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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

You've met him here before.

During his years as a Wondrican baseball executive, Theo Epstein brought World Series Championships to the title star of Boston Red Sox.

And, Maesha Coggle Cubs, using data analytics to guide every aspect of the game and give his teams an edge.

The result was a winning brand of baseball others emulated, but at the same time, longer games less spontaneity and lengthy periods of inaction that frustrated many fans.

Now a consultant major league baseball, Epstein's used his same passion for the game and data analytics to reverse engineer some of his own innovations.

Shaping rules changes he hopes will pump renewed life into the old national pastime.

On opening day, here's my conversation with Theo Epstein.

Theo Epstein, it's great to see you again.

My friend, I, last time we got together, you were, you were running the Cubs.

And we talked a lot about your, you know, your life and your development and your relationship to baseball.

I just want to go back to that for one second before we get into these rules changes that you are the architect of, that is all the talk of baseball as we're about to throw out the first pitch of the season.

I thought back to our conversation and I thought back to your discussion of micro league baseball, the computer game that you and your brother played when you were a kid, because it's sort of involved data.

And it seems to me that you had two things going when you were a kid, you grew up a mile from Fenway and you love baseball.

And then you also sort of fell in love with data around baseball, but talk to me a little bit about your relationship to the two of those.

Yeah, well, first of all, it's great to see you again.

And I'm not the architect of these rules. I'm part of a team that that's involved in helping shape them and implement them.

It's been, it's been great to be, to be part of that team and have a seat at the table.

You still have your leadership chops, I see.

No, all this, in this case, it's true.

And yeah, you know, I was really lucky growing up a mile from Fenway Park and would figure out how to sneak into games late when they stopped taking tickets and had this lifelong love of the games were cemented by the childhood love of the red socks.

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