OXFORD – Chris Goudoras remembers his first important meeting since joining the Ole Miss baseball staff in 2018.
The Rebels had just lost their entire weekend rotation following the 2018 season, and head coach Mike Bianco gave him an assignment.
“He just looked at me point blank and said, ‘We need you to figure out how to make Will Ethridge a Friday night starter. I think he has the best shot. He’s competitive, throws strikes,’” Goudoras recalled.
Ethridge at that point had pitched 91 2/3 fairly effective innings across two seasons in Oxford, but he had made just four starts. Goudoras pulled up his sleeves and went to work.
He printed out a handful of scatter plots showing Ethridge’s pitches, how they moved and how hitters did against them. Goudoras saw Ethridge’s two-seam fastball had a better shape than his four-seam fastball and recommended he drop the four-seam.
Ethridge went on to lock down the Friday night starter role and finished the season with a 3.39 ERA. He also became a trusted arm on an Ole Miss team that came up just short of making it to Omaha after losing in Game 3 of the Fayetteville Super Regional.
“I thought there’d be some pushback, and he’s like, ‘Oh, makes perfect sense. Let’s do it,’” Goudoras said. “And then, Will obviously had a great year in 2019. I think, batting average cut in half against his fastball one year to the next, so that was a good victory early in my time here.”
Goudoras is now in his eighth season with the Rebels and works under the title of director of analytics. In that time, he’s become a trusted member of Ole Miss’ support staff as analytics have made their way into the college game.
You can’t coach college baseball for longer than your players have been alive without making changes and adapting along the way, especially in a conference like the SEC. Bianco wanted to stay ahead of the curve, and that meant embracing more of the analytical side of baseball. With Ole Miss looking for its first national title at the time, it only made sense.
“Obviously, there was a change in baseball, and we needed somebody that was kind of going to get us over the hump,” Bianco said. “As coaches, we’re trying to learn, but we had nobody on staff that had really dealt with analytics and data and even video and different things like that.”
That path guided the Rebels to Goudoras, a Long Island, New York, native who grew up loving baseball despite being a New York Mets fan. Goudoras admittedly “wasn’t very good” at playing baseball, so his passion for the sport led to him delving into the numbers side of the game. Goudoras was an economics-finance major at Bentley University, but working an analytics job in baseball was always the plan.
“A lot of people think econ is money, it’s really econ’s the study of decision-making,” Goudoras said. “It’s the way my freshman year microeconomics teacher taught me. It’s just like looking at numbers and making decisions based on numbers, so it all goes into baseball. That’s kind of what I was told: ‘If you want to work in baseball, econ, stats, something like that.’”
But working in college baseball wasn’t ever part of Goudoras’ plans. Before coming to Oxford, he had spent time in the Mets and Philadelphia Phillies organizations. But when the opportunity with Ole Miss came along, he couldn’t say no.
“Honestly, video of the beer showers on YouTube kind of hooked me, and I’ve never looked back,” said Goudoras, referring to how Ole Miss fans celebrate a home run.
Goudoras’ responsibilities change depending on the time of year. In the days leading up to Ole Miss’ 2025 opening weekend against three preseason top 25 teams, he was putting together scouting reports and video. While that’s done ahead of time, on game days he’ll be in the hitters and pitchers meetings and answer any questions. Postgame reports are compiled for pitchers – which go over how they did, how pitches played and moved – while hitters’ postgame reports are more about swing decisions.
Ole Miss has a director of player development in Bianco’s son Drew, but Goudoras also has a hand in the development side for the Rebels.
“Hitters, breaking down swing decisions, (like), ‘Hey, do you realize you’ve swung at 20 percent of fastballs in the zone this year? You need to swing more at pitches in the zone and be more aggressive,’” Goudoras said.
“Or the opposite – OK, you’re chasing a lot. You need to cut down on that. Or, you hit the ball really hard, but you never hit it in the air, so we’re going to try to hit more balls in the air. Pitching side, it’s like, ‘Hey, this pitch gets a lot of swing and miss in the zone, it’s really good.’ Or, ‘Hey, your slider’s really up out of hand, you need a tighter slider, harder.’”
In the offseason, Goudoras also pitches in in a way he couldn’t have foreseen in 2018: the transfer portal. Goudoras helps out with player evaluations and, through the use of analytics, finds players for Ole Miss to target. Sometimes, it involves taking chances on players whose traditional stats don’t look great but have solid tools, like current Ole Miss pitcher Connor Spencer.
