Michael Fishman ’97 Is Solving the Yankee Equation One Number at a Time

Michael Fishman ’97 has been on a surfboard once in his life—and it was fleeting, a lesson he took with his wife on their honeymoon in Hawaii.

So when Billy Eppler, an avid surfer and Fishman’s colleague with the Yankees, cajoled some of his office mates into entering Surfer Magazine’s fantasy surfing contest years ago, he had little idea what he was unleashing.

Fishman, poring over the rules, discovered a loophole: You could enter as many teams as you wanted as long as you used different email addresses. So Fishman developed a database of scores from the previous five years of competitions and built his own metrics for ranking and valuing surfers. Then he created new email addresses and entered his teams.

Among the nearly 18,000 entrants chasing the grand prize of a trip for two to Australia, Fishman finished first. And second. And sixth, ninth, 11th and 18th.

“When he won, there was a lot of head-shaking,” said Eppler, who is now the Los Angeles Angels’ general manager and has friends on the pro surfing circuit. “They’re like, this guy doesn’t even surf.”

The result was so unnerving that Surfer Magazine changed the contest rules, invoking what it called the Fishman Clause. Beginning in 2011, entries have been limited to one per person.

Meanwhile, that ability to solve problems, and the mastery of data to predict performance, have made Fishman, 37, one of General Manager Brian Cashman’s trusted deputies.

As the Yankees confront a major retooling, Fishman, an assistant general manager who oversees one of baseball’s largest analytics staffs, will have a prominent voice. “You want to make the best, most informed decision you can, so the deeper you can dig on something the better,” Cashman said.

When the Yankees hired Fishman in 2005, two years after the publication of Moneyball and four years after he graduated summa cum laude from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, he was their analytics department.

It has since grown to include seven analysts, five system developers and several interns who work under him. Seven former interns have landed analytics jobs with other teams, Fishman said.

Baseball’s analytics boom is hardly a secret. Yet the transformation of the Yankees, rarely known for being discreet about anything, has taken place with little fanfare. Still, when ESPN last year rated every team in the four major professional sports leagues on their commitment to analytics, the Yankees were ranked sixth among 122 teams.

Fishman is circumspect in discussing the Yankees’ analytics work in detail. “If we find an inefficiency to the game that we can exploit and then it’s made public, it’s no longer an inefficiency,” Fishman said. “Everybody knows about it.”

He added: “People who do research in baseball are making a choice: I’m going to do something that’s going to the benefit of the team that’s going to help them win games, and my research is not going to be made public. I’m not going to get the glory for my research.”

Fishman, who grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, began viewing baseball as a game of probability when he was all of seven years old. That was when he began playing Strat-O-Matic, a game that uses dice, along with cards that contain the statistics of major league hitters and pitchers. Within two years, Fishman was developing his own weighted formulas for evaluating a player’s worth.

By the time Fishman and his brother Rocky, who is two years older, were teenagers, they would gather their friends for weekend-long Strat-O-Matic binges at their house, with research notes and cards scattered all over the floor.

The cards, noted Rocky Fishman, who now works as an equity derivatives strategist for Deutsche Bank, did not have personalities or hot or cold streaks, except the ones randomly provided by a roll of the dice. Instead, he said, it was all about numbers and “the ways to maximize your odds of winning a baseball game.” In effect, his kid brother was already acting like a 21st-century baseball executive even though it was still the early 1990s and he was not old enough to vote.

By the time Michael Fishman reached high school, he had also found another outlet for a fierce competitive streak: math competitions. He entered a statewide contest in eighth grade in which the top four advanced to a national event in Washington. He finished first.

When Fishman arrived the next fall as a ninth grader at the Hopkins School in New Haven, he felt like a hot-shot basketball recruit on a college campus because upperclassmen knew all about him.

Naturally shy or reticent, Fishman does not carry himself with the cocksure gait of a former athlete, nor is he compelled to fill lulls in a conversation. Those who have known him describe him as determinedly loyal and with a wry, often understated, sense of humor.

David McCord, a teacher who coached the math team at Hopkins, recalls two things about Fishman: He was rarely seen without a Mets cap, and he became a galvanizing figure within the Math Team, a captain in the truest sense, drawing in other students who, like Fishman, might have been “a little off kilter in their social progress—very funny, quirky kids.”

“There is an intensity there that is not at all obvious,” McCord said. “One of the things about Michael, and this is very rare, is it just all made sense. I don’t think at any point in high school anything in math was trouble for him. It just made sense.”

In many ways, numbers are the prisms through which Fishman sees the world. In college, he and his friends would devise their own formulas to calculate which food at the cafeteria constituted the best deal. And when Fishman was organizing a Simpsons marathon before graduation, he ranked dozens of episodes on cassette tapes to determine the viewing order.

When Fishman had earned his degree in math, the use of analytics in sports was nascent—and baseball was nearly impossible to break into without having played the game at some level. So Fishman became an actuary at an insurance company.

But he also began a side career in the fantasy sports industry, where he became a well-known figure. Then Moneyball hit, and suddenly doors into baseball began to fly open.

Fishman sent letters to all 30 clubs. He prepared two projects—on how in-game moves affected win probability and on relief pitcher valuation—that he hoped would showcase his problem-solving skills. He landed an interview with Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, the protagonist in Moneyball, at the 2004 winter meetings, and Beane peppered him with questions.

The A’s analyst job eventually went to Farhan Zaidi, now the Dodgers’ general manager, but Fishman was encouraged enough to continue his hunt, touring spring training camps and meeting with more teams. One asked him for a sample project on batting orders, another was interested in hiring him as a computer programmer, and several asked if he were interested in an internship; he was not.

By July 2005, the Yankees expressed interest. Cashman brought Fishman in for an interview and, within a week or so, offered him a job.

“I always want to understand things from a different perspective and want the organization to make the best decision possible using all the information possible,” Fishman said. “I can’t go to a high school game and identify what those players are going to be ten years later the way scouts can. But I want to use what they’re doing to help us make the best decision.”

                                                     

This article was adapted and reprinted from The New York Times, July 25, 2016. ©The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

Photo by Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

This article also appears in the Fall 2016 issue of Views from the Hill.