From UVA Batten to the Blue Jays: A career in baseball analytics

As the Toronto Blue Jays advanced through their postseason run in the fall of 2025, eyes were on the players and the dugout. Quietly in the background, the baseball team’s analytical work continued shaping decisions that extended well past the end of the season.

For Sanjay Choudhury (MPP ’12), the Blue Jays’ principal scouting analyst, the pressure of the baseball season looks different from what fans might imagine. His attention is fixed on long-term vision.

“I’m not really doing a lot to prep for the game that. night,” Choudhury said. “I’m thinking about which free agent we should sign in two weeks.”

Choudhury’s path to this role was never predictable. Raised in Pittsburgh, he moved around often before finding his academic home at the University of Virginia.

“I was attracted to UVA’s strong political science and foreign affairs programs, as well as the school’s tradition of public engagement,” he said. “Being situated in a beautiful city like Charlottesville certainly didn’t hurt either.”

After landing in Charlottesville, he went on to join one of the earliest cohorts of accelerated master students at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

At the time, Choudhury’s ambitions had nothing to do with baseball.

“When I was in college and grad school, I was more focused on global development as a career path,” he said. He landed a consulting job at Deloitte during the recession, the “safe bet,” he said, before shifting into education with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) D.C. schools, a chain of tuition-free, open-enrollment college preparatory public charter schools.

But after long days in the classroom, Choudhury would come home and write about baseball simply because he loved it. “I’ve always loved baseball, and I’m a nerd,” he said.

It wasn’t an intentional career move, but encouragement from readers and colleagues created a new possibility: the work he was doing for fun could be something more.

Still, Choudhury never imagined he belonged in the world of professional sports.

“Growing up and really through colege, I never thought about it as a career,” he said. “I kind of figured a lot of those jobs went to ex-players or people who were really well connected.”

It wasn’t until his mid-twenties that he recognized his skill set aligned naturally with the evolving landscape of baseball analytics.

Choudhury joined the Blue Jays in 2016 as a manager on a small, three-person research team, which meant doing everything from amateur scouting support to player evaluation, long-term modeling and research development. As the organization grew, he advanced into leadership roles, including assistant director and eventually director of research and development.

Guiding a growing department remains one of the highlights of his career.

“Being able to play a small role in someone else’s story is the best part of any leader’s job,” Choudhury said. “I’ve been fortunate to work with a large number of talented, curious, interesting people who have gone on to grow in ways I never would have expected – both with the Blue Jays and elsewhere.”

Choudhury admits he has made mistakes along the way, but in his mentorship, he tries to model humility, servant leadership and a sense of humor. After nearly a decade in management, Choudhury deliberately chose to return to a more hands-on analytical role.

“I want to spend a little bit more time doing the parts of the job that I enjoy the most,” he said, describing the satisfaction of player evaluation and deep analytical work.

In baseball, those analyses can range from straightforward to extraordinarily complex. The hardest, Choudhury explained, involves people.

“Humans have free will,” he said. Instead of modeling a physical process, you’re “trying to make a decision under uncertainty” by weighing conflicting pieces of information. It’s a challenge that blends the technical and the deeply human, precisely what drew him in.

The 2025 World Series run heightened that blend.

“Seeing how happy the run made so many people,” Choudhury said, “feels like you were a very small part of putting something good into the world.”

It was an experience marked not just by excitement but also by responsibility and the drive to contribute meaningfully to a team beloved by millions.

When reflecting on his career journey, Choudhury often returns to his time at UVA Batten. Decision-making frameworks, negotiation, leadership psychology and group dynamics continue to shape his work.

Courses that taught him to anticipate bias and communicate across differences have proven invaluable. As he put it, they helped him “see the world in more shades of gray.” He specifically points to Professor Ben Converse‘s lessons on cognitive biases as beneficial, both in management and in scouting and talent evaluation, along with state studies the program completed on organizational culture.

Completing UVA Batten’s Accelerated Master’s Program was also great preparation for the working world more generally, he said.

For students hoping to break into competitive fields like sports, Choudhury’s perspective is both honest and encouraging.

“There’s an element of luck to all of this,” he said. “If the thing you want doesn’t materialize on day one, it doesn’t mean that you are bad or wrong or anything like that.”

He is open about the rejections he faced early on and the importance of resilience, because he believes that setbacks don’t reflect a lack of talent.

At the same time, Choudhury believes deeply in curiosity and initiative.

“There are a lot of ways that you can add to your resume for free,” he noted, whether through independent projects, writing or working with publicly available data.

Today, Choudhury’s career sits at the intersection of analysis, intuition, leadership and long-term vision, the very qualities that guided him through each unexpected turn along the way.