ABOUT ME
I'm always open to connecting with teams, coaches, and fellow analysts about baseball, data, or potential opportunities. Feel free to reach out:
Email: bgillis@mail.endicott.edu
Phone: 781-910-0401
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamingillis
Baseball has been my greatest passion for as long as I can remember, and, while I initially pursued that as a player, I realized that my future in the sport would come through a different path. At that point, I discovered that my greatest strengths came from my understanding of the game itself: player evaluation, pattern identification, communicating information, and finding ways to help teams and players improve and get an edge. Since then, I've dedicated myself to building a broad foundation across baseball through player evaluation, analytics, player development support, and overall information delivery. Analytics and technology usage have become major components of what I do, yet I have always viewed these tools as means of greater understanding of the game and to help players and teams improve, and I want to make sure this information can be turned into actionable insight that will positively impact on-field performance.
How I Got Started
In the summer of 2023, I served as a Baseball Operations/Data Analytics Intern for the North Shore Navigators of the NECBL, working closely with three other interns and the organization's President. The three other interns and I managed Trackman and Synergy Sports technologies to gather pitch movement, ball flight, and biomechanical data to aid in assessing player performance, and we also generated extensive scouting reports utilizing the collected data to help the players further their careers in the game of baseball. When I first started, the Trackman server was in poor condition, and I took the initiative to learn and fix technological problems. I spent hours learning, and three days later the technological problem was fixed and it worked without error for the remainder of the season.
Following this internship, in the fall of 2023, I was offered the role of Director of Baseball Operations for the 2024 NECBL season. I am the first to hold this position in team history. As Director of Baseball Operations, I became responsible for building and leading our baseball information/analytics infrastructure while managing four interns and serving as a bridge between all of the numbers and the players. Alongside my team, I developed comprehensive scouting reports for each game, and designed pitching cards from Trackman data to help visualize pitching data to coaches and players. I also worked to create expected stats models, along with Stuff+/Location+/Pitching+ models, which help to better assess a player's raw skill and overall process, particularly within a short 40-game summer season. Additionally, I developed and have continued expanding Shiny App-based dashboards for both pitchers and position players, which house usage trends, location heat maps, break charts, release plots, spray charts, and rolling trends, and served as a centralized location for player information so that players and coaches didn't have to go through a myriad of loopholes to see their own numbers.
On Campus
While in college, I have also served as a student analyst for the Endicott College baseball team, who have reached the D3 College World Series each of the past four years, and have been consistently ranked among the top ten teams in the nation. While we do not have an excess of technology, I have done whatever it takes to help the team in any way I can. While we do not have any in-game pitch tracking technology, we do utilize Rapsodo technology during preseason live at-bat environments, which, from the data gathered, I developed a pitching dashboard akin to that of the Navigators', with movement profiles, release point consistency, location heat maps, arm slot visuals, velocity/spin trends, and a pitch sequencing matrix measuring strike-rate effectiveness. Throughout the process of developing this dashboard, I regularly talked with the coaches and pitchers regarding what data they wanted to see, which allowed the dashboard to be tailored to their needs. In season, I have also maintained a master Excel spreadsheet, with every pitch thrown by an Endicott pitcher during the season. From this data, I have created individualized tabs for each pitcher breaking down process-based metrics and statistics, like CSW% and batted ball rate for each pitch type and count situation, along with separate two-strike analyses to better understand how pitchers were finishing plate appearances. The goal was to optimize sequencing patterns by understanding which pitches generated called strikes and whiffs in putaway counts and which pitches were prolonging at bats or creating poor outcomes. These systems updated automatically throughout the season, so players and coaches could see how these sequencing changes were evolving throughout the season.
Independent Research
Beyond my work with teams, I have continued pursuing independent baseball research projects to assist in my understanding of the game. My undergraduate thesis focused on tunneling and pitch deception, specifically looking into how pitches interact with each other based on overall release similarity and break divergence. While the project involved analyzing millions of pitches across three MLB seasons, my goal from this was to understand how inter-arsenal pitch interactions could be translated into more effective game planning. As part of the project, beyond simply looking at who was "best at tunneling," I developed sequencing matrices which aimed to identify which consecutive pitch pairs within a pitcher's arsenal most effectively led to deception-based run prevention. I wanted to build something actionable that could actually help coaches and front offices tailor game plans around specific strengths and tendencies.
Another project of mine was Stat Slugfest, a website for which I wrote analytical pieces in the 2023-24 offseason. The first article I published was on Shota Imanaga and his transition from Yokohama to MLB, prior to his signing in Chicago, specifically examining how his pitch characteristics and command profile would translate from the "dead-ball" NPB run-scoring environment to that of MLB, and what those traits suggested about his future success stateside. Writing pieces like that helped me continue developing my ability to convey scouting observations, analytical information, and baseball context into more complete player evaluations.