Emilee Fragapane, a third-generation Japanese American, was an undergraduate Economics student at Sonoma State University in 2011. She was an accomplished student but struggling with what career she wanted to pursue. As fate would have it, she walked into a screening of Moneyball, the Hollywood hit that featured the previously niche field of sports analytics.
While many moviegoers might have been there to see stars like Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, Fragapane discovered a passion, and her future. Now the director of Integrative Baseball Performance in her twelfth season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, she credits the film with opening her eyes to the career opportunities available in the field.
Sports analytics is a fairly new field of applied data science that uses advanced statistics to help coaches and athletes improve their game. In Moneyball, that was shown most famously in how the 2002 Oakland A’s changed their draft and trade strategy to maximize the effectiveness of less-expensive players. Since that time, the field of sports analytics has exploded, especially in the era of “big data.”
Fragapane is now part of an eight-person team tasked not just with crunching numbers, but also communicating their findings in a way that is useful to the rest of the Dodgers organization. To team manager Dave Roberts, her role is essential. “If there is a person who is not a coach, she’s like a coach on our staff,” he said at a panel hosted by the Japanese American National Museum last year.
Growing Up Different
Fragapane grew up in the rural town of Jackson, California. Nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, she describes her hometown as beautiful, agricultural, and “very, very white.” Although just about an hour outside of Sacramento, with its deep Japanese American roots, Fragapane’s only real connection to her heritage in Jackson was through her grandmother.
Yoshiko Sato, a post-war Japanese immigrant, found a small contingent of other Japanese women and formed a social group centered around tea and card games. Fragapane describes Sato as her primary caregiver, and it was through her that Fragapane really discovered her “Japanese-ness.” Like many in the Nikkei community, that connection often came through food. It was Sato who introduced Fragapane to the Japanese markets in Sacramento. “I ate sushi before anybody in this county,” she laughs.
Growing up, Fragapane was certainly aware that she was different from her classmates and neighbors, with the exception of her own extended family. For the most part her Japanese heritage wasn’t exactly a source of tension, but was rather seen as “cool” and “exotic” in a way that highlighted her differences and made her feel like an outsider.
A close friend in high school, although clearly proud of having an Asian American friend, would mock stereotypical Asian features with what Fragapane euphemistically calls “the eye thing.” Most Nikkei children of the ’90s can relate when Fragapane reflects on the experience: “It happened a lot—and it was just kind of normal, but it felt weird. And you didn’t have the words to explain why it felt weird.”
Still, she credits the challenges of her upbringing for helping her find resiliency that has served her well in her chosen field. At last summer’s JANM event “Beyond the Dugout: A Discussion with Japanese American Staff at the Los Angeles Dodgers,” Fragapane spoke about how living as an outsider throughout her childhood helped her navigate that reality in what is still a very male- and white-dominated field. “Growing up, learning to navigate it in a way that I did not dilute myself and I was proud of what my differences were.”
Working with the Dodgers
Fragapane entered Sonoma State University as a political science major, but when she realized that the part of political science that most interested her was economics, she changed majors. Because economics was closely aligned to statistics, she ended up discovering an interest and a talent that would eventually lead her to the Dodgers.
It was while completing her BA in Quantitative Microeconomics and exploring career options that she had that fateful screening of Moneyball. Until that point, she had never been exposed to the types of jobs depicted there. As a lifelong sports fan (although, at the time, a supporter of the San Francisco Giants), the ability to combine her interest in data and statistics with her love of sports seemed almost too good to be true.
After graduating from Sonoma State, Fragapane worked a four-month internship for the Dodgers, focused on analytics. Then, during her one year master’s program at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), she worked with the UCSB baseball team. Although at that point there wasn’t nearly as much data available at the college level, the stint with UCSB gave her valuable insight into the field and helped solidify her career path.
Fragapane was hired by the Dodgers in the summer of 2014, right out of her MA program. Since then, she has worn many hats for the organization as sports analytics has exploded from relatively uncharted territory to something seen as a necessity in the major leagues.
These days, she says, the cutting edge of the field is in biomechanics, building mathematical models to help predict how small changes to an athlete’s body can yield optimal results. At this highest level of the sport, a hitting slump or recovery from an injury can be catastrophic to a season, and Fragapane is there to help the team navigate these challenges.
At the JANM panel, Dave Roberts described how Fragapane has the trust of the coaching staff and the players themselves: “There are a lot of times that players will go just to Emilee to say ‘Hey, Emilee, you gotta fix me. What’s going on?’”
The field is not without its controversy. Some in baseball fandom decry what they see as an over-reliance on sports analytics, which they feel can lead to decisions that may be mathematically sound but seem against common wisdom. At that JANM panel, one audience member blamed analytics for making fans get discouraged when things go wrong.
Fragapane understands why fans get frustrated. The key, she says, is in understanding that even the best mathematical model can’t predict outcomes with 100% certainty. This increased humility and embracing of nuance is one way in which the field has changed over Fragapane’s career. Whereas ten years ago someone in her position might have come in with almost cocky assurance that their answers were always better than the conventional baseball wisdom, now she looks for ways in which her approach and that of the coaching staff can complement each other.
Looking to the Future
Although the Performance Science team at the Dodgers has an even fifty-fifty split of men and women, both baseball in general and analytics in particular remain overwhelmingly dominated by white men. At Sonoma State, Fragapane’s undergraduate cohort only had one or two other women. At the JANM event, which celebrated the Japanese American staff at the Dodgers, Fragapane was the only woman on the panel. As a woman of color, Fragapane has had to embrace her “outsider” status, just as she has her whole life.
“I’ve tried to train myself over the years to just get used to feeling uncomfortable,” she says. “That’s something that you’re kind of signing up for when you enter the environment that you chose.” She talks about finding community with other women in the industry and sharing experiences and insight. She hopes that these conversations can help prepare younger women to feel confident as they stand their ground and defend their positions in tough conversations and rooms that are not always friendly.
Moving from a rural community with virtually no Japanese American presence to be part of an organization with a huge Nikkei fanbase gave Fragapane more opportunities to explore that part of her identity. With her Japanese American colleagues, she’s been able to form connections that she lacked growing up. She laughs about broaching the subject with the recent high-profile additions to the team roster. “It took me a while because I wasn’t going to lead with it, but to be like, ‘Oh, Shohei, I’m Japanese by the way!’ It was kind of fun.”
Growing up, even as a baseball fan, Fragapane didn’t see a place for herself in the sports world. Now, as the industry continues to embrace diversity, she hopes that more young people, especially young women of color, will see the possibilities available to them. At the Japanese American National Museum panel, she shared her vision: “that we can have not just a place, but also an impact on the sport and where it goes.”
© 2024 Sharleen Higa
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