|| PERSPECTIVE THREAD ||

I worked in baseball analytics for an MLB team during the 2018 season. Those 8 months were actually invaluable for my work today in the fantasy football industry.

While I've followed football & combed through NFL stat spreadsheets for most of my life,

baseball, for a time, was the sport I understood "best"

And that's really helped me as I transitioned to working in the fantasy football industry. Player evaluation, & just analytics projects overall, are much much further along in baseball than in football.

It makes sense. The

game of baseball is much easier to analyze than football, with fewer moving parts to the game at any one time.

It makes sense why baseball would be further along, analytically, than football.

But I can still draw on my baseball experience, & all the player evaluation projects,

with my current football research. Having a well-rounded background is really important in life, and diverse perspectives are incredibly important.

I'm better at projecting football players and understanding the intuition behind handling data on athletes because I've analyzed 2

entirely different sports.

But, just because they're different, does not mean parallels don't exist.

Aging curves, while different between the 2 sports, do exist, and it's critical to have a handle on red/yellow flags in a player's profile (PlayerProfiler mini reference...) to

know which players are likely ascending, declining, or plateauing.

Everything I've just stated in this thread is why I also encourage young professionals to not limit themselves when searching for sports analytics jobs.

I've worked for 2 MLB teams, and finished 2nd for an NFL

team's analyst role a few years ago, as well as making it through multiple rounds of interviews with an NHL team.

I'm not including that to brag (I can post another time about having an MLB internship end w/o a job offer and getting Covid-laid off from another MLB job), but

rather to demonstrate that I practice what I preach. If you're fully set on breaking into the fantasy football industry, or the baseball industry, or the basketball industry, etc... I'd encourage you to broaden your horizons, at least initially. The knowledge you will gain from

the different perspectives you'll be exposed to will make you a better job candidate later on, as well as helping you to more efficiently understand what you're "good at" and where your "value add" is in this space.

I've learned over time that my value add is in my ability to

communicate research effectively. Very few can compete with me in this area. I learned that it's definitely NOT being the quiet guy in the background who keeps his head down and codes in a dark room all day. I cannot compete with those guys.

They will out-code and out-research

me if I'm put into that environment.

If you're wondering what you can do, concretely, to broaden your perspectives & improve your chances of working in the sports industry, apply to AS MANY sports jobs as you are qualified for.

Really, I give you permission. But, for each job

you apply to, you must also be willing/able/ready to do the research and show up fully prepared to your interview.

Quantity over quality initially. As the months pass, you'll become better at interviewing, pick up a diverse collection of info along the way, and be prepared to

shift into quality mode once you've narrowed down the positions you most greatly prefer to work in.

From there, you can just let the craziness that is the sports analytics industry chew you up, bounce you around, and inundate you with new perspectives, tools, lingo, and

ideas.

I'll continue to post on this topic, and will try to answer as many DMs/questions as I can.

I'm fortunate to be where I am today, but I assure you there's been many months of anxiety, job insecurity, low wages, work stress, & fighting the feeling of whether or not it's

all worth it to work in sports.

You can do it, good people of Twitter. With America mostly shut down from Covid still, now is as good a time as any to put in the extra work on the weekends and better yourself while fewer temptations/distractions exist.