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Devils Hire Data Scientist Formerly with MLB’s Seattle Mariners

Originally posted on The Hockey Writers | By Daniel Amoia | Last updated May 17, 2025 9:35 AM ET

This past season was the second straight where the New Jersey Devils were absolutely decimated by injuries. It left some wondering whether it was bad luck, an insufficient job by the medical staff, or a combination of both.

At his end of season press conference, general manager Tom Fitzgerald defended his medical staff and processes when The Hockey Writers asked, saying, “It’s a contact sport, and injuries like we’ve had this year are unpreventable in my opinion because of the contact that the game is all about (…) I think one of the areas that has a lot of merit to it is when players leave here and go to other teams, and their agents call me and tell me how good they had it here versus other places. Or when people come into New Jersey and are really blown away with the care that they get. The amount of people and quality that we have to take care of our players, and the processes that we have in place, I’m very comfortable.”

The Devils did deal with a number of freak accidents that were seemingly unavoidable. But regardless, no pro sports team should ever become complacent with their processes in place, and that’s why the Devils’ recent addition of Greg Ackerman as a Senior Data Scientist is a sneaky good one that could pay dividends.

Ackerman’s Background

Ackerman graduated from Syracuse University in 2015. Before landing a job, he displayed detailed presentations at various conferences, both on the performance side (Ex: Exploring why some MLB teams outperform their run differential) and on the medical side (Ex: Minimizing National Football League’s concussions on punt blocks). It’s no surprise that this expertise quickly got him a position at the highest level of a major pro sport: In 2017, he landed a gig with Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Arizona Diamondbacks as part of their business analytics team. He stayed with them through the 2020 season.

In May of 2021, he became a Sports Science Analyst with MLB’s Seattle Mariners. According to the Mariners, he monitored and performed “quantitative analysis focusing on athlete workload, athleticism, baseball biomechanics, and injury prevention.”

The Mariners’ pitching staff was ranked top 10 out of 30 teams in earned run average (ERA) in 2022 (8th), 2023 (3rd) and 2024 (2nd). A large part of that was their ability to stay mostly healthy, an especially tough task nowadays as pitcher injuries continue to rise.

Analytics as a whole have completely evolved and taken over professional sports in recent years. In many cases, we see teams that invest more heavily in the right departments find long-term success as a result. It’s near-impossible to measure the direct impact of one specific staff member’s research on a team’s success, but Devils fans should be encouraged by the team’s willingness to improve.