Red Sox CTO: Baseball teams need modern tech stack as much as any other biz

Image Credits: Maddie Meyer / Staff / Getty Images

As much as in the front office, a modern Major League Baseball team is built on a steady diet of data and analytics.

While the main focus of a professional baseball club is building a competitive team that takes advantage of the unique talents of each player, when you get down to it, the Red Sox are no different from most businesses.

Sales and marketing tools, data storage, analyst dashboards are just some of the things that they make choices about. When and how to share tech with other members of the corporate family is something the Red Sox need to understand.

Major League Baseball has its own technology priorities that it shares with individual clubs, which is something most businesses don't have to consider.

According to Vasanth Williams, MLB's head of engineering and chief product officer, the league has established a relationship with Google Cloud, which could affect each individual club's cloud infrastructure decisions.

We created a base platform that all clubs can leverage. That’s one of the things we’ve done in the last few years that is both on the fan side as well as on the baseball data side. We wanted to bring all the data and make that accessible in an easy way. Back in the day, it was all on-premise and in different data centers. We put it all in the cloud and made it much easier for them to query and build analytics on.

We spoke to Brian Shield, the club's chief technology officer, to learn more about how they use technology.

A look at the stack

Shield said his job is similar to that of a CTO at a large organization trying to define and drive the company's technology strategy but the requirements of a baseball club aren't always the same.