You know a modern one? Major League Baseball team like the Boston Red Sox is built on a steady diet of data and analytics — this is as true on the field as it is in the front office.
While the main focus of a professional baseball club is building a competitive team that takes advantage of each player’s unique talents, the Red Sox are no different from most companies when it comes to their technical stack.
They make choices about sales and marketing tools, data storage, analyst dashboards – everything every company needs to run a business these days. The Red Sox, like many companies, are part of a larger corporate entity — in this case, the Fenway Sports Group — so they need to understand when and how to share technology with other members of the corporate family when it makes sense.
There’s another problem that most companies don’t have to consider: The Red Sox are also part of Major League Baseball, which has its own technology priorities that it shares with individual clubs.
As an example, Vasanth Williams, MLB’s chief of engineering and chief product officer, told Marketingwithanoy+ earlier this year that the league has built a relationship with Google Cloud, which can influence decisions about each individual club’s cloud infrastructure:
We have created a basic platform that all clubs can use. That’s one of the things we’ve done over the years, both on the fan side and on the baseball data side. We wanted to include all data and make it accessible in an easy way. It used to be all on-premise and in different data centers. We put it all in the cloud and made it much easier for them to query and build analytics.
To learn more about how the Boston Red Sox uses technology to run their business (and play the game), we spoke with Brian Shields, the club’s chief technology officer.
A look at the stack
Shields said his job is similar to that of a CTO at a large organization trying to define and drive the company’s technology strategy, but a baseball club’s requirements aren’t always the same.