As a lifelong baseball fan, Jake Primack always knew he could see himself working for Major League Baseball. But during his time at Denison, he didn’t have any professional experience in sports, and wasn’t exactly sure what his post-graduation plans looked like. When Covid-19 hit Denison’s campus, sending students home, Jake had an opportunity to reflect on his career aspirations, and realized his passion was to break into the baseball world. With time to focus during the pandemic, Jake logged into Linkedin, searched for the name of each MLB team, and started connecting to anyone he could find who looked like a valuable resource during the application process. As time passed, Jake graduated and got a job in Chicago with a consulting organization, but never stopped looking for baseball-related jobs. Finally, he got in touch with a few organizations, and started interviewing.
While applying to work for the Philadelphia Phillies, Jake was asked to analyze the international talent scouting process, and after that, had a video call with a hiring manager. At one point during the application process, he received a challenge to create data visualizations from a collection of player performance metrics. Leaning into his experience as a Data Analytics major, Jake focused on presenting to a non-technical audience (coaches) when working on that interview project, and was able to navigate the task successfully. Understanding the audience was more important than using fancy tools – a classic focus of the Denison DA major.
Jake started with the Phillies in spring 2022, and is entering his fourth season this year, as an Assistant in Player Development. He loves his work, and it changes pretty regularly. During the offseason, he focuses on minor league free agents, looking for undervalued talent that could have an impact on the big-league level. In season, Jake does roster management for over 200 players on all levels of the Phillies organization, helping determine who gets promoted, and how they go through the location change to join their new club. Jake says that his major in Economics helps with contract suggestions, being able to evaluate the market and understand what a player is worth. And coming up soon is the Rule 5 Draft, for which Jake is creating queries that will pull data to evaluate which players should be protected and targeted during that process.
Jake feels that his experiences on campus played a major role in preparing him for this job. Majoring in Data Analytics gave him strong presentation skills, which is a significant piece of his responsibilities, especially when he has to present complex analyses to coaches who are both busy and don’t have a data-oriented background. He uses R on a regular basis to create visualizations that get handed directly to decision makers, and feels that anyone looking to get into player analytics should have that skill. In terms of other skills to have, Jake listed Python and SQL as good backups to R, along with having an understanding how to calculate sports metrics and produce statistical evaluations of players. Soft skills can’t be overlooked either – Jake emphasized that regardless of the project he’s working on, clear and concise presentation skills are always crucial.
Jake says his involvement out of the classroom at Denison also helped him prepare for his career. On campus, two of his big commitments were RED Corps (through the Red Frame Lab) and DCGA. Red Frame Lab involvement taught him how to work with people with different priorities and skill sets, which has been highly applicable when his role in player development has him collaborating with people from a wide range of backgrounds in the Phillies organization. And his time on the DCGA finance committee gave him practice in being part of a small section of a big operation, learning that he could bring value to a larger purpose from a specific role. That mindset has allowed him to take pride in his behind-the-scenes work with the Phillies, knowing that his work really does make a difference.
Jake is having a great time working for the Phillies, with a wide range of responsibilities and an opportunity to make a real impact on the organization. His story is a great example of how your time at Denison can be instrumental in preparing for your ideal career, even if you don’t end up there immediately after graduation. Jake’s pursuit of the job he truly wanted should serve as a goal of what Denison students should all try to accomplish.
