by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

April 16, 2009

Any baseball fan following the sports and economic news over the winter knows that, with the expected exception of the New York Yankees, the latest batch of free agents didn’t do too well. Salaries weren’t as high and contract lengths weren’t as long as in previous years.

Such decisions come from people like Livingston native Mike Chernoff, director of baseball operations for the Cleveland Indians.

Chernoff is involved in player acquisitions and analysis. “There’s two aspects,” he told NJ Jewish News while the Indians were in still in spring training. “One is scouting, where [they] will watch players and tell us their gut feelings about how those players are going to do. The other side is actually analyzing a player’s statistics and putting them in context. If you watch a player in Double A, you can get a lot of information from that, but it would be more helpful to know if, at the park that he happened to be playing in, the fences are much further and the wind is always blowing in.”

Surprisingly, a lot of the research materials the Indians and other teams use are readily available to the general public, including books like Baseball Prospectus and other publications. “I think a lot of the work that’s being done in the blogger community and Baseball Prospectus community is really cutting-edge stuff, so we’re always on top of that,” Chernoff said. (The Indians even hired a writer from BP to head their analytics department.) On the other hand, he said, the team also developed “a lot of things in-house that no one ever heard of.”

Chernoff didn’t plan on a career in sports. As an economics and finance major at Princeton University, he was interested in several other fields, including consulting, banking, and government. “I had done an internship with a senator in Washington, DC, before my junior year in college and loved that work,” he said. “It wasn’t until I completed an internship with the Mets between my junior and senior years that I realized how passionate I was about not only the game of baseball but about working in the game. Heading into my senior year, I began to pursue the field more seriously.

“A lot of things I’m working on are not necessarily the things I worked on in school, but…the economics background gives me a base for decision-making.”

Like one of his team’s minor league hopefuls, Chernoff — now in his sixth year with the Indians and the third in his current position — came up through the ranks, starting as an intern following his graduation from Princeton.

The Indians home ballpark, Progressive Field (originally Jacobs Field), which opened in 1994, was one of the first “retro” ballparks and set a record for consecutive sellouts, a streak that spanned more than seven seasons. That’s no longer the case.

“In Cleveland, the economy hasn’t been great for awhile,” Chernoff said. “Since our new ownership came in [Cleveland attorney Larry Dolan bought the team in 2000], we’ve had to cut back on payroll tremendously. So it’s not anything that new to us.” The degree, however, is much more extensive. “This free-agent market over the past off-season really showed some of the realities of this economic uncertainty.”

Chernoff married Sarah Keil, his high school sweetheart, in January. The couple lives in Cleveland Heights. They enjoy their surroundings, but Chernoff admits it was “a difficult transition” for a young man who grew up in northern New Jersey. “I couldn’t be happier with my job and the people I get to work with every day,” he said. “But I miss the East Coast for sure.”

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