Winning Formula: Aggies Blend Baseball and Data Science
Descalso was part of the championship St. Louis Cardinals team of the 2010-11 season. It was the beginning of a nine-year major league career with stints at the Cardinals, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks and Chicago Cubs before he retired in 2019.
“I always thought that I would find myself doing something in baseball. I just didn’t know what exactly that would look like.”
UC Davis helped Descalso begin the transition from home plate to the dugout by welcoming Descalso back to the classroom in 2022 to complete the handful of classes left toward his economics degree. With his family, including newborn children, a one-hour drive away in Danville, Descalso began commuting between the Bay Area and Davis. No longer a student-athlete, Descalso was now “putting the kids to bed and then go study or finish up a couple assignments.”
“I had classes with some of the baseball players,” Descalso said. “Some people wondered if I was going to the right spot, asking if I was supposed to go to the grad school building. ‘No, I’m just here finishing.’”
He also returned to the Davis baseball program, this time as an undergraduate volunteer assistant, his first foray into coaching. After graduating, Descalso briefly worked with the Arizona Diamondbacks before returning to the dugout in his current position as a bench coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. His responsibilities include managing the run game, using hand signs to communicate with his catcher about infield play decisions. He also builds the spring training schedule, organizing the team and smaller group exercises.
But his new degree has led to unique inroads with other departments. After learning how to code “multivariable algorithms” in an analysis of economic data course at UC Davis, Descalso was able to reach across the aisle from the dugout to the front-office analysts.
“Some of the analysts were working on something, and I recognized the program. They kind of looked at me, like, ‘How do you know about that?’” Descalso said, noting most teams now have analysts writing code to understand player performance. “Just understanding what goes into those models helped me to be able to have conversations with those people that don’t necessarily have a playing background but are a vital part of our organization.”
This awareness, according to Mejdal, speaks of the ongoing “race to search for innovation” within the field of data analytics.
“It’s the skill of combining information from disparate sources,” Mejdal said. “That’s been a dramatic shift in in baseball.”
A focus on baseball
Ross Fenstermaker ’08 knows this shift well. He started his career in baseball in the early 2010s amidst a noisier communications landscape driven by social media and online video. A native of Granite Bay, California, Ross was a left-handed pitcher at Granite Bay High School and UC Davis, where he majored in economics.
