I grew up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, just a little outside of Pittsburgh. From a young age I knew I loved math and Pirates baseball. As I grew older, I naturally developed a taste for sabermetrics. I maintained my affinity for the Pirates even as work took me away from the Pittsburgh area, and in fact I became a season ticket holder in 2013 despite living closer to Philadelphia at the time. As I worked in related fields like mathematical modeling, machine learning, and software development, on the side I tried my hand at my own baseball analytics research. I secretly hoped to somehow make a career of these side projects. Eventually, having not found the right opportunity, I decided to make my own opportunity. I voluntarily left my day job in order to focus on baseball analytics. I was at a stage of my life where I could afford to take such a risk, and I felt like there were several promising ways for this new journey to work out (e.g. the fantasy baseball space has grown and presents several options). So although I felt I had a few options open, my main hope was that this would help me towards securing my dream job working in the front office of the Pirates doing baseball analytics.