Climbing The Ladder In Professional Baseball

Climbing The Ladder in Professional Baseball

I Got An Internship For an MLB Team, Now What?

Getting an internship with an MLB Team is an incredibly exciting moment. All the hard work has paid off; whether that’s from your college studies, playing or coaching experience, internship opportunities, along with the rigorous application and interview processes. It can be easy to feel like now you can rest, knowing that you will soon learn how that MLB Team operates and they will teach you what you need to know to continue your career upwards. While that may be partly true, i’m here to share how that can partially be a trap!

My first MLB Internship came after I graduated from UMass Amherst in 2017. I attended the annual Winter Meetings, took part in a few interviews, and eventually accepted an offer from the Houston Astros. I graduated in May, and since Baseball season begins in March, with spring training taking place in February, my options were quite limited and I was able to get an internship in Player Development at their short-season affiliate in Greeneville, TN.

I’m writing this blog to share what happened during that season, and after several other internships, in the hopes of helping you land a full-time role faster than I did in this industry, because there are so many aspects to working in Baseball that take time and experience to learn that you can’t master in just one internship.

What Will I Learn In My Internship?

Depending on what area your internship is within the organization, such as Baseball Ops, Player Development, R&D, Scouting, etc; the specific skills you learn will be quite different; but the general areas remain the same. Perhaps the first thing you will learn is how large MLB organizations are with their layered departments and the amount of communication that is required to succeed.

You will also learn how high the standard is for completed projects, especially when it comes to player-facing materials. While mistakes are part of all learning processes, especially internships, you will soon learn that the players are often multi-million dollar investments, so if you’re working on something that eventually will be seen or discussed with them, there is little room for error.

Perhaps the main attribute of working in Baseball that you will learn in your internship is just how demanding, physically and mentally, working in this industry is. No holidays, 6 or 7 day work weeks, working past 10pm, traveling long distances immediately after games, and so much more, are all common traits of working in the game. While these may sound rigorous, and believe me they are at times, there is also a bond that is formed only by those who have gone through these challenges and come out the other side; so in your internship, you will learn if you can and want to deal with these demands.

Lastly, you will absolutely learn how to use the specific tools or technologies required by the organization for you to carry out your role. These can be baseball technologies, new database querying skills, new coaching techniques, and so much more that will undoubtedly help you in your career moving forward. While this is very true that you will acquire new skills, there is so much more that your internship won’t teach you.

What Your Internship WON’T Teach You

While an internship in Baseball teaches you so much, there are almost as many elements about working in the industry that you simply can’t learn from one intern season with one team. In my career, I had the opportunity to intern for four different organizations, and now I get the chance to share with you what I realized I simply couldn’t learn in one season.

Firstly, your internship won’t teach you just how different the organization that you work for is from the others in the game. I remember thinking during that first summer “this must be how all teams do things!”. How wrong I was. While all thirty teams have access to similar resources and information, the ways in which they analyze and produce findings from that information couldn’t be more varied. The Astros were a very strongly analytical organization even back in 2017, and I was exposed to cutting-edge baseball technologies, proprietary user interfaces and dashboards, and saw how all the coaches in the organization were on the same page as to what metrics were most valued and what weren’t as important. Having organizational synergy is one of, if not the, most important elements to having a successful MLB organization, and I quickly learned after my first internship just how rare, and difficult, that is to achieve.

Your internship also won’t teach you what traits that YOU personally gravitate towards and feel are most impactful for success. There are so many individuals in MLB organizations that work on the same team or department, and knowing your role within that infrastructure is incredibly important to your future success. During your first internship, you may be at a minor league affiliate with only 6 other co-workers who do vastly different roles than you do. It can be very hard in this environment to learn what types of co-workers you perform best with, or the types of communication styles that work best in a baseball clubhouse or front office. You have to find your own voice in this game; whether that is in your department, with players or coaches, or even when speaking to upper management; and you have to work in different roles to be able to find that voice.

So How Do I Move Up That Ladder?

Now that we know what we will and won’t learn in your first internship; the most important question remains of how do you move up, and do it quickly? For me, I originally came into my baseball career thinking that if I performed well at my assigned tasks, worked hard, and got along well with those around me, that I would rise up. This was not the case.

The Baseball industry is simply too competitive and ever-growing to be comfortable checking boxes and even being a top performer amongst the other interns or co-workers you have. I learned after my third internship that I needed to not only excel at what I was tasked with doing, but that I needed to provide additional value to the organization that would make me indispensable. You need to realize that in this game, certain roles are internship roles, and certain ones are full-time roles. While you may have been a top intern, if that’s all the value you add, then the team may not necessarily deem you worth promoting or retaining. It is YOUR job to show them why you should get one of those coveted full-time roles.

I will close this blog with sharing some ideas on how to do that and how I did it. After your internship experience(s), while being that top performer, you will undoubtedly have been exposed to other areas of the industry in ways you never knew existed. Perhaps it was an entirely new area of the game like injury prevention, workload management, regression modeling, pitch design, and so many more. Perhaps you observed ways that the organization chose to disseminate information, and got to hear first-hand how the information didn’t land the way they intended because you’re the one with the BOOTS ON THE GROUND.

The single best way I can tell you to move up in the Baseball industry is to use your experience while your boots are on the ground to see where the organization could be improved, and dive head first into making them better in that area. Make your intentions known to the organization during your internship as well, and come up with examples of ways you can help them move forward in that department; as communicating these types of things not only shows your initiative and ability, it also shows you are thinking of the organization and committed to making it better.

Hopefully this blog helps you to visualize and map out how to personally advance your career in this industry moving past your first internship and how to navigate moving forward; because nobody ever really tells you; you have to figure it out yourself whether that’s on your own, or with help from your friends at Baseball Connect!