Sam Menzin’s interest in working in baseball started with a book he read as a teenager.
“I read Moneyball like a lot of people my age, and it did something to me that a sports book isn’t supposed to do,” he says. “It didn’t make me want to play baseball more. It made me want to run it.”
At the time, he couldn’t have described exactly what it was that people in a baseball front office did all day. He simply knew he was interested in how teams made decisions and wanted to be part of that process.
That interest eventually led to fourteen years with the Detroit Tigers, where Menzin rose from an intern in baseball operations to Vice President and Assistant General Manager. Along the way, he learned how new technology was changing how teams evaluated players, negotiated contracts and arbitration cases, managed departments, and made long-term investment decisions.
When he eventually left the Tigers and started two companies of his own, he found that he’d learned much of what he needed to know years earlier while working inside someone else’s organization.
A Career Path That Wasn’t Particularly Direct
“My path into baseball operations was not direct,” Menzin says, “and I don’t think the direct path would have taught me as much.”
He played four years of varsity baseball at Swarthmore College while studying history and psychology and spent a year abroad in Rome. During college, he also worked for two years as an Assistant Director at the Complete Game Institute, where he helped run a pitching biomechanics facility, staffed camps, and worked with high-speed video.
It was an early introduction to the growing role of measurement in player evaluation. Things that scouts had historically described through observation could increasingly be measured and compared.
His next few jobs took him into very different parts of the sports business.
Menzin worked in corporate sales with the New York Mets, handling client relationships, activations, and stadium tours. He then spent two years at player representation agency Turner-Gary Sports, where partner Rex Gary introduced him to the mechanics of salary arbitration: building a case, tracking the market, determining a player’s value, and defending that number before a panel.
He also built the agency’s website because, as often happens at a small organization, someone needed to.
In 2012, that combination of experience led to an internship in the Detroit Tigers’ baseball operations department. There, Menzin prepared arbitration cases and evaluated trade targets, including players involved in the deals that brought Aníbal Sánchez and Omar Infante to Detroit.
Looking back, he sees value in how different those early jobs were.
“None of them looked like the eventual job,” Menzin says. “Nobody hands you a front-office title. You accumulate the pieces: negotiation, analysis, relationship management, a tolerance for being the least important person in a room full of decision-makers, long before anyone asks you to use them all at once.”
At the time, those pieces didn’t necessarily look like they were building toward one particular job. Eventually, they did.
Fourteen Years Inside One Organization
The internship turned into a fourteen-year career with the Tigers.
Menzin moved from analyst to coordinator to director, and in 2021, at thirty-one, he was named Vice President and Assistant General Manager. In that role, he oversaw scouting, medical, performance, and player experience departments, worked on salary arbitration cases, and helped direct more than $100 million in capital investment across training facilities, academies, and stadium upgrades.
Those responsibilities also gave him experience with many of the questions he would later face running his own companies.
“I say all of this not to recite a résumé,” he says, “but because it’s the part people skip past when they ask how I ended up running two companies.”
“I spent fourteen years inside one of the most conservative, risk-averse industries in American sports, making capital allocation decisions, negotiating eight-figure contracts, and managing people through pressure that shows up publicly and immediately if you get it wrong,” he says. “That is a founder’s education. It just doesn’t look like one from the outside, because nobody calls a VP of Baseball Operations an entrepreneur.”
A decision about whether to invest in a training complex, for example, forces an organization to think several years ahead. What can it build internally? What will it otherwise have to acquire elsewhere? How long will it take before the investment starts producing something useful?
Salary arbitration is a completely different kind of problem. There, the job is to understand a player’s market value, gather the evidence, build the argument, and defend the number.
Menzin wasn’t running a startup, but he was getting plenty of practice making decisions about money, people, risk, and incomplete information.
SJM Sports Grew Out of Problems He Already Understood
When Menzin founded SJM Sports in 2025, he wasn’t entering an entirely unfamiliar field. The company grew out of questions he spent years addressing on the operating side of professional sports.
A buyer evaluating a youth academy, performance facility, or ownership stake in a club can analyze revenue, expenses, contracts, and other financial information. Understanding what those numbers mean inside the organization can be harder.
A coaching staff, for example, may be a significant part of an academy’s value. A development pipeline that looks consistently productive may actually be benefiting from one or two unusually strong groups of athletes. A long-term contract that initially appears expensive may look very different once the market changes.
