Turning data into on-field competitive advantage

Harbert business graduate sets his eyes on professional baseball as he wraps up project with the Auburn Tigers

Auburn University alum Ryan McTighe is hoping he will get the call to join Major League Baseball in the near future, because it’s all in the numbers.

McTighe is a 2026 business analytics graduate from Auburn’s Harbert College of Business, and that’s how he may soon be in one of professional baseball’s front offices as he proves that modern analytics can make a difference in fielding a successful team. It’s a more real-life version of the popular movie “Moneyball” starring Brad Pitt, but with new ingredients such as artificial intelligence.

What started for McTighe as a capstone project his senior year captured the attention of the Auburn baseball team so much that, after graduation, the team hired him.

“To summarize their project,” Harbert Lecturer Eric Satterfield said, “baseball generates a massive amount of data, which the students analyzed to uncover a competitive advantage. Their work provided the baseball staff with factual, actionable insights to drive decision-making rather than relying on hypotheticals.”

Results? Their efforts in the 2025 season contributed to Auburn baseball ending the year as one of the Top 10 teams in the nation.

Making the team

Auburn pitching coach Everett Teaford joined the Tigers in 2023, and as a former Major Leaguer himself, he immediately began helping Head Coach Butch Thompson and the team with recruiting and player evaluation.

The Tigers already were working with a third-party vendor that maintains a professional website and organization specializing in providing data and analytics for teams at all levels, although perhaps best known for their work with the Majors.

“It was kind of a perfect storm,” Teaford recalled when looking at the special project work of the Harbert students led by McTighe.

The third-party vendor is “more on the pro side than they are the college front, but they lost some of their internal people to Major League clubs. So, they were looking to fill a need,” he said.

That led to the former MLB pitcher tossing McTighe as a fill-in contributor, and looking at him closer than just trying to help a senior get his degree.

“Obviously, I was so impressed with what Ryan did that it was like, how could we get somebody to help on the development front,” Teaford said. “Ryan did such an awesome job with that project that we kept him kind of in a joint venture between us and the vendor.”

Thus, McTighe made the team, and soon after he, Teaford and others at Auburn began connecting the dots. They paid closer attention to what the project that began as a graduation requirement was showing them now in helping to field a roster capable of capturing a national championship.

It’s not about just ‘the big boppers’

“Data in baseball is extremely prevalent across the board, but we all get the same data. So, it’s basically, how can you use it to help win games?” Teaford explained. “Whether that’s player evaluation, whether that’s player development; and now with NIL, it involves making good, fiscally responsible decisions on players as a piece of the puzzle.”

Other teams are using data to help them in making decisions, “with some of the same ingredients. But it’s what you’re doing with them and what kind of pie is getting out there.”

McTighe explained the basics of baseball analytics usage.

“They get all of this information from different sources, and I just kind of put together a pipeline on the front end so you can visualize it and use it more effectively,” he said.

Originally, the project focused primarily on creating a defensive model for the team, looking at current and prospective players by studying their fielding percentages, athletic abilities and other factors and then considering any margins of error.

“By using that stat and then looking at all the players in the portal, we can find the second-tier players that add more value than just like, the big boppers that everyone was going after,” McTighe said.

Teaford feels the analytics work on several levels.

“It’s definitely more about building up and coaching and figuring out what’s the next step in their development process,” he said. “Nowadays, kids are asking ‘why’ a lot more than in the past. Now we can kind of show them exactly why, and not just our opinion. It’s the data being told us.”

The recruiting angle: Pitchers pitch, hitters hit

It’s not just the numbers concerning the recruit, but also the numbers associated with the players on the field with them, and how the ballpark itself matters.

“On the recruiting front, we showed one player we brought in how much better our infield defense was than his last team’s defense, and he’s a groundball pitcher. So, that was a selling point,” Teaford said. “It felt like through Ryan’s modeling and different visuals he created it was a clear indicator.”

McTighe helps deliver the recruiting message: “We could just sit there, show the results and show with a better infield like ours, ‘just imagine how your numbers will improve by nothing else but just coming over to the team.’”

Matching field dimensions to player’s habits also matters, he said, such as pitchers pitching on a smaller field wanting more room in the outfield to record outs; or for hitters the opposite, wanting a smaller distance from a home plate to a home run.

“That helps out a lot, seeing who fits our field the best, and using that to sell to guys,” McTighe said.

Meanwhile, Harbert’s Satterfield, who lectures in business analytics and information systems, reminded of how this began with an idea and passion in a business analytics class.

“Ryan’s success simply reinforces our expectation that students become problem solvers and analytical thinkers,” he said. “We want them to understand business problems first and then solve those problems using technology.

“Ultimately, real-world challenges are a fantastic extension of the classroom,” he said. “To use a baseball analogy: There is only so much batting practice you can take before you eventually need to play the game live.”

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Learn more about majoring in business analytics in the Harbert College of Business