BRADENTON, Fla. — It’s no secret that the Pirates haven’t routinely been involved in the bidding wars that regularly take place each offseason for the game’s biggest names. Located in what many have deemed a “small market,” Pittsburgh’s baseball club will likely never be among the league leaders in payroll.
While it can certainly be argued that there is room for more spending on big-league free agents, the reality for teams like the Pirates is that, in order to win consistently, the margin for error is far slimmer than it is for teams such as the Dodgers, Yankees and Mets. Each decision that pertains to player evaluation and development carries a bit extra weight, which is why over the past two offseasons, the Pirates have taken steps intended to gain an advantage via a different route.
Over the last two years, the Pirates’ baseball operations management staff has undergone a total reconstruction. The most notable news has pertained to the scouting department, with Justin Horowitz, Max Kwan and Michael Voltmer assuming the director roles in amateur, international and professional scouting, respectively. All three were external hires, two coming from other clubs and the other returning to the organization after a yearlong stint with a baseball talent agency.
But while scouting is certainly a more familiar concept to the casual baseball fan, their jobs are made easier through the work of the Pirates’ research and development department (R&D), which has also recently undergone a series of additions and, as the organization would say, “evolutions.”
In November 2023, the Pirates hired Sarah Gelles from the Houston Astros to be an assistant general manager. Viewed by many as one of the up and comers in the world of baseball operations, she arrived in Pittsburgh with notable experience in R&D, having oversaw the Astros’ department from 2020 through 2023, a four-year stretch that included four ALCS appearances, two American League pennants and a World Series championship in 2021.
One year into her tenure, the Pirates hired Kevin Tenenbaum to oversee the organization’s R&D, joining forces once again with Gelles, who gave him his start in baseball as a college intern more than a decade prior.
Last week, the Post-Gazette sat down with Gelles,Tenenbaum and general manager Ben Cherington to learn more on the department’s actual function, what the new leadership brings to the table, and what early steps, initiatives and mentalities have already been implemented through their work together in the front offices on the North Shore.
What is R&D?
To most casual baseball fans, the extent of an organization’s research and development department goes as far as the hit film “Moneyball,” an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-selling book that documents the then-outside-the-box player evaluating strategies of the early 2000s Oakland Athletics.
Cherington, Gelles and Tenenbaum all can’t help but smile when such a point is made in the early minutes of their interviews, simply because in a way, that assessment isn’t far from reality.
“It’s consistent with the movie ‘Moneyball’ in the sense that we’re looking for information that somehow helps us find an advantage,” Cherington said of his R&D department.
During the time the seasons covered in “Moneyball” were unfolding, Cherington was part of the Red Sox baseball operations staff. While Boston was also viewed as one of the first organizations to embrace baseball’s analytical wave — going as far as to hire Bill James as a senior baseball operations advisor in November 2002 — not even the high-spending Red Sox had an R&D department at that time.
However, as time progressed and new data continued to make its way into the game, it became clear that not only a few individuals, but an entire department would be needed to organize and communicate information to players, coaches and decision-makers.
“There is not a single thing that happens in baseball operations, not a single thing a player does, or a single thing a member of baseball operations that is not in some way supported by the work of R&D,” Cherington said. “It’s really central to everything we do.”
While every department is constructed in its own unique way depending on what specific things are valued, Cherington explained that the Pirates’ R&D department is divided into three areas:
Player analysis: Evaluating internal and external players through additional data than what one sees on the field, or on the stat sheet to help make better choices on personnel and development. This was the first R&D role to surface in baseball’s information age and still remains the most common.
Baseball systems: A combined force of two separate initiatives within the Pirates’ R&D department that builds, maintains and warehouses the data and data tools used by the baseball operations team. Those two separate initiatives are:
- Data engineering: The process of accumulating data from different sources. In today’s world of baseball, new data is accumulated and wrangled through each workout, practice and game.
- Software development: The work that allows an organization to build a tool they can use. This ensures that decision-makers have efficient access to their data, helping them be able to make quick calls based on the aforementioned work above.
Data science: The process of analyzing said data through applied research to develop insights that can be used as an advantage. One takes a sizable data set, does research and uses that research that will lead to some conclusion or insight, often through a model.
“We want to drive the Pirates to make better and faster decisions in an effort to build a championship-caliber team,” Tenenbaum explained. “That underlines all of what we do. We want to support decisions across the organizations, empower them to make better decisions and make them more efficiently.”
Meet the team
Gelles started her baseball career in Pittsburgh as an intern in 2009. She remembers what R&D looked like back then, and how the Pirates were one of only a handful of teams that had even a semblance of that type of department, which was founded and led by Dan Fox, who remains a key figure within the organization. After watching and learning on the North Shore, Gelles took a job with the Baltimore Orioles in 2011, where she helped build that organization’s R&D department from the ground up.
“There were people leveraging FanGraphs and other really strong public work, but I actually learned from that internship with the Pirates, that the Pirates were ahead,” Gelles said. “I saw what that could look like. We had an internal desktop app that was centralizing all the information that we had — internal models, projection systems — that were supporting our decision-makers. When I got to the Orioles, the first thing that I did was try to build that infrastructure for them.”
Part of that building process involved hiring Tenenbaum as an intern following the end of his sophomore year at Middlebury College. The two worked together for a few years until Tenenbaum departed for an opportunity with the Guardians organization in December 2017. Gelles exited not long after, starting with the Astros in 2019. A department that had only three full-time employees in their early years of their work had grown to “between 15 and 20” by the time the duo was both out the door.
