America’s pastime meets Michigan Engineering
The data science expert who’s helping the Detroit Tigers win.
The Detroit Tigers major league baseball team was in the midst of its best season in decades as of press time. Helping to drive that success was Michigan Engineer Danny Vargovick (BSE CSE ’17). The 2025 season was Vargovick’s second as the Tigers’ assistant director of research and development.
“This has been my dream job since middle school,” he said. “As a senior at Michigan, working in baseball was my reach goal, but I truly didn’t believe it would happen for me until I got an offer.”
The Tigers and other major league teams have access to an ocean of detailed statistical data from approximately 50,000 games each year—all major and minor-league games, most college games and selected international and high school contests. It’s collected by the league and curated by the Tigers’ full-time data management staff.
That data fuels the Tigers’ pro projection system, a predictive model that can provide detailed insight about which prospective players might add the most value to the team. For example, would the roster benefit more from a player who hits big home runs, or one who hits with less power but gets on base more often? Is it better to have a catcher who excels at throwing out base runners or one who is better at handling pitches cleanly?
Vargovick is tasked with managing the system and continuously tweaking it to help the Tigers keep their competitive edge.
“If someone had a hypothesis that players who were born on a Tuesday perform better at batting, the system could test it,” Vargovick joked. “And no, I haven’t been asked that question.”
He explains that his work is a world apart from the days when teams had to rely on what one or two people could observe from the stands.
“Data turns art into science in baseball and many other industries,” he said. “That can be used to gain knowledge that had been unobtainable before the age of modern computing. We can also use data science to control for variables outside of player talent such as ballpark or opponent.”
Vargovick joined the team as an intern in 2017 after becoming one of the first graduates from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s data science program. He was hired full-time in less than a year. He says that after growing up in a houseful of Michigan Engineers, engineering was a natural path.
“My mother, father and brother all have Michigan mechanical engineering degrees,” he said. “So I guess I’m quite the rebel with my data science degree. Growing up, my father gave his old Car and Driver magazines to my brother. I got Sports Illustrated. And our personalities were born.”
Sports and data intersected for Vargovick in high school, when he got his first laptop and discovered baseball’s massive trove of data waiting to be crunched.
“Baseball is unique because there are so many games each season, and because it’s made up of isolated, discrete events like the batter-pitcher matchup,” he said. “That’s a lot different from the continuous, free-flowing play in games like hockey or basketball. Baseball is easily the most naturally applicable sport to statistics.”
Vargovick says his work in data science, and particularly with the Tigers, has given him a new perspective on what it means to be an engineer.
“You could describe my role as an analyst or a statistician, but really, I build things. I build projection systems that have raw materials and inputs and outputs just like an engineer at General Motors would for a part they’re working on,” he said. “And ironically, that has made me realize that I would probably enjoy doing more physical engineering just as much. Because what we’re all really doing is solving problems every day. That’s what makes it interesting.”