“You can look at his fastball shape and see this guy has a cut-ride fastball, which is rare and good,” Goudoras said. “If he can throw strikes, he can be really effective, and he was. Will McCausland this year, lower release-height guy. Fastball’s some carry from a lower release height’s good. … If you look at the ERA and hits given up, it doesn’t look great on paper. But there are pieces there.”
Bianco values Goudoras’ input on players in the transfer portal.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have somebody like Chris on the staff for the last seven years that’s been able to help us with that, to be able to jump into the computer in the portal and evaluate guys on a computer screen and things that they do and be able to pull it out and show it to coach (Carl) Lafferty, our recruiting coordinator, or with (pitching coach Joel) Mangrum and so on,” Bianco said.
Case in point: Bianco credited Goudoras with finding Illinois State transfer Luke Cheng, who Goudoras believes is one of the best defensive shortstops in the country. The Rebels led the SEC with 66 errors last season, and they’re hoping Cheng’s glove can fix some of their defensive shortcomings.
“He’s always going to have a say in that. The good thing about Chris is Chris is not scared to speak up,” Bianco said. “He’s not scared to say, ‘Hey, I like this guy,’ and to go to bat for the players that he thinks are going to help us.”
Old dog, new tricks
It’d be easy for a baseball lifer like Bianco to butt heads with someone with an analytics background like Goudoras, but the two don’t clash. It turns out, an old dog can learn new tricks.
“It was interesting just because he’s really good at, ‘Hey, I don’t know this, so you explain this to me,’” Goudoras said. “He’ll poke holes and everything, so that makes me have to work hard at my job to say, ‘Hey, I think this is it.’ I know he’s going to ask this, this and this. … He’s really good at making sure what we’re doing is right and making sure he understands it.”
“I also think with a lot of the analytics, there’s a part of it that is, I think, confirms what you know or confirms what you see visually, and then there’s a part of it that allows you to realize what some kids maybe do well, but yet they haven’t had success. So, you know that this kid does this and it’s different,” Bianco added.
The hiring of new pitching coach Joel Mangrum is an extension of what the Rebels want to do to stay on the cutting edge. Mangrum previously spent time coaching in the college ranks, but he most recently worked in the Cleveland Guardians organization. He has a background in modern player development.
“On a lot of different levels, but one, certainly somebody that understands the data and the analytics more so than I, somebody that has watched so many more pitchers and high-level pitchers,” Bianco said. “From a development standpoint, he’s been terrific. And like I said, also from a time standpoint to where a guy that just solely focuses on pitching that’s it, I think the pitchers have felt that. They’ve felt a lot more one-on-one relationship with a guy that’s helping them develop.”
Even with players entering college with more data on them than ever, Goudoras and the Rebels can throw more information at newcomers than they could ever think of. But the players can also go at their own speed.
“It’s a lot different (than high school), I think we did a good job of not overloading guys with it, letting them know the stuff that’s important,” Ole Miss pitcher Hunter Elliott said. “If we wanted to kind of get a little deeper into it, they allowed us to. But if we kind of wanted to stay a little bit away from it and slowly get into analytics, we were able to do that.”
Though, he admits, sometimes Goudoras’ analytics knowledge can go over his head.
“He’s too smart for me sometimes to where I’m like, ‘All right, I don’t know that much, I can’t understand it,” Elliott said. “But he is the one that really did a good job of like, hey, the information’s here, we have all of the tools. If you want it, it’s here. He’s always happy to talk analytics with you, he’s always super happy to go into some stuff about your bullpen or about your outing that he thought was really good. He’s incredible.”
Ole Miss’ use of analytics not only has benefits on the field, but off the field as a recruiting tool as well.
“That’s kind of one of the reasons why I came here, because we’d have the opportunity to have all of those bells and whistles some other colleges might not have or are very limited with it,” Ole Miss pitcher Riley Maddox said. “I think it’s been great, and it’s been easier than I thought it was. Now being in my fourth year, it’s been pretty good.”
Ole Miss is hoping for a return to form after a couple of disappointing seasons since winning the College World Series in 2022. But it takes a village to return to the postseason – let alone Omaha – and that includes the analytics guru that does a little bit of everything behind the scenes.
“I trust all of our coaches, I don’t know if I trust anyone more than I trust him,” Bianco said. “…He does a terrific job in his main duty as director of analytics and all that touches. But what a lot of people also don’t know is because we’re college baseball, he’s also doing a lot of operations and administrative tasks and duties that take up a lot of his time as well and being my right-hand man, if you will. He makes my life a lot easier, so yeah, I love Chris Goudoras.”
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