How Caltech Analysts Power the Dodgers Dynasty

In the beginning, Ryan Casey, (BS ’15) admits, it was a struggle to get players to buy into statistical analysis.

He recalls an instance from the 2016 season. Dodgers center fielder Joc Pederson would consistently play shallow on defense in the outfield. “We told him one day, ‘You’ve just got to play way deeper and you’ll catch all these fly balls that are going over your head,’” says Casey, a developer in the team’s baseball systems unit. In the next series versus the Arizona Diamondbacks, the outfielder ended up making numerous catches at the warning track—catches he likely would have never made had he been playing as shallow as before. Pederson seemed surprised. “Oh, you guys are right,” he told them. Casey says it was one of the first times he saw his work impacting in-game results.

Casey came to the Dodgers that year after a master’s at UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s at Caltech, where he had walked onto the Beavers’ baseball team and helped the Division III program win its first game in nearly 10 years. The child of two alumni, Casey takes great pride in both graduating from Caltech and helping change the fortunes of the baseball team. “I contributed to increasing our winning percentage exponentially,” Casey says with a chuckle.

That achievement notwithstanding, a professional playing career was not in the utility player’s future. While Casey’s dream of playing for his hometown Dodgers was never going to pan out, he found the next best thing: a job in the team’s front office. Casey, a Valencia native, became the organization’s third software developer hire, charged with building tools and applications for the baseball operations department that streamlines the player evaluation process.

Today Casey counts at least a dozen developers and data engineers in the Dodgers’ baseball systems unit. The newest member of that team is fellow Caltech grad Grace Peng, (BS ’20). Before she took a job as a quantitative analyst with the Dodgers in 2021, the Bay Area native had dazzled as the Beavers’ star point guard, setting Caltech women’s basketball records in career scoring, field goals, and assists. She walked off the commencement stage in Pasadena almost directly into the front office at Dodger Stadium.

“I got lucky with the hiring,” says Peng. “I just saw the Dodgers had a job post up after I graduated and I applied. Being a computer science major, that was the dream coming out of school.”

Up until the June day I spoke with Casey and Peng over Zoom, Peng had served as a quantitative analyst for four years; she was part of a data science team focused on using mathematical modeling and statistics to build metrics for evaluating players and projecting performance. In other words, she and her colleagues helped the Dodgers build—and constantly refresh—its winning roster of on-field talent.

Our conversation happened at an auspicious moment: Peng would join Casey on the baseball systems squad the following week. Two days before we spoke, the Dodgers’ Japanese two-way megastar Shohei Ohtani had made his pitching debut for the club. The day after that, the boys in blue had beaten their National League West rivals the San Diego Padres to extend a four-game win streak. And just an hour before the three of us hopped on the call, news dropped that the Dodgers owner Mark Walter would be paying $10 billion to acquire another historic SoCal sports institution: the Los Angeles Lakers. The Dodgers are not just leading a renaissance in L.A. baseball but supercharging fan enthusiasm for SoCal sports across the board—and Casey, Peng, and their coworkers in the Dodgers’ front office have their digital fingerprints all over the team’s winning formula.