Meet the young executive trying to make the Phillies into an analytics leader

In 2021, the Phillies turned to 27-year-old Ani Kilambi to help them catch up to the baseball world in research and development. Here is how he has made them better, now and in the long term.

Ani Kilambi was hired by the Phillies in 2021 as assistant general manager.Read moreCourtesy of Phillies

by Alex Coffey

Published Jan. 17, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

When 27-year-old Ani Kilambi was hired as a Phillies assistant general manager in November 2021, it was with a specific goal in mind. General manager Sam Fuld and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski knew their research and development department was not robust enough. They wanted to change that — and told Kilambi that he was the man for the job.

Dombrowski and Fuld didn’t want the Phillies to be just average. They wanted the Phillies to be an industry leader in the analytics space. To understand just how ambitious that goal was, you have to look at the organization’s relationship with research and development (R&D, for short) over the last decade.

They spent many years playing catch-up. While teams like the A’s, Red Sox, and Guardians were at the forefront of the analytics movement, the Phillies had no dedicated baseball analytics employees on staff until late 2013, when they brought in Scott Freedman as an extern. They eventually transitioned him to full time, with the goal of spearheading a research and development department. In 2015, he hired two interns, Lewis Pollis and Natan Weinberger. In 2016, the Phillies hired a director of baseball research and development, Andy Galdi, to oversee the department — which, initially, was composed of just two employees: Galdi and Pollis. Weinberger joined their staff full time a few months later.

To say they were lagging would be an understatement. It is widely believed the Phillies were the last team in baseball to hire a full-time R&D employee. At the time Galdi was hired, ESPN ranked the then-122 teams in major professional sports based on how they used advanced metrics. The Phillies came in at No. 122.

The organization made strides over those six years before Kilambi became assistant GM. They grew their R&D department, built out an internal system called “Rocky” — which they still use today — and began incorporating data into more of their decisions. But as the Phillies grew, other organizations did, too. Staying on par with those teams, particularly those that embraced analytics early, was a challenge.

That challenge appealed to Kilambi. Up until that point, he’d spent his career with the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays were, and still are, one of the most analytically savvy teams in baseball. Kilambi took advantage of that.

He soaked in as much knowledge as he could. He learned how to earn a coach’s trust, how to make objective decisions, how to build and lead a department, and everything in between. But with the Phillies, he had an opportunity to put all of that experience to the test. He had an opportunity to build something that endured.

In the two years since he was hired, Kilambi has done just that. The Phillies have nearly doubled the size of their R&D department. They’ve changed the way they evaluate and project player performance. They have more data at their disposal than ever before, and their departments are working more collaboratively to better use it.

Kilambi, who is not one for the spotlight and respectfully declined to be quoted in this story, is at the center of this organizational shift. Here is how he is making the Phillies better — not just now, but for the long term.

‘Obsessed with baseball’

When Fuld thinks of Kilambi as a coworker, one word comes to mind.

“Obsessed,” he said. “He is obsessed with baseball. He is obsessed with helping the Phillies win. It just shows in the way he speaks about the game.”

There is evidence to back this up. A lot of evidence. Kilambi has never been a casual baseball fan. He was indoctrinated from an early age, growing up in the Bay Area during the golden era of Giants baseball. His parents emigrated from India in the early 1990s, and Kilambi’s father, Krishna, grew to love the sport. His son did, too, but in a different way.

Kilambi liked to analyze. He enjoyed thinking about problems and how to solve them. When he was a teenager, he spent hours creating a projection system that he ran out of an Excel document to evaluate free-agent contracts and team decisions. He called it “BEAnS”: Baseball Empirical Analysis System.

There were other pet projects. Kilambi made “hundreds of spreadsheets” to keep track of box scores, stats, and outcomes. Eventually, as he inched closer to graduation day at the University of California-Berkeley, he began to keep track of team internships, too.

He applied to any opening he could find. In 2015, Kilambi was hired as an intern with the Rays. He worked there for the next seven years. By the time he left for the Phillies, he had risen all the way to assistant director of research and development.

