Meet Di Zou, the Orioles' bridge between the past and future of their burgeoning analytics department
What a thrill it must be to work for your hometown baseball team, and yet what a drag to have done so at the beginning in a department that many were led to believe didn’t exist.
That was the reality for Di Zou, who began working in the Orioles’ marginalized analytics department in 2017 and was the lone holdover when the new front office under executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias and assistant general manager Sig Mejdal came in to make the department a priority.
Buffering those two distinct eras was a brief period where he was the only one left, bringing reality as close as it would be to the wrongly-held perception Zou is happy to push back on: that the Orioles didn’t have an analytics department at all.
“I was by myself for about three weeks, so it wasn’t that long, but it was sort of lonely in the sense that there’s no one else in this department,” said Zou, now the Orioles’ director of baseball systems.
“I still had stuff to do, but it was just like, ‘Now, there’s no sort of overarching direction.’ I was like, ‘I’m just going to do the stuff we need to do right now until whoever comes in,’ but there was no [plan to] have to do this for next year.”
The one who came in happened to be Mejdal, the rocket scientist turned front office baseball mind with the Houston Astros. But to say that was when the fun began for Zou discounts what happened before.
A native of the Baltimore area whose first Orioles games were so early in life that he doesn’t remember them, Zou went to the University of Maryland and majored in math with a physics minor but didn’t see a path into baseball when he graduated in 2009.
He worked programming and data engineering jobs after graduation, and was living in Rhode Island where his wife was doing her residency when in 2017, they decided to move back to the area and he looked for jobs here.
He interviewed in March 2017 with Sarah Gelles, then the Orioles’ director of baseball analytics, and analyst Kevin Tenenbaum in Sarasota, Florida. He asked them to take his picture on the field at Ed Smith Stadium to commemorate the occasion, figuring it could be the last time he was there. His hiring ensured that wouldn’t be the case.
As a developer in the Orioles’ small analytics department, Zou was responsible for building up and populating the internal website – named OMAR after the popular character from The Wire – with the reams of data and platforms that help interpret it for the rest of the front office and field staff.
Zou said: “The website is used to see all this data that we get, and so the job then is basically just to manage the website and build out features of the website, make sure all the data importing is happening correctly, doing whatever data transformations we need to do – it’s called data ETL (extract, transform, and load), so writing all the software to do all of that stuff and then doing reporting on top of the data.”
James Daniels, who was later hired back as a full-stack developer, had started work on the site as an intern a year or so before Zou arrived, but it was a small team of full-timers when Zou arrived. That group worked closely with some areas of baseball operations in the front office, but struggled to get their insights or work to the field level due to how siloed the organization’s dysfunction had made things.
There were uses in player acquisition on the professional side, as well as in the amateur draft, where the Orioles used TrackMan data to enhance and quantify the case for deceptive left-handers Keegan Akin and Zac Lowther.
It was a harder road for Gelles and her team to connect with the major league or minor league staffs, though, and in turn was difficult to use the data to help players. Those headwinds didn’t do much to dampen Zou’s spirits, though – he was working in baseball for his favorite team, and was thrilled to be there.
Eventually, he was the only one remaining. Tenebaum left to work for Cleveland ahead of the 2018 season, and amid the turmoil of the Orioles’ season-ending house cleaning after 2018, Gelles went to work for the Astros. Those departures made it seem the department wasn’t there at all.
Zou said: “I’d read that and be like, “No, we had people! We had some people!’ When Sarah was there, when Kevin was there, we were doing some pretty forward-thinking stuff and advanced stuff. I think we didn’t get as much credit as we deserved, and they didn’t get as much credit as they deserved.”
The front office changeover also saw many of those Zou worked closely with in baseball operations leave as well, so when contracts expired at the end of October, many of them didn’t return.
“I wasn’t actually depressed, but it was pretty depressing,” he said. “I was sitting in my office by myself doing this work.”
Elias’ hire and the subsequent addition of Mejdal meant Zou wouldn’t be on his own for long. Mejdal’s hire was announced shortly before Thanksgiving, and Zou did some online sleuthing to find that Mejdal was appearing at a conference in Japan, so he thought he wouldn’t meet his new boss for a while.
Mejdal surprised him by strolling through the office the next Monday, having cut his trip short. So Zou chased him down and gave him a breakdown of what his department looked like. Almost immediately, they landed on needing six hires, and jobs were posted quickly. Zou spent part of a vacation to New Zealand reading resumes. So did an intern here in Baltimore – there was no one else to do it.
From Mejdal’s arrival through essentially the June draft, it was a sprint to get systems up in time for spring training, then the minor league system, and then the draft.
“We needed to hire all these people, and then we needed to build out all of these things,” Zou said. “That first six months, it was just a mad dash of building out a bunch of things that we needed. All the people we hired, they’re great. They jumped straight in and just sort of built all these amazing new things. Those are the ones that are still here now, that we hired then.”
That group, including analysts Ryan Hardin, James Martin III, Hugh McCreery, and Michael Weis, plus developers Daniels and Peter Ash, has been responsible for helping the Orioles get up to speed in a field where the best teams are constantly trying to find an edge.
In the early days, Zou said it was a mix of changes they needed to make to existing platforms, building systems they had sought before but didn’t have the capacity for, and “also a bunch of new stuff that was like, ‘Oh my God, I never knew this. This is amazing that we can do this.’”
Now, he’s a significant part of what’s been built, having been promoted to baseball systems manager in 2019 before earning a director role this offseason. Mejdal hopes to make a handful of hires this winter to continue the department’s growth, if they haven’t already, but it will be Zou who can give a full picture of both where the group they’re joining started and where it’s going.
“I just feel extremely lucky that I could stick around,” he said. “This is the longest job I’ve had by far. I just feel really lucky that I can wake up and do something that I love so much.”
I knew things would be different when I saw the cameras installed at Arthur Perdue Stadium for the Delmarva Shorebirds in April 2019. I almost cried when I saw them. My favorite team was finally not fighting with one arm tied behind its back. Can't imagine how much they had to get done in a few shorts months to get all those camera and data collection up and running at all the Orioles' MiLB stadiums for the 2019 season.
Great article. Would love to hear more about the holdovers in the organization who can talk about the differences between the Duquette and Elias eras. It's always interesting to get that peek behind the curtain and see what the transition has been like.