"It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life." -- Mickey Mantle.
The above quote is featured in the opening screen shot of the movie Moneyball and Siloam Springs native Abi Sislo is seeing first hand what it means.
Sislo, a 2014 graduate of Siloam Springs High School, is nearly a full season into her first job out of college as a data engineer for baseball research and development for Major League Baseball's Colorado Rockies.
"It's been a fascinating time," said Sislo, who was hired in December 2018 shortly after she graduated from the University of Tulsa with a math degree and two minors in computer science and economics. "It just kind of fell together."
Sislo, 23, has always been familiar with baseball and softball, having grown up as a travel softball player and she played four seasons at Siloam Springs High School.
After she graduated from high school, she knew she loved math and wanted to do something in a math-related field, whether it be computer science or something of that nature.
"I loved math and started doing those classes," she said. "Along the way, I changed my mind several times and ended up as a math major and did a lot of different things to figure out what I wanted to do."
Sislo said her first plan after earning her undergraduate degree was to go to graduate school, but then she began to look into other opportunities.
Sislo said she has always wanted to live in the Denver area and did a Google search of jobs in that area.
That's when she found an advertisement with the Rockies.
"It was kind of crazy," she said. "They (the Rockies) only had the position on their web site for a week."
The Rockies hired Sislo and she moved across the street from the Rockies' ballpark, Coors Field, right before the New Year.
"I walk to work every single day," she said. "The views from Coors Field are incredible. You can see the mountains around you and there's the Denver skyline. It's really cool."
Sislo's job involves sabermetrics statistics and data, a relatively new phenomenon in baseball, which was made famous by the Moneyball book written by Michael Lewis and the subsequent movie starring Brad Pitt.
Huge files of data are compiled every game by every team in the league and each team now has its own staff that goes and sorts and organizes this data into usable numbers and information.
"My main thing I do at work is I'm in charge of all the data we get," Sislo said. "We get all sorts of data, so we can help the coaches and players do the best we can."
Sislo said the data she receives could be anything from how hard a player is hitting the ball, to the ball's launch angle off the bat and its exit velocity -- all subjects discussed in today's game that wasn't done so before Moneyball.
"We get these big raw files of numbers and they may be dumped into one big file," Sislo said. "I parse through the file and put it in a database. Part of my job is automating that process."
Sislo went to spring training in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the Rockies and she also returned there back in June for the Major League Baseball Draft.
"It's been crazy, going down to spring training and the draft," Sislo said. "We're really big on creating relationships between every single part of the organization. We talk to coaches, players and the scouting department so we're all on the same page. We're all working from the same goal."
When the Rockies are playing on the road, Sislo said her job is more like a regular 9 to 5 job. But when the team is playing at home, she and her data team will often work a full day and then stay for the game as well. She said they all watch together with the scouting department and playing development groups.
"We're watching the game together as a team," she said. "We're just as critical on players as any other fan can be, except that we know what goes into a lot of it and we really believe in the players we're putting out there."
Sislo said her background in softball and athletics has helped her tremendously in her data field.
"Having that basic understanding of how the game works and how to tweak things to get better is good," she said. "I did it at a much lower level obviously. Having that understanding made it easier to explain the numbers to my GM (general manager), boss or anyone who asks."
Sislo said she's having fun and could see herself in a similar role for a long time.
"This has been even better than I ever imagined," she said. "This is somewhere I really want to be for a long time."
Sports on 07/31/2019