The 2021 Diamond Dollars Case Competition winners were announced Friday, March 12 during the SABR Virtual Analytics Conference.
The winning teams selected were from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Cornell University, Syracuse University, and the Horace Mann School in New York City.
The University of Chicago team — which was picked to deliver an encore presentation in front of the full SABR Analytics Conference on Saturday — included Jacob Fain, Cam Harrigan, Trevor Million, and Omar Taveras.
The Cornell University team included Alexandra Conte, Kirk Greenspan, Daniel Johnson, Tyson Kochan, and Matthew Simeoni.
Syracuse University sent four teams to participate; the Team 2 winners were Seth Warner, Sam Auerbach, Brent Huot, Kevin Ivers, and Preston Klaus.
The Horace Mann School team included Maxwell Resnick, Aidan Resnick, Jake Federman, and Eshan Mehere.
In this year’s case, the students were asked to devise an improved metric for Game Score, created by Bill James (and later updated by Tom Tango) to evaluate the performance of starting pitchers.
In the Diamond Dollars Case Competition, undergraduate, graduate and professional school students from colleges and universities across the country compete against each other by preparing an analysis and presentation of a baseball operations decision — the type of decision a team’s GM and his staff is faced with over the course of a season. The cases are developed by former SABR Board President Vince Gennaro, co-founder of the SABR Analytics Conference, author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball, and consultant to MLB teams. The Diamond Dollars Case Competition is the first national competition to be based solely on baseball operations issues.
Four- to five-person student teams are asked to evaluate a baseball operations case problem. The student team presents their analysis and recommendations to a panel of judges that includes MLB front office executives.
This year’s judges included Cameron Barwick (Major League Baseball), Adam Brodie (Houston Astros), Travis Buck (MLB), Catherine Cage (Houston Astros), Cody Callahan (Arizona Diamondbacks), Tani Cohen (MLB), Samuel Elias (Los Angeles Dodgers), Ben Jedlovec (MLB), Katie Krall (Cincinnati Reds), Kyle Krueger (MLB), Joseph Martinez (MLB), Joe Rosales (Sports Info Solutions), Greg Rybarczyk (Boston Red Sox), Scott Shapiro (Magnus Sports), Greg Starek (San Francisco Giants), Victor Wang (Cleveland Indians), and Craig Weinhaus (Los Angeles Dodgers).
Callahan is a former winner of the Diamond Dollars Case Competition at the SABR Analytics Conference.
Other participating schools were: Elon University, Loras College, Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School in Virginia, St. John Fisher College, Tufts University, University of Florida, and Washington University in St. Louis.
For more coverage of the 2021 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
More than 120 alumni from the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 Diamond Dollars Case Competitions have secured internships or permanent positions within Major League Baseball.