By Andrew Cohen

Mark Brubaker remembers getting a phone call from Steve Cohen in 2020, about a year after Brubaker joined Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management firm as chief technology officer. Now, the billionaire hedge fund founder wanted Brubaker to handle the same title for the New York Mets, which Cohen bought majority control of for US$2.4 billion in November 2020.

 “I literally pick up my phone, saw his name [and] he just said do you want to be CTO of the Mets?” Brubaker recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know anything about baseball. I don’t know if I’m the best person to be doing this’. He goes ‘No, you’ll pick it up.’”

Brubaker is now in his second season with Mets, who have the best record in the National League. He’s one of about 20 Point72 employees who’ve added part-time roles with the Mets, which has helped boost the club’s data operations in their front office and baseball analytics departments.

“I have resources at Point72 that are really good at creating data platforms. Those resources have partnered with the baseball analytics team,” Brubaker says. “We’ve helped to give them an ecosystem that they can better focus on the analytics side and less on what I’ll call the data engineering, normalization and cleaning side. That’s been a great partnership.”

Brubaker says about 20-25 per cent of his time is spent with the Mets and the rest is with Point72, which is headquartered in Stamford, Conn., and manages US$24 billion in total financial assets. Among the other employees to split time between the two organizations is Sameer Gupta, who is head of data solutions for both the baseball club and Point72, according to his LinkedIn page.

“I have resources at Point72 that are really good at creating data platforms. Those resources have partnered with the baseball analytics team,” Brubaker says. “We’ve helped to give them an ecosystem that they can better focus on the analytics side and less on what I’ll call the data engineering, normalization and cleaning side. That’s been a great partnership.”

“I find that [being CTO of the Mets] is really not that much different than my responsibilities at Point72,” Brubaker says. “There’s a lot of common traits, which are creating a vision, delegating, building the right technology team, partnering with your business partners and your peers in order to make sure that you’re on the same page. Creating a business plan, making sure that you’re thinking about it from a business perspective with an ROI, nothing should be done just for the sake of spending money.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Mets have increased their data analytics staff from eight full-time workers to 35 since Cohen purchased the club two years ago.

“It’s important to me on the data side, I don’t want the Mets to be solely dependent on Point72. We hire people here at the Mets too, we’ve increased our technology numbers quite a bit from a few years ago,” Brubaker says. “Steve wants me to try to figure out in my role as CTO of Point72 and the Mets is where are those commonalities and how does he get the benefit of scale? So he’s not spending money on the same effort twice.”

Other technological enhancements undertaken by the Mets under Cohen include upgraded Samsung video boards at Citi Field and a new pitching machine that analyzes ball-tracking data to simulate MLB pitchers. The Mets are also the first MLB club to deploy Wicket’s facial ticketing for entry into Citi Field, and Brubaker says the Mets envision expanding facial recognition to process payments for food, beverages and merchandise at Citi Field. The team’s staff already uses Wicket to access administrative buildings at Citi Field, with hopes to expand to the stadium’s elevator systems as well.

The Mets are paying for all the output Point72 gives to the baseball team. “Point 72 is not paying for it, it gets charged back to the Mets accordingly,” Brubaker says. “We have a fiduciary responsibility to Pont 72 investors.”

Brubaker treated about 100 members of his Point72 technology team to the Mets’ game on Thursday at Citi Field. He says TV inside Point72’s offices will play Mets games frequently and that office chatter around the ball club has spiked significantly since Cohen’s purchase. While Point72’s data analytics expertise has found a second home with the Mets, the hedge fund has also occasionally found a leg-up from contract negotiations in the baseball world.

“We benefit from MLB. Because MLB might have a contract with somebody, and Point72 will go to them and say ‘there’s a great deal they’re [MLB is] getting, we’d love to get a part of that. There’s a lot of companies that will say ‘yeah, we’ll give you that same kind of deal.”

Financial markets have taken a beating lately. But earlier this week, Point72 Ventures invested in a US$20 million raise by blockchain-based decentralized finance startup Skolem Technologies. Cohen is also an investor in Recur, an NFT marketplace that is partnered with the Pac-12.

“I hope that at some point the stock market corrects itself and becomes as hot as the Mets,” Brubaker says.