At the start of Boston College’s Homecoming 2024 weekend, Jason Sinnarajah ‘02 was conversing with students at a “Lunch with a Leader” event, and he didn’t need to point out that he wished he were somewhere else on that Friday, October 25. That went without saying because Sinnarajah is the COO of baseball’s Kansas City Royals, a team that landed two series shy of playing in this year’s World Series—which began that evening in Los Angeles.
It was a surprise to many that the Royals made it as far as they did, batting their way to the American League Division Series. They ultimately fell to the Yankees, which, as Sinnarajah did note in his talk, has a team payroll three times the size of the Royals in small-market Kansas City. (The Yankees, in the end, were humbled by the L.A. Dodgers.)
Which is not to say that the Royals chief seemed less than enthused about returning to the Heights to tell his story. Hardly.
Jason Sinnarajah
At the lunch sponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, Sinnarajah was pumped for both the conversation and the Eagles kickoff that night. He was sporting a maroon-and-gold hoodie and showed up with his two young sons, also clad in BC caps and sweatshirts. With fingers crossed, he introduced the two boys, Taylor and Matthew, as members of the Boston College classes of 2034 and 2036, respectively.
Speaking to 25 students who helped themselves to salads and wraps and crowded around a long rectangular conference table in Carney Hall, Sinnarajah said, “You guys already have a great leg up because you’re here. I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for BC.” He credited his alma mater and its values with much of the success he has enjoyed in a diverse array of industries.
“You almost have to be a servant leader, no matter where you are. You need empathy, you need to understand people’s feelings,” he said, alluding to Jesuit values of service and discernment. “Feelings matter.” His service priority as an undergraduate—volunteering for ReadBoston, a children’s literacy group—carries on with his role as board vice chair of a similar organization in Kansas City, Turn the Page KC.
Sinnarajah offered a bracing account of his choices and changes over a two-decade span.
A highlight of this trajectory was his decision to leave a rewarding and remunerative job at Google, where he held senior roles in Tokyo, Sydney, and San Francisco. He helped build out Google's early entrance into sports-related content through partnerships with ESPN and the major professional sports leagues. After five years with the company, Sinnarajah chose to follow a dream of executive leadership in the sports world. In 2012, he moved to Ohio with his wife, Jessica, and their nine-month-old, Taylor, to join Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians on their strategy and business analytics team. In doing so, he took a 90-percent pay cut.
His winding path began well before then. Sinnarajah entered Boston College as a communications major, switched to economics, then transferred to the Carroll School to major in marketing, before settling on finance with a marketing minor.
“ “Be flexible, curious about life, always growing and looking to learn. Meet many people. Be nice…. Focus on data and facts. Admit when you’re wrong…. Stay true to Jesuit ideals.”
His hopes of going into investment banking after graduation were upset by the post-9/11 downturn. Instead, he did sales at General Mills, followed by MBA studies at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, followed by Google and the Guardians, then to the Weather Company where he led business development partnerships with global media platforms like Apple and Meta, then to Ziff Davis as senior vice president, back to professional sports with the Buffalo Bills (the NFL franchise he grew up rooting for as a Toronto native), and back to baseball with the Royals.
These twists and turns have a logic that Sinnarajah shared with the students, a batch of lessons he imparted: “Be flexible, curious about life, always growing and looking to learn.” To that he added, “Meet many people. Be nice…. Focus on data and facts. Admit when you’re wrong…. Stay true to Jesuit ideals.”
The logo for the KC Royals
One student asked how he sees his role as a person of color in business. Sinnarajah, who is of South Asian descent, replied that he honestly never gave it much consideration until six or seven years ago. Now he feels “a personal responsibility to help people of color advance.”
Asked if he had any regrets about his risk-taking, Sinnarajah mentioned a different regret. “I wish I had learned to code. You guys should do that,” he said—before hearing that the Carroll School now has a required course, Coding for Business, in the core management curriculum.
His keen attention to data and metrics doesn’t mean that Sinnarajah is entirely untouched by that endearing quality of baseball players, their taste for superstition. His teams have tended to do surprisingly well after Sinnarajah arrives, a fact that can’t be unrelated to the generally accepted links between success in sports business operations and on-field team success.
Sinnarajah’s take on that? “I like to think I’m a good-luck charm,” he said with a sparkling smile.