Menzin had spent years around those kinds of decisions.
That experience is behind SJM Sports’ approach to evaluating sports assets for investors. Menzin has worked on capital budgets, contracts, player valuation, arbitration, scouting, and development from inside a Major League organization.
Now, when he looks at a sports business as an investment, he’s interested in the assumptions underneath the financial model, too. He knows which parts of an operation can look straightforward on paper and become considerably more complicated once you’re responsible for running them.
Campus Edge Baseball Put Him Back in the Weeds
Menzin launched Campus Edge Baseball the same year, and running it introduced him to a different side of entrepreneurship.
The company is designed to bring more structure to college baseball recruiting.
“There’s no professional-grade evaluation layer sitting underneath college recruiting the way there is at the pro level,” Menzin says.
Campus Edge provides athlete profiles, a searchable index of coaches and programs, a recruiting strategy matrix, and direct communication with coaching staffs across Division I, Division II, Division III, and JUCO programs.
That last part matters to Menzin. Technology can make it easier to organize and distribute information about a player, but at some point, someone still has to make sure the right coach knows who he is.
Running the company has also meant doing jobs that would have belonged to entire departments during his years with the Tigers.
“As CEO, I own everything from sales and marketing to NCAA compliance to the actual coach relationships,” he says, “which is its own lesson, because nobody tells you when you start a company that you will personally become its head of video editing on a Tuesday afternoon.”
After years of managing large departments, Menzin found himself back in a setting where the big decision and the small task might land on the same desk.
His baseball experience helped with the judgment calls. Building a more structured approach to college recruiting also meant learning to handle everything else that comes with a young company.
Still Learning Outside Baseball
Menzin is also completing an Executive MBA at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business.
He doesn’t see the degree as a replacement for what he learned during fourteen years in baseball. He sees it as a way to keep adding perspectives that years inside one industry may not have provided.
“Fourteen years of pattern recognition inside one industry has limits,” he says. “People who stop learning formally once they start succeeding tend to plateau earlier than they expect to.”
He also tries to keep parts of his life separate from the companies.
“I run, cook, ski, play chess, and in 2023 ran the Detroit Marathon and raised $17,000 for suicide prevention research,” he says, “which had nothing to do with baseball or business and everything to do with staying a person while you build things.”
It’s an unusually personal line in a conversation about entrepreneurship, but it fits with the larger story of how Menzin thinks about his career. Baseball occupied fourteen years of it. Running companies occupies much of it now. Neither has to occupy all of it.
Learning the Industry Before Starting the Company
Menzin didn’t spend fourteen years with the Tigers to prepare to become a founder.
“I didn’t set out to become a founder,” he says. “I set out to understand how a complicated organization actually works, from the inside, at every level I could reach.”
The companies came later.
“The companies came later, built on the specific gaps I could see because I’d spent fourteen years standing in exactly the spot where those gaps were most visible,” he says.
That experience has shaped the advice he gives people considering entrepreneurship.
“Go deep enough inside something that you can see precisely what it’s missing,” Menzin says. “The company usually announces itself.”
That’s more or less what happened to him.
SJM Sports grew out of years spent seeing the gap between what an investment looks like on paper and what it takes to run a sports organization. Campus Edge Baseball grew out of his experience evaluating players, and his belief that college recruiting could use more of the structure professional baseball had spent years developing.
Neither idea required him to forget what he’d been doing for fourteen years and start over. That experience is why he could see the opportunity in the first place.
For Menzin, that’s the part of the founder story that’s easy to overlook. You don’t necessarily know you’re preparing to start a company while you’re doing it. Sometimes you’re just getting very good at an industry, paying attention to what doesn’t work, and learning enough to recognize a problem when you finally have the chance to solve it yourself.
About Sam Menzin
Sam Menzin is a sports executive, entrepreneur, and advisor whose career spans professional baseball operations, athlete development, and finance. He spent 2012 to 2025 with the Detroit Tigers, eventually becoming Vice President and Assistant General Manager. His earlier experience included roles with Turner-Gary Sports, the New York Mets, and the Complete Game Institute.
A native of Westbury, New York, Menzin studied history and psychology at Swarthmore College, where he played four years of varsity baseball.
He is the founder of SJM Sports, an analyst with Woods Capital, and the founder and CEO of Campus Edge Baseball. His writing on fourteen years of front-office work covers player acquisition, contract negotiation, salary arbitration, and talent pipeline development.
