Heading to Steel Town

Today my column on Baseball Prospectus did not feature any new analysis or the usually endless tables overflowing with numbers and headed with three-letter acronyms. No, today marked the 100th and (at least for now) final Schrodinger's Bat column, marked with the title "Opus 100".

The column does not require a subscription and so you can read it for yourself but in the final section I briefly discuss the reason that this centennial edition is the last in the series.

To borrow from that bit...I'm leaving BP to join the front office of the Pittsburgh Pirates to become their Director of Baseball Systems Development. In that capacity I'll be assisting the excellent staff--including Kyle Stark, Bryan Minniti, Greg Smith, and Joe Delli Carri, under the direction of General Manager Neal Huntington--in building systems to support and inform the decision-making process of the baseball operations staff. All of those individuals mentioned, and many others, have made me feel more than welcome, and I'm thrilled to start the process of integrating the array of quantitative and qualitative information in a way that makes both even more instructive.

While I'm very excited at the new challenges and opportunities, I'm also a little sad as I say goodbye to Compassion International, where I've worked as a software architect for the last three years. Beyond the successes of the team in building a service oriented infrastructure that I've been blessed to be a part of, working at Compassion has truly been a wonderful experience. The dedication, intelligence, and vision of the organization and its employees to release children from poverty in Jesus' name is truly inspiring. It really is a great place to work and hey, I hear they might be looking for someone :)