Inside Baseball

As assistant GM of the St. Louis Cardinals, John Abbamondi '93 revels in the data analysis that goes into fielding a winning team.

The contents of John Abbamondi's in-box wouldn't be out of place on The Office--a new cell-phone policy to approve, employee reviews to tackle. "It's all kinds of normal company stuff, because this is a company," says Abbamondi '93.

Credit: David Torrence

Then again, most companies don't have Albert Pujols on the payroll or 10 World Series titles to their credit.

Now finishing his second year as assistant general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, Abbamondi is part of a new wave of baseball executives bringing fresh perspective to the game. "Teams are looking for an edge in any way they can," he says. "They are using more people from a nontraditional background, because clubs recognize that a relentless pursuit of improvement means that you try to look through as many informational lenses as you possibly can." Combining skills such as quantitative analysis with an ability to mine innovative ideas from unconventional places, Abbamondi has helped the 2006 World Series champs remain postseason contenders.

Major League front offices are often staffed by baseball lifers who have spent years playing, coaching, or scouting everything from college ball on up. Abbamondi, however, came to the Cardinals by a more unconventional route. He attended MIT on a navy ROTC scholarship and spent the next nine years as a naval flight officer. But he was also a baseball aficionado and "kept following baseball, particularly the business side," he says. "I was the guy reading the news on collective-bargaining agreements and reading books by [sports economist] Andrew Zimbalist."

Abbamondi began to think even more seriously about sports after he left the navy to attend Stanford's Graduate School of Business. As he weighed possible post-MBA careers, classmate and San Francisco 49ers employee Paraag Marathe introduced him to several people in the sports industry, and business-school classes with sports management guru George Foster further piqued his interest--and gave him an opportunity to meet Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A's.

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In 2004, those informal connections and some mentoring helped him land a job in Major League Baseball's labor-­relations department, which negotiates and administers collective-­bargaining agreements with players and umpires. There, he found himself drawing on quantitative skills he'd honed as a political-science major at MIT. "There were lots of public-policy-oriented problems that we looked at quantitatively," he says. "It's not altogether different from the stuff I did in the commissioner's office."

The group also served as a central advisor to MLB teams, giving Abbamondi a consulting opportunity that would prove a crucial stepping stone. "It was a good place to learn the business," he says. "Club executives would come to you with their trickier problems, and we got to respond and help clubs solve them. We got a ton of experience, and got to meet people from a lot of clubs." Shortly after the Cardinals' 2006 victory, John Mozeliak, then the club's assistant GM, asked for advice on contract negotiations with David Eckstein, who'd just received the World Series MVP award. "We could act as a dispassionate third party and say, 'He's a great player, but here's what this similar player signed for as a comparison,' " he says.