Kilambi was smart, and articulate, but so was every other intern. What separated him from the pack was his thoroughness and humility. He wasn’t afraid to speak up in a room of seasoned baseball executives, but he also wasn’t afraid to listen to other opinions.

“He was receptive to the idea that he didn’t know everything,” said Peter Bendix, the Marlins president of baseball operations and former Rays general manager. “And that’s a very impressive skill to have for somebody who knows a lot.”

Kilambi worked to fill in the gaps of what he didn’t know. He talked to scouts and player development officials — anyone and everyone — in an attempt to better understand different perspectives. This led to better decision making — and better relationships.

James Click, who now works as the Toronto Blue Jays’ vice president, baseball strategy, overlapped with Kilambi for about five years with the Rays. He was impressed by Kilambi’s ability to incorporate the human element into his decisions.

“It was obvious that Ani had the technical skills, but he also understood how they could be applied to the game,” Click said. “I think sometimes it can be easy to look at all this data that we have and think that you can just punch it in there and solve a problem. You forget that it’s a representation of human beings doing human things on the field. It’s conceptual. It is within the confines of the game of baseball. He understood that this was a reflection of reality and not a problem set.

“A lot of people, particularly undergrads, give you these very clean problem sets. And they have nice, neat answers. The real world isn’t like that. And you could tell that Ani was somebody who understood that.”

Over time, Kilambi became more and more involved in the Rays’ overarching strategy. He helped shape decisions during the playoffs, and also decisions about contract structures, player development, and player acquisitions. He quickly gained a reputation for finding diamond-in-the-rough bullpen arms, but Bendix and Click — who declined to get into too many specifics, at the risk of divulging any trade secrets — said Kilambi’s impact went further than that.

“He showed a real aptitude for decision-making,” Click said. “So, we started having him work more with the coaching staff and with [manager] Kevin Cash. We thought — he is really good at this. He could really help us out.”

It was a natural fit. Like he did with everyone else, Kilambi brought humility and a willingness to listen to his interactions with the Rays’ coaches. It was a rewarding experience that equipped him with a skill set he still uses today.

“How is the technical work in an analytics department used?” said Will Cousins, Rays vice president and assistant general manager. “It’s going to be used to either make a really difficult decision or used with a player directly. We think you should throw this pitch more or you should throw this pitch less. Maybe you have a player who’s done something a certain way for most of their life, and what they’ve done has gotten them to the big leagues.

“To implement an outside-of-the-box suggestion, people need to trust you. People need to trust you as a person and people need to trust that you really listen to what they have to say. Those personal relationships are the foundation for getting anything done, and Ani is awesome at all of that.”

‘He’s not offending people’

Kilambi never acted as if he had all of the answers. If anything, it was the opposite. He was the brunt of many good-hearted jokes during his time with the Rays — particularly about his age. Bendix and Click liked to gently remind him that “he was a 12-year-old.”

One time, Click took his R&D employees out to lunch. For some reason — and he doesn’t remember why — he made a reference to O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco chase on the L.A. freeway. Kilambi looked back at him with a blank stare.

“I’m like, ‘Guys? White Bronco?’ ” Click said. “And Ani is like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I’m like, ‘O.J.? Juice? Remember?’ And he was like, ‘No, when was that?’ And I was like, ‘June 1994?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I was born in May of ‘94.’

“There are times that I have felt old. But having Ani stare at me and not know what the white Bronco was, and then tell me that he was born a month before it happened … that was tough.”

Added Bendix: “We’d look for any opportunity to remind him that he was young. Take the stock market in 2008. We’d say Ani, were you even born yet?”

Another source of levity were his cats, Olive and Kulfi, who had a nose for the camera during the pandemic, when most of Kilambi’s meetings were on Zoom.

“I can’t think of anything more disarming than Ani making a very eloquent, well-articulated point, while his cat walks across the keyboard, knocking his coffee over,” Cousins said.

All joking aside, Kilambi’s willingness to not take himself so seriously is something that enabled him to work with just about anyone. Dombrowski has been in the game since 1978. He has seen how ego and pride can harm an organization. Part of the logic in hiring Kilambi was that the Phillies thought he could help foster more collaboration.

