Seth Lane’s diamond memories

Seth Lane ’90 is responsible for the Major League Baseball (MLB) network infrastructure. His team designs, builds and supports all networking components in MLB data centers, ballparks and offices. The group also supports the network infrastructure underpinning fan and player applications such as streaming and the Statcast, which provides speed and distance statistics.

“Perhaps most visible to fans — and critical to the game itself — are the replay videos we route back to our main office for review,” Lane says. “We’re also helping the deployment of the much talked-about automated balls and strikes that we’re piloting in the minor leagues and it’s very, very cool.

“I’ve been working in the networking field ever since I left Binghamton,” he says. “I graduated with an economics degree and didn’t know what I wanted to do other than live in New York. After dozens of rejections, I ended up on a waitlist for a job at a large financial institution — and as it turned out one of the hiring decision makers was a Binghamton alumnus. He lobbied hard for me because I was ‘one of our own!’ It was the big break I needed as I was placed in a training program that taught me networking. It’s been a phenomenal ride.”

Here are Lane’s five favorite baseball memories through the years:

• “Roger Clemens laughing and throwing me a ball during batting practice after I screamed that I wanted to ‘have his baby.’ I was young.”

• “Jim Leyritz hitting the home run against the Braves that basically launched the late 1990s Yankee dynasty. I was at a bar called Mo’s Caribbean with some friends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and it was absolute madness.”

• “Watching the Yanks sweep the Padres at Yankee Stadium in the 1998 World Series and just thinking it wasn’t fair. Even though the Yankees were, and are, my team, it felt like the competitive balance was off. This was further proven when they won the World Series the next two years, but then only won once in the next 20 years. That was such a special group of players and, at the time, I thought they would win forever.”

• “I owned a small tech consulting company and was taking an important client to a game in the Bronx and really wanted to do right by him. So I spent what was, for us, a very large sum of money and got seats four rows behind the dugout and I could hear the players speaking and they could hear me — a true ‘insider’s seat’ well before I wound up working at MLB.”

• “Getting a job at MLB and going around the country to ballparks. There are still a lot I haven’t been to! It’s so cool to take a look ‘behind the scenes’: the dugouts, locker rooms and the field. I still feel like a kid at times and sit in awe at some of the sights and people I see on the job.”