When he was earning his undergraduate and graduate accounting degrees from the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, Abrams played on the Hurricanes baseball team. Today, he’s employed by the Chicago Cubs, although not as an on-field warrior.
“Pretty early on in college, I realized that collegiate ball was probably going to be the end of the line for me,” said Abrams, 31, who’s a coordinator of pro scouting for the Cubs and who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting in 2014, followed by a master’s the following year.
In light of Abrams’ smallish 5-foot-10, 160-pound build, he refused to view UM’s Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field as a field of dreams. His future depended on knocking his Miami Herbert coursework out of the park—baseball was merely a hobby.
“I kind of knew at my size, and how hard I threw, that I probably wasn’t going to get drafted (by an MLB team),” Abrams explained. “That’s why I already was looking forward to my master’s degree and was kind of ready to go to work after school.”
After finishing the Master of Science in Accountancy program in 2015, Abrams took a job in Miami with Grant Thornton, an accounting and consulting firm. Abrams figured that baseball diamonds were consigned to his past, but he was mistaken.
“I worked at Grant Thornton as an auditor for two years,” Abrams said. “It was my first job out of college. When you’re working in auditing, you see an entire business. You get a big picture of companies, which is kind of what drew me to that.”
A Miami native who grew up rooting for the Miami Marlins, Abrams was thrilled when Grant Thornton asked him to audit the Marlins. It was a pleasure to enter the Marlins magnificent retractable-dome stadium, which was called Marlins Park at that time, in order to audit his favorite team.
“Showing up at the stadium every day was like, `Well, this is something that I’m interested in!’ Abrams said. “A lot of people get into public accounting to find out what kind of industry they’re really interested in, whether it’s real estate or financial services, or something like that. For me, and I probably should have known this earlier, it was obviously baseball.
“I had a different perspective of the sport than when I was a player,” Abrams continued. “Having the accounting background and the business background, it was the perfect combination of what I was looking for and what I was interested in. I wanted to get into something baseball-related full-time.”
To attain that goal, Abrams left Grant Thornton and secured a paid internship with Inside Edge, a sports data and analytics company. After six months, Abrams left Inside Edge for a paid internship with the Houston Astros baseball team, where he spent 2018 working with the Astros’ advanced scouting/advanced information department.
After the 2018 season wound down, Abrams sent his resume to all 30 MLB teams and got an offer to work full-time with the Chicago Cubs baseball operations department. One of the most storied baseball venues in the United States, Wrigley Field, was now his workplace.
“I was excited because I know Chicago is a great city,” Abrams said. “I knew a person who had already worked for the Cubs, so I knew I was walking into a good situation, which was great.”
After spending two years getting the lay of the land, Abrams was made coordinator of pro scouting in 2021.
“It’s kind of a combination of baseball operations and player acquisitions, so it’s pretty much anything related to player contracts and player personnel decisions,” Abrams said. “Most of the time I’m looking at other organizations, and we’re trying to identify players we think we would want to target, whether through free agency or trades.
“And I help a little bit on the baseball operations side, during free agency, with things like how much money do we think we should offer a player?” said Abrams, who loves being part of the Chicago Cubs brain trust.
He has advice for Miami Herbert students thinking about careers in sports.
“It can be a long process, so don’t get discouraged,” he said. “Reaching out to as many people as possible is very helpful, because you’ll see that people will kind of respond to that, and they’re always trying to find good people as well.
“Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of formal ways to get into sports,” Abrams added. “A lot of it is finding people and going out and making as many connections as you can to try to find your way in.”
Having successfully found his way into one of the country’s premier baseball organizations, Abrams doesn’t foresee himself leaving anytime soon.