“He’s not offending people,” Dombrowski said. “Ani is a very intelligent individual, but he and his team are not saying, ‘We know this and you don’t.’ They do a great job of making it work.

“You always used to have the argument of player development versus scouting. You’d have a young player come in. And then, all of a sudden, he wouldn’t develop, and if you weren’t properly run as an organization, and you didn’t have people working together, scouting would blame player development, and player development would blame scouting.

“I think the game has gotten past that point, but now, the debate over the last eight or 10 years has been between on-field stuff versus analytical stuff. And the reality is, we’re all trying to do the same thing. Just like player development and scouting were many years ago. The ability to understand the importance of all the departments working together is so important. We can always be better, and we’ll always strive to be better, but I think they’ve done a tremendous job.”

The Phillies have not always had this level of cohesion. The dynamic that Dombrowski described — of scouting and player development working at odds — was pervasive in the organization not so long ago, and has been well documented. But the hires of Kilambi and Preston Mattingly, the assistant general manager for player development, have helped to foster better communication.

One of the best examples of this lies in Kilambi’s relationship with pitching coach Caleb Cotham. Kilambi works with all of the coaches, but he said he works with Cotham the most. They meet multiple times a week, and have open-ended conversations. Cotham believes that Kilmabi has made him a better coach.

“He’s done a fantastic job of providing resources to understand how we get the most out of our players,” Cotham said. “It could be pitch usage, it could be biomechanics, it could be how they think. It’s about giving us, as coaches, more tools to make a connection with a pitcher.”

As is the case with the Rays, Kilambi’s footprints can be found all over the Phillies’ decision-making. He pushed for José Alvarado to increase his cutter usage, and Jeff Hoffman to throw his slider more. He has helped unearth a few under-the-radar players, like Andrew Bellatti, who was signed to a minor league contract in 2021 and ended up pitching for the Phillies in the 2022 World Series.

But his biggest contributions have come in his consistent — and thorough — frameworks for decision making.

“It’s really tough to get anything done if there’s no trust,” Cotham said, “And he brings empathy to what happens in the dugout. It’s not just, ‘Hey, spam your best reliever all the time.’ There are times where you might have to deviate, but I think that’s where we’ve grown. We’re making better and better decisions for when we break the rules — rules like a lefty or a righty facing a certain batter, or the three-batter minimum.

“When we break them, it’s intentional, and there’s a reason behind it. It’s not random, pocket-driven decision making. I think he’s really helped with that.”

When the Phillies hold meetings between the coaching staff and the front office, Kilambi is rarely the first person to talk. He listens and then responds, which is a quality that Cotham appreciates.

“I think the ability to communicate and not feel like you’re talked down to or talked over has helped us a lot,” he said. “It’s not me versus you. And that’s a credit to Dave and Sam and Ani, and how the front office has been built. It’s a free flow of ideas.

“Sometimes, it’s almost like Ani is a coach to me. Because some of these things — call it data, analytics, sabermetrics — can be used as a sword to be smacked over people’s heads. Like, ‘No, you should do this, that was dumb.’ His healthy skepticism, his ability to sit and talk baseball, not just recruit everyone to a certain way of thinking — I really enjoy it. I leave our meetings as a better coach.”

A lasting impact

What Kilambi has built with the Phillies and the Rays is lasting. It’s not about a singular player, or a singular pitch. It is about incorporating a more collaborative and comprehensive way of thinking, that can be applied to decisions for years to come.

Kilambi could leave for another organization tomorrow, and the Phillies would still reap the benefits of his time there. The Rays know this firsthand.

“A lot of what Ani did here was about coming up with good processes,” Cousins said. “If you do that right — and Ani did a great job of doing it right — the impact is going to last. It’s not just, ‘Hey, you did a great job finding this one player.’ It’s, ‘Hey, you came up with a great process for making decisions, and it’s applicable to other cases as well.’

“The type of work Ani did really provided lasting impact. His footprints are all over this place.”