When Major League Baseball's Toronto Blue Jays come to Cleveland to start the American League Championship Series (ALCS) this weekend, one Blue Jay in particular will be really close to where he honed his craft. It's not Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista or Edwin Encarnacion, but Assistant General Manager Joe Sheehan.
 
Sheehan, who graduated from Oberlin in 2006 with a degree in biology, was member of the Yeomen baseball team and worked in the school's sports information office where statistics is a big part of the job.
 
"I liked baseball and that was where my passion was," he noted. "Senior year on fall break I was talking to a counselor at the career center at Oberlin and they asked me what I liked – baseball and math came to the forefront, so they suggested I look into this type of career."
 
His career in the big leagues started like most – at the bottom. Following graduation, Sheehan landed an internship in the public relations office of the Colorado Rockies.
 
After a year in Colorado, Sheehan began creating a niche for himself, which led him back into the big leagues. PITCHf/x, a system that tracked the velocity and trajectory of every pitch was in its infancy in 2006 and it was something that intrigued Sheehan.
 
He learned the ins and outs of the system and began doing his own original research and wrote articles online on various websites about his findings.
 
Soon enough he was back in the bigs, accepting a position with the San Diego Padres in 2008. He was then offered a new position with the Pittsburgh Pirates, helping them build their own database over the next two years.
 
A rising-star in the world of baseball analytics, the now 32-year-old Sheehan has been with the Jays since 2011 and he has continually earned more responsibilities throughout his time in the organization.
 
He has been promoted twice in the last 12 months, first earning the director of analytics title in November of 2015 before moving into his new role as assistant general manager in September.
 
In addition to running the analytics department, Sheehan will oversee the professional scouting department as well.
 
"The biggest change for me is on the scouting side, analyzing major league and minor league players. We have our group of scouts that I will oversee and it is up to me to incorporate their reports into our systems."
 
He is working for and with two very highly respected front office minds in the game in General Manager Ross Atkins and President and CEO Mark Shapiro. Both of whom that have roots that trace back to the Cleveland Indians – their ALCS opponent.
 
"They are very willing to teach and have exposed me to a ton over this past year, which certainly afforded me the opportunity to have this new position put in front of me."
 
The world of analytics in baseball has ballooned over the last decade as nearly every quantifiable statistic is tracked, from hitters' exit velocities to outfielders' route efficiencies, but ironically enough Sheehan believes the focus of future talent evaluators will be on the human element of the game.
 
"The scout input is going to become more of a separator," he noted. "At some point the analytics becomes less of a competitive advantage cause now everybody is doing it."
 
And it's not just front offices, as astute fans know where they can publicly access some of the same data the teams are using.
 
"For example you see people tweeting during the NLDS that this particular catch was a hit 70 percent of the time. Even when I was with the Pirates maybe only 15 teams were using this type of data and maybe 15 others weren't, so it was a little bit of advantage there."
 
However, as Sheehan and his analytical staff look for new ways to interpret the data, he still stresses the importance of the scouting component.
 
"We have our scouts and the Indians have their scouts, and of course we think ours are better, but that variation of opinion is going to drive the functional differences we have in our projection systems."
 
One of his first tasks when he arrived across the border was to consolidate the Blue Jays information into one database, which he and a small team of others were able to achieve in a relatively short amount of time.
 
"When I first got here things were sort of all over; if you needed scouting reports you went here, if you needed game information you went to a different place, and if you needed stats you went to this third place, so they weren't unified."
 
While he understands he didn't score the series-clinching run in the 10^th inning to complete the ALDS sweep of the Rangers (that was Donaldson), Sheehan still has the competitive fire and cherishes every win.
 
"There is no way what Donaldson did and what I do feels the same, but with that said there still is a tremendous amount of pride that we have some type of involvement in putting this together. We are competing against  people from the other organizations who are doing our jobs. We are trying to make better decisions, hire better scouts and that drives player acquisition. My competition is against the people in other offices, so it's certainly different for the guys on the field who are facing Corey Kluber, for example."
 
While Sheehan is enjoying his continued success in Canada, he isn't the only Oberlin alumnus working in the front office of a professional sports franchise in Toronto as Jeff Weltman '87 was recently promoted to general manager of the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association (NBA).
 
Additionally, 2016 graduate and former baseball player Tristam Osgood is following in the footsteps of Sheehan. As an amateur scouting assistant for the New York Yankees, Osgood worked in the Cape Cod League over the summer and produced scouting reports for the team.
 
He has since transitioned into the Yankees' Tampa offices, where he worked full-time coordinating video, data, and doing administrative work for the amateur scouting department.
 
"It's a great opportunity because it gives me the opportunity to be part of the front office and learn how everything works here, while interacting and learning from our scouts out in the field on a daily basis," Osgood says.
 
While many people from across the globe dream about working in professional sports, Sheehan, Osgood and Weltman are prime examples that Oberlin dreams can become a reality.

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