JJ Svenson, a senior at UCLA, is poised to turn a lifelong baseball passion into a professional analytics career.
His love for the game was cultivated early, with his father Erik Svenson guiding his Little League team and his mother Alisa Svenson cheering from the stands.
At UCLA he served as a student manager for the Bruins baseball program, immersing himself in the inner workings of a top‑tier collegiate squad and learning the nuances of high‑level baseball analytics.
A Data‑Driven Path to the Majors
A screening of the film Moneyball sparked a pivotal shift, steering Svenson toward data science and prompting mentorship under professors Vivian Lew and Nicolas Christou, who helped him bridge theory and the diamond.
During the summer he interned with the Cape Cod Baseball League, collaborating with bench coach Jeff Pickler, now a coach for the Colorado Rockies, where he applied statistical models to player evaluation.
His analytical contributions extended internationally when he assisted Italy’s national team in the 2026 World Baseball Classic, developing a matchup model and an interactive R Shiny App to optimize strategic decisions.
Svenson will graduate this spring with a degree in statistics and data science, complemented by minors in geography and environmental studies, and will transition to the Detroit Tigers as an analytics associate.