When Gabe Riedel set foot on campus at the start of his first year, he was already inspired to pursue a career path that could marry his interests in math and baseball. 

 “I remember watching 'Moneyball’ as a kid and thinking, ‘Oh, that's amazing,’” said Riedel, a mathematics major and lifelong baseball fan. “And then when I was picking my major for college, I started to think about what I would want to do professionally, and the idea of doing sports analytics was so cool.” 

He cold-emailed Cal Poly Baseball Coach Larry Lee in October of his freshman year to ask if there were any opportunities to use his skills, and Lee connected him to the student team in charge of statistics. 

“I was just shocked to learn that there were people already doing exactly what I wanted to be doing,” Riedel said.  

He got to work, learning how to utilize the technology the student managers used to stay on top of the team’s metrics. That meant doing things like video editing and analysis of tapes, as well as operating analytical systems during games, including one that analyzed statistics like ball speed in real time.  Riedel and the other students working with analytics sent the data to a public college database but otherwise didn’t do much analysis themselves.  

“When I got here, learning how to analyze the data was one of my big goals,” Riedel said. “How do we really use this to gain insights? There’s just more to be gleaned from it.” 

In the last few years, the stats team has grown from five people to about 25, with student managers working in fields like data engineering, scouting, research and development and biomechanics, and Riedel is now the student director of baseball analytics.  

Ahead of the 2026 baseball season, the team embarked on their most ambitious project yet: developing their own app, comparable to what major league baseball teams use, that is designed to be a one-stop shop for analytics.  

“There’s a lot of manual labor that goes into preparing for the teams that we face, and we face two different teams every week,” Riedel said. 

Some of the things the app has already streamlined include preparing scouting reports, which the analysts must complete before each game, and hosting detailed performance metrics for each Cal Poly baseball player.  

 “The app allows a lot of that manual work to be automated,” Riedel said.  “It will probably always be something we keep adding to, which is a good thing, but it also serves a purpose right now.” 

The work that Riedel and the other members of the statistics team have done to grow the analytics pipeline has played a role in Cal Poly Baseball’s success. In the 2024 season, the Mustangs posted a successful 35-22 record and finished 20-10 in the Big West Conference, tying for third place. 

In the 2025 season, the Mustangs finished 43-19 (23-7 in conference), and won their second Big West Conference title, earning a berth in the NCAA Tournament. As a team, Cal Poly finished No. 1 for batting average.  

Ahead of the 2026 Big West Championships, the team won the Big West Conference’s regular season title: the eighth in program history. 

As Riedel looks forward to his next chapter as a baseball projects analyst with the Seattle Mariners, he said he’s felt especially connected to the team this season. 

“It’s been such an integral part of my college experience overall, and it’s been very sentimental each game, knowing there’s a fleeting amount of time left,” Riedel said. “I just love the people I work with and getting to connect with them and see the next generation of analysts really take hold and buy in.” 

He added that he’s looking forward to seeing how future generations of Cal Poly baseball analysts build on the work he and his team have done. 

“One of my biggest goals has always been to help the team get better, but another big goal is just to make sure underclassmen get this exposure that I didn’t get until later in my career, and infuse them with the confidence that they can do this,” Riedel said. “Baseball analytics is somewhat of a niche and being around people who just care about it is rewarding enough, but getting to pass off this work and know other people will do better things than I ever did is a cool feeling.” 

Read more about Gabe’s journey in Cal Poly Magazine.