Crosspost: ‘She astonishes me’: How an astrophysicist is helping the Oakland A’s fine-tune their pitches

Written By: Shayna Rubin for The Mercury News

Dr. Samantha Schultz, an astrophysicist turned pitching analyst for the Oakland Athletics, is shown here in the field with Oakland A's pitcher, Lou Trivino. Credit: Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group.

Samantha Schultz called her mom from college in the middle of a meltdown, frustrated with the complicated math she needed to master for her degree in astrophysics from St. Mary’s College.

Her post-graduate plan had been to get her Ph.D. in particle physics. That wasn’t her plan anymore. Through tears over the phone, Schultz told her mother the new one: to work in baseball.

Huh?

That her science-obsessed daughter wanted to go in another direction was shocking enough. But getting where she wanted to go in baseball was harder than math.

“You look at the front office names, and going off first names, 98 percent of women are in marketing or something similar — not baseball operations,” Schultz’s mother, Elizabeth Baldwin, said last week. “I told her, ‘You might have to start out with something boring like cricket, or hockey.’

“She said, ‘Nah, I’m gonna do baseball.’”

Now 26, Schultz is a pitching analyst for the A’s. In four years, she has gone from the Big Bang to the big leagues.

“She was confident it would be baseball and not some other sport she had minimal interest in — and she did it,” Baldwin said. “She astonishes me.”

First love

When it came to baseball, the Giants were Schultz’s first love.

While other baseball fans in the Bay Area and around the globe were engrossed by Barry Bonds’ home run chase and enigmatic stardom, Schultz was drawn to the pitching — Jason Schmidt, Robb Nen and, later, Matt Cain and Sergio Romo. But it was the undersized Tim Lincecum, with his powerful delivery and the supernatural movement on his pitches, that gave flight to her love of pitching.

“It was the dominance,” she said. “Watching him be dominant with mechanics that are not routine and something you wouldn’t teach. The beauty of his changeup. The way he used his pitches, it made me fall in love with pitching as its own art form.”

After leaving St. Mary’s with her astrophysics degree and math minor, Schultz enrolled in the sports management program at Columbia University. It was there, while working with the baseball team, that opportunity began to knock. And knock. And knock.

The woman who had worked without pay for the St. Mary’s baseball team, serving as official scorer and in any other capacity, had been recruited by Major League Baseball’s diversity fellowship program. She had an internship with the New York Mets and was juggling offers from the Tampa Bay Rays and the San Diego Padres. She had been a runner-up for a uniformed position as a traveling analyst with the Cincinnati Reds, which would have made her the first uniformed woman on an MLB coaching staff — a few years before Giants trailblazer Alyssa Nakken.

In a baseball landscape where teams are constantly looking for a unique edge and expertise, an astrophysics background was proving attractive.

Read more about Samantha Schultz's fascinating career turn from astrophysicist to pitching analyst for the Oakland A's and how her extensive math background has helped pitcher, Lou Trivino, improve his game:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/14/how-an-astrophysicist-is-helping-the-oakland-as-fine-tune-their-pitches/