notice that all of these individuals have a vast array of experience. Some are part of a no-longer new effort to bring in extremely intelligent people who can provide insight in one form or another. Whether it’s purely analytical or scouting, it’s fair to say that each of these guys has brought something important to the Rays front office as they try to compete with any edge they can gather.

Next: Tampa Bay Rays: Reflecting Upon the Future

Congratulations go out to all of them for their promotions and we certainly hope they’ll continue to do the outstanding work they’ve done so far. If the Rays are interested in filling the spots made available with one of the hardest working individuals they could ever hire, I’m available and willing to interview!