Phillies announce additional baseball operations promotions

The Phillies have promoted Alex Nakahara to senior director, research and development, Tegan Ashby to director, software engineering and Pat McFarlane to director, predictive modeling.

Phillies President of Baseball Operations David Dombrowski made the announcement.

Nakahara has been with the Phillies organization since 2017, originally serving as a senior quantitative analyst before being promoted to director, R&D in November 2021. In his new role, he provides strategic leadership in R&D, identifying high-value greenfield problems in baseball research while overseeing departmental logistics. A native of Philadelphia, Nakahara received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, a master’s degree from MIT in aeronautics and astronautics in 2012 and worked for four years at Northrop Grumman as a systems engineer in a variety of roles before joining the Phillies.

Ashby oversees the club’s software engineering efforts, orienting the organization’s products toward maximizing on-field impact through data engineering, application development, MLOps and infrastructure support in her role. She was hired by the team in January 2023 as assistant director, software engineering and previously worked in basketball R&D for several seasons with the Brooklyn Nets and Philadelphia 76ers. The co-founder of the Women in Sports Data Symposium and Hackathon, a game-changing initiative to amplify women’s voices in sports analytics across the technical spectrum, Ashby holds degrees in linguistics and Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania.

McFarlane supervises the development of the organization’s forecasts of player performance, and their incorporation into the club’s decision-making processes in this role, his fourth with the Phillies. He joined the organization in January 2018 as a quantitative analyst, was promoted to lead quantitative analyst two years later and was promoted again to assistant director, quantitative analysis in January 2022. Prior to his time with the Phillies, McFarlane held data science positions in various industries, including aviation, finance, consulting and sports. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a BS in aerospace engineering in 2014 and earned an MS in air transportation systems from MIT in 2016.