It was May of 2018 and young pitcher named David Ledbetter was continuing his journey to the major leagues. As a starter in the Texas Rangers organization, Ledbetter said he never intended to play longer than three seasons in the pros. But as opportunities continued to flow his way, he found himself on the verge of accomplishing his dreams and making it to “The Show”. He was just one level away from his dream, playing for the AAA Round Rock Express.
However, his career came to an abrupt halt. It wasn’t the result of injury or a front-office decision, it was Ledbetter’s own decision. It was time to hang up the cleats. It’s rare enough to make it to that level, but to give up all that work and time in the Farm to pursue something new is simply unheard of! He had not even the faintest idea of what lay ahead, but he did know that there were things that mattered more to him than the game of baseball! After a few months of uncertainty, an opportunity with a startup company called Big League Advance (BLA) would also come his way.
Ledbetter’s career to pro baseball was a unique one. To start, he had zero interest from division 1 schools coming out of high school, so he and his twin brother Ryan, also a pitcher, took their talents to Cedarville University, a small NCCA school in Cedarville, Ohio. After becoming an All-American and one of the top pitchers in the school’s baseball history, he, along with his brother, received tryouts with the Texas Rangers. Amazingly, both were drafted by Texas, making them the first Cedarville ball players to sign with an MLB team.
“I wanted to get drafted, but I didn’t think I’d get drafted,” Ledbetter said. “The Lord provided some crazy opportunities and things started opening up. Between getting us some incredible agents in Jonathan Maurer and Mike Montana, as well as receiving invitations to a few pre-draft workouts, there was an endless amount of “help” along the way. At long last, the Rangers took a chance on me and my brother.”
Around the same time that the Ledbetter brothers were kicking off their pro careers, Michael Schwimmer was nearing the end of his. Having noticed and experienced the small amount of pay minor leaguers receive, he came up with an extraordinary idea: why not make investments in minor leaguers that had the potential to give them immediate capital, but also pay out to investors if they became huge successes? It helped both parties. Investors could make money and players didn’t have to live in such poverty during their minor league days. In addition, players would be given extra money to improve their skills during the offseason, better increasing the chances of making the Big Leagues. He put legs on the idea and, in 2016, his new venture called Big League Advance (BLA) was founded. Raising over $150 million in investor capital provided more than enough funds to be able to begin dispersing to players and the business began to take off.
For Ledbetter, it was time to call the curtain on his baseball career, despite the fact that he was one level away from making his dreams of making it to “The Show”. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens”. Like Schwimmer, he had learned valuable lessons from his time in baseball, lessons that would stick with him and play an important role in his next career.
“For me, it was time to step away. You know, I went in with a timeline said ‘I’m going to start with three years and if I don’t make it to the Big Leagues in that span then I’ll head out to something new”, he says. “Then all of a sudden three years turns into four and four turns into five and BAM. You’re still playing! Coming into 2018 I had been really strong the previous year at AAA and then, once the season got started, I strung together quite a few quality starts as our Big League team struggled for starting pitching. At that point, I wasn’t trying to prove anything – they knew what to expect from me – and it was just a waiting game. But I was getting so much peace about walking away… and it made so much sense to me. That’s when I knew it was time.”
His retirement brought about a meeting with another recent retiree and former Little League teammate who told him about BLA and what they had done for him in his baseball career. He also mentioned that the company was looking for a player relations guy.
”Jared reached out to me because he had worked with this company,” Ledbetter remembers. “He said, ‘They’re looking for this position of a player relations guy and I think you’d do really well at it’. I’m like, ‘I’ll try anything once! So I expressed my interest and they flew me to Washington to interview me and the rest is history. I got the job a week later and I’ve been with this awesome team ever since.”
In what seemed like a flash, he was offered the job and found that it combined his passion for baseball with his degree in business. A year later, he still enjoys getting the opportunity to interact with many different people on a daily basis and learn more and more each day he steps into the office.
“I think for me the ability to build relationships with a lot of these guys is what I enjoy most. I have the background of being in the minor leagues, so I understand what they’re going through,” Ledbetter said when talking about his favorite aspect of the job. “I want to be the soundboard for a lot of these guys to try and develop them not only as players, but more so as people.”
But the position is not without challenge. He admits that one of the toughest aspects of his job is giving young players a realistic picture of their pro careers often conflicting with their own dreams and ideas of what their future might hold. While the players he works with all qualify for BLA deals and have the skills to make it big, most won’t ever “pay back” what they receive from the company. And that’s merely because the percentages of baseball are alarmingly against big-time contracts and long careers!
“I think the biggest challenge is educating the players as to how our deals work, what's involved and the benefit we’re trying to provide them,” he said. “Most players think they are going to make a hundred million dollars. That’s a good thing, you need that perspective because no one can believe in you as much as you need to believe in you. But the players also need to know that most players simply aren’t going to make that kind of money. Heck, if you make ten million over the course of your playing career that’s fantastic! We’re operating under the idea that out of any 100 guys we give offers to that four or five become superstars.”
Interestingly enough, every minor league player is screened by BLA to determine whether or not they qualify. This is calculated by system of analytics, something that has only recently begun to be used in the pro sports world. “Analytics are providing a very different perspective into the things scouts have known, but haven’t been able to put a tangible number on. I think it appeals to the engineering mind. Now you have something tangible answering the questions of ‘Why does that fastball getting on me so quick?’ or ‘How does that hitter keep his bat in the zone so long?’”
The idea to use analytics in the front office started with Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane in the early 2000s and his assistant Paul Depodesta. They proved that using math to calculate the worth and future of a player worked, as they advanced to four straight playoff berths. Depodesta is now doing the same thing with the Cleveland Browns in the NFL while also serving on the board for BLA. In fact, he helped create the system and algorithm used by Ledbetter and others to figure out if a player is worth an investment.
With the rise in math playing a role in the front offices of many teams, as well as sports companies like BLA, Ledbetter believes that analytics will soon play a role in nearly every industry.
“Data analytics is not only the future of sports, but also businesses,” he says. “It provides solutions for many non-glaring, but critical, questions. I have all this data, how do I use it to make my business better and more complete?’”
Big League Advance has proven to be a true trailblazer in the field of sports analytics, being one of the first of its kind to invest in players and think about minor league players from a math and investment standpoint. As Beane and the Athletics first discovered, data and analytics may not tell the whole story of a player’s career, but it has proven to be one of the most reliable sources for predictions. “I think what we’re doing is instrumental in both baseball as well as other industries,” says Ledbetter. “We completely trust the analytics.”
Comments