Volume 28 · Number 2 · Winter 2011
Sports
A numbers game
Daniel Descalso may have been the first Aggie position player to reach the major leagues, but he is not the only St. Louis Cardinal to call UC Davis his alma mater. Sig Mejdal ’89 serves as a senior quantitative analyst for the ballclub.
Mejdal has been a baseball fanatic his entire life. As a grade-schooler fascinated with the stats on the backs of baseball cards, he joined the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), an organization known among other things for spawning a discipline of empirical baseball study known as “sabermetrics.” He completed his undergraduate studies in mechanical and aeronautical engineering at UC Davis, added two engineering master’s degrees from San José State University, then worked for NASA creating mathematical models that predict human performance based on large samples of sleep-cycle data.
Mejdal maintained his interest in baseball research as a hobby, but never considered it as a potential career until Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game, hit booksellers in 2003. Moneyball examined how Oakland As General Manager Billy Beane used sabermetrics and quantitative analysis to assemble a team that competed successfully with better-funded opponents. Soon, the Boston Red Sox hired esteemed baseball expert Bill James as a consultant. Other teams followed suit, hiring their own number crunchers.
When professional baseball executives gathered in New Orleans in December 2003 for their annual winter meeting, Mejdal was waiting in their hotel lobby to pitch his analytical skills.
“I thought I’d have a job by the end of the week and that the 29 other teams would be crawling over each other to find someone with my background,” Mejdal said.
He guessed wrong. But Mejdal stayed persistent, submitting proposals to teams while serving as an expert for a 2006 book by Sam Walker, Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball’s Lunatic Fringe. More than a year later, St. Louis Cardinals vice president Jeff Luhnow contacted Mejdal.
Luhnow said Mejdal brings a unique blend of traits to the Cardinals’ front office.
“Sig was absolutely what we were looking for, which is somebody with a passion for baseball, who had deep roots analytically and a fresh perspective,” Luhnow said.
Six seasons with the Cardinals and one World Series ring later, Mejdal credits his years at UC Davis for preparing him for his current profession. “The engineering methodology I learned at Davis — the logical, systematic process in which you attack a seemingly unsolvable problem by breaking it down into smaller, more digestible chunks . . . really could describe my job well,” he said.
“When I see Descalso play in the majors, I have to smile as it reminds me and makes me appreciate the experiences that have come with being both an Aggie and a Cardinal. I wouldn’t be surprised if Daniel feels the same way.”