Expected Value TruMedia Networks

Tim Gibbons is TruMedia’s baseball professional services lead, dealing with players, agencies and facliities. He previously worked as a minor-league hitting coach in the Orioles system. In this episode, Tim talks about…
- His career path to becoming a hitting coach
- What a minor-league hitting coach does
- Data available to minor-league teams
- How a minor-league team’s approach is influenced by the parent club
- Communicating data to players
- Mixing data with coaching of mechanics
- How facilities and agencies use data
- New baseball data points available to coaches
- Follow Tim on Twitter: @LineDrivePro

Allison Loucks is the Director of Business Development and Innovation at ESPN, where she oversees ESPN’s Analytics group. Her team has created ESPN metrics including their Total QBR, Basketball Power Index and pass rush win rate. In this conversation, Allison talks about…
- What she does as a director of the analytics group and what a typical day looks like
- How ESPN creates proprietary metrics
- Challenges of using complex metrics in simple ways
- How sports betting has affected her team’s work
- Common misconceptions about ESPN metrics
- What’s on the horizon for the analytics team
- What she looks for when hiring
- Her ESPN career and journalism background
- Meeting one of her sports heroes
Show links
- ESPN Analytics home page

Matt Chang and his team won the 2024 NFL Big Data Bowl, an analytics competition with a $25,000 first prize. In this episode, Matt will discuss…
- His team’s submission, entitled Uncovering Missed Tackle Opportunities
- What the Big Data Bowl is and how he and his team became interested
- The data and question provided by the NFL
- Attacking that question through trial and error
- Creating a metric and its components
- Making the outputs easy to understand
- Ideal next steps with their metric
- Advice for anyone looking to enter contests like the Big Data Bowl
Show Links
- Kaggle notebook for Matt’s team’s winning submission
- Video of Matt’s team’s presentation
- Matt’s advice for future Big Data Bowl contestants
- Big Data Bowl home page
- Big Data Bowl Kaggle home page
- Matt’s transition from hardware to machine learning
- Follow Matt on Twitter and LinkedIn

Ben Zauzmer is an assistant general manager with the New York Mets, and he’s better known publicly for his book Oscarmetrics and his Twitter account @BensOscarMath, where he uses data to project winners of the Academy Awards. With this year’s Oscars ceremony coming on March 10, Ben joins Expected Value to talk about…
- How he got into the Oscars predictions business
- Creating an Oscars model from scratch
- The variables that go into his calculations
- Projecting nominees vs projecting winners
- Explaining probability
- Factoring in betting markets
- Reaction from the film community
- Majoring in applied mathematics at Harvard
- Course and skills recommended to aspiring analysts
- His favorite movie and favorite Best Picture winner
Show links
- @BensOscarMath on Twitter
- Buy Oscarmetrics on Bookshop or Amazon

Bobby Bandelow is the coordinator of advance scouting for the world champion Texas Rangers. During his decade-long career, he’s worked with the Astros, the then-Indians and the Rangers, in roles ranging from video intern to major-league analyst. In this conversation, Bobby talks about…
- Winning the 2023 World Series
- What an advance scout does for an MLB team
- How he presents data to Bruce Bochy and the Rangers staff
- Adapting to MLB rule changes
- Dealing with small sample sizes
- His career path with three MLB teams
- Advice for aspiring sports analysts
Show Links
- Follow Bobby on Twitter
- Bruce Bochy doesn’t miss a thing
- How the Rangers improved their defense
- The Patriotic Pig

Wes Johnson was named Head Baseball Coach for the University of Georgia on June 5th. Prior to taking the job in Athens, Wes served as the Pitching Coach for LSU, where he won a national championship earlier this year. He also has MLB experience, having served as the Pitching Coach for the Minnesota Twins from 2019-2022. His previous stops at Mississippi State and Arkansas add on to his SEC experience, in addition to his past as a high school baseball coach, among other stops. In this conversation, Wes talks about…
Balancing his responsibilities of being LSU’s pitching coach in the midst of a national championship run with his duties as Georgia’s head coach.
His career path and how he got into coaching in the first place.
An SEC school’s resources from a data perspective.
Coaching in MLB vs coaching at the collegiate level, including the different levels of preparation.
How stats factor in his approach to the transfer portal.
Communicating information to players vs a staff member.
Players to watch at Georgia and around the SEC next year.
Then, TruMedia’s Sergio De La Espriella joins the show to discuss Paul’s conversation with Wes.
Show Links
To check Wes’ biography, click here.
To read Wes’ interview with On3 about his MLB experience, click here.
Follow @TruMediaSports on Twitter.
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