“At the time, that group was probably in the top third of the league,” Gelles recalled.
Both Gelles and Tenenbaum found new, larger roles with organizations at the forefront of their field. Both helped contribute to postseason success, received promotions, more responsibilities and, eventually, found their way to Pittsburgh for their current opportunities.
First, as mentioned, came Gelles, as an assistant general manager.
“I think I saw all of the sort of same buy-in from the rest of the organization for what R&D was providing,” Gelles said. “There was an excitement for it, the innovative ideas, the curiosity that really empowers R&D. The Pirates need to be really good at all of these things. We’re not going to sign $400 million contracts, so I saw that as a really exciting opportunity to help the Pirates continue the club toward a championship.”
While also responsible for many other tasks in her role in Pittsburgh, Gelles’ familiarity with R&D allowed her to allocate notable time to the department in Year 1, ultimately leading to Tenenbaum’s hiring.
“It was really exciting to work with Sarah again, but also, just thinking about working for a team like the Pirates and the people here,” Tenenbaum said. “I’ve been blown away with how innovative the group is here, how open-minded and curious they are. It’s been awesome to be a part of it.”
‘An evolution’
From the outside, hires such as Gelles and Tenenbaum would indicate the Pirates are going a new direction with their research and development department. That, however, is not the case, per those involved.
“The changes that have happened in R&D over the past year are reflective in our desire to get better and our desire to respond to a fast-moving world that we need to not only keep up with, but stay ahead of,” Cherington said. “But it’s not a new initiative. Dan Fox was doing incredible work over a decade ago, and he’s still a huge part of our leadership group. I really don’t believe we’re taking a whole new route here. We’re responding to the need that we have. I am accountable for delivering wins on the field, and we need to stay ahead of our competition in order to do that. We’ve made changes in an effort to respond to that. We’re making sure we have really strong expertise. It’s not a new idea, though. I’d see it more as an evolution.”
So what exactly does this evolution look like? How can it be defined?
For Tenenbaum, who enters his first season at the helm of the department, the key is approaching everything with an open mind.
“I think there is a real openness to thinking about the decisions we make and constantly be asking the question of, ‘OK, this is how we’ve done things in the past and this is how we’ve evolved over time — let's stop, talk and think about how can we consider how we make this decision now. How can we make this decision even better in the future?’” Tenenbaum said. “I think that applies to every decision we make in baseball, from what players we trade for, free agents that we sign, draft picks that we make, how we think about monitoring player performance and what feedback we give to them, so they can understand the ways they can best improve — how things are changing day to day.”
Paired with this open-minded approach are additional resources that have been made available throughout the last year. Multiple sources informed the Post-Gazette that the Pirates’ R&D department has received a “significant increase in funding” to help take their efforts to the next level.
While the Pirates were unwilling to delve into the specifics of what these new additional resources were, they did take time to highlight areas that will be impacted. The R&D staff that currently sits at “about 20 people” will continue to grow in the near future with a focus on adding staff that can help with current areas of need.
“It’s a work in progress,” Gelles said. “Right now, we’re trying to be opportunistic and sort of make sure we’re thinking creatively. We’re not setting out to hire a specific skill set. We’re looking to hire great people, and we’re open to skillsets looking different. But it’s going to be data scientists, engineers, we’ve got an applied analysis group, as well, that we’ve grown. So we’re really trying to grow in all directions.”
Per Tenenbaum, some new positions in the works could include, but are not limited to, software and data engineering, research, data science, applied analytics and biomechanics, the last being an area Gelles and Tenenbaum went out of their way to provide extra emphasis on.
“We have a lot of biomechanical data we’re getting from our Hawk-Eye systems that MLB installs at the major league level, and we have throughout our systems,” Tenenbaum said. “We’re putting resource emphasis on how we can use that data more effectively to build our own insights, as a place where we can find a competitive advantage relative to teams. Think about how we can use biomechanics data to help our players improve, to identify players outside the organization that we think could be successful as a Pirate, and help keep our players healthy. We’ve been doing more research on that in very innovative ways.”
Another part of that investment will go toward improved technology. In addition to better equipment to further gather and analyze data — as Tenenbaum just noted — there also seems to be a strong push to strengthen the club’s internal website to get even more information and unique features available at an instant to the entire organization’s decision-makers.
While it can seem as though R&D will have an impact in all areas of baseball, the Pirates expressed that the department’s work is not designed to replace or overrule any other existing positions or elements of the organization. The department is there to assist in decision-making and help communicate to players, coaches and other baseball operations staff the data from their research, with the hope to make the quickest and most informed decisions possible.
So how will the R&D department's efforts be measured? The simple answer: wins at the major league level.
“Ultimately, if what we’re doing is working across our organization, it’s going to lead to winning,” Tenenbaum said. “I don’t think there’s ever a time you can point to and say, ‘The R&D department did that,’ because we’re here to support people. We don’t make decisions. People might leverage our resources to help make their decisions, whether that’s a pitcher adding a pitch, or a player making adjustments to their mechanics, or a trade that we make, whatever decision it might be, people are using research that R&D provides. But those are decisions made from their expertise, and we’re layering in information that we have.”
First Published: March 20, 2025, 8:00 a.m.
Updated: March 21, 2025, 12:08 p.m.
