Thanksgiving at the Horan household in New Jersey is usually your typical, American celebration of the fall holiday.

There’s football on television and the oven works overtime for a scrumptious feast. Jasmine, the youngest of the family, handles the desserts – an amateur baker, she prides herself in offering plenty of options.

“Blueberry pie, pumpkin pie, sometimes chocolate cream pie,” the Chicago Cubs manager of baseball operations said. “Just way too many pies that we don’t necessarily need, but I’m big on pie.”

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Her older brother, Beau, helps, but is more of a laid-back, go-with-the-flow type. As the assistant director of research and development for the Detroit Tigers, Beau enjoys spending the rare time back at home with his mom and three other siblings. He doesn’t see them too often. When his Tigers host the Cubs this weekend, it will be one of the few times during the baseball season that he sees his little sister Jasmine. 

The holidays, are usually that time for family bonding. But Thanksgiving in 2019 in the Horan household was vastly different. Jasmine wasn’t going 100 miles per hour or cranking out pies. She sulked in her room, isolated from the rest of her family while stressing about the repercussions of a massive decision.

Had she made the worst mistake of her life?

Jasmine had just accepted a full-time offer with the Cubs and was leaving the New York Yankees front office. The Yankees gig was an apprenticeship role but close to home, with the team she grew up rooting for with coworkers and an environment she treasured dearly.

Alone in her room, she closed herself off from family.

“Let’s go get ice cream,” Beau texted her.

He suggested other activities to try and get Jasmine out of her room. Only he could understand what she was going through. That’s why he broke out of his laid-back ways and tried to drag his little sister out of her funk.

It highlights the bond the two have; one that’s taken them from Princeton, N.J. to the majors. It’s hard to get work in a major-league front office – it’s even rarer to see a pair of siblings make it. 

“Seriously how the [bleep] did we BOTH pull this off??” Beau texted Jasmine when she was first hired by the Yankees in 2019.

That’s what makes their relationship so special and unique – and one that will be put to the side for a few hours over the next three days when their teams square off this weekend in Detroit.

Road to the Show

Jasmine and Beau are the youngest of four children raised in Princeton. Paul Horan played college baseball at Division III Amherst College in Massachusetts and passed his love of the game to his four children, Jake, Bianca, Beau and Jasmine.

Beau and Jasmine both played. Beau was talented enough that his parents enrolled him at the local Princeton Day School, and he went on to play at Division III Williams College in Massachusetts. Jasmine, meanwhile, was a “scrappy defender” in Little League and loved it. One day, her parents were told it was time to play softball, as girls weren’t allowed to play baseball past a certain age.

Little Jasmine had a stubbornness to her, one that’s benefited her even to this day.

“I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” Jasmine said. “So, I just stopped.”

Her love of the game never waned.

Jasmine went to Amherst and was on the diving team. It was in college that both siblings began their ascent to the majors – through similar paths with each charting their own trail.

Jasmine was advised by Joe Katuska – then a Cincinnati Reds area scout and now their director of amateur scouting – through an alumni mentorship program to work in the Cape Cod League (CCL). She spent the summer of 2016 with the Harwich Mariners, selling raffle tickets and merchandise, picking up trash after games and occasionally talking to scouts.  

“It was not glamorous at all, but, to me coming out of that internship, I just knew that I wanted to keep going,” Jasmine said. “I was just happy to be there.”

Beau had his first taste in a short-term internship with the Washington Nationals and enrolled in grad school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He interned in the CCL with the Wareham Gateman in 2017, doing scouting work and writing reports on some 20 to 30 players. A shortstop who hit .300 that season really caught his eye. 

“Nico Hoerner was one of my favorite players coming out of the Cape Cod League,” he recalled of the Cubs’ future 2018 first-round pick and Gold Glove winner. 

That same summer, Jasmine interned with the Vermont Lake Monsters, then the short-season Oakland A’s affiliate in Burlington, Vermont. She was their TrackMan operator, charting pitch types and outcomes with some video work, too.

Players from opposing teams would make inappropriate comments and others would ask her if she needed help with aspects of her job – like going up a 15-foot ladder to set up the camera for games.

“I know that people offering to help and stuff not always had bad intentions,” Jasmine said, “but the comments from the players sometimes would get to me a little bit.”

One day, pitching coach Bryan Corey sat her down after he heard some comments and told her to brush it off and said she’d reach the majors before any of them.

“My internal motto is: ‘Prove them wrong,’” Jasmine said. “Because, the deeper I got into my internship progression, I felt more aware of the fact that, yes, I’m a woman in baseball, and there’s not many. And I feel bad because I know that a lot of women have faced that also, and it deters them enough where they just choose a different career.

“But I was not going to let that happen to me.”

Her resilience paid off.

Welcome to The Show

Beau attended the 2017 Winter Meetings, where he was offered and accepted a baseball analytics internship with the Tigers for the next season. Jasmine, meanwhile, took a scary jump. She accepted an internship with the Oakland A’s.

It was the farthest from home she’d ever been. And it was the best thing that happened, too. The A’s front office was small, so she had her hands on a bit of everything. She helped with the amateur draft, making over 500 magnets with player names and was able to announce their 32nd-round pick, used to select catcher John Jones.

“I just listened again, you were perfect. So proud. So happy. So jealous haha,” Beau texted her.

She worked with assistant general manager Dan Kantrovitz and the major-league coaching staff after the draft to optimize the A’s outfield positioning.

“It just felt very natural,” Jasmine said, “and I was very excited about the idea of doing stuff for the major league team.”

The next year, Beau was hired full-time by Detroit and Jasmine entered her senior year juggling two majors, competing for the diving team and trying to join her brother in the big leagues.

She applied for jobs with numerous teams, including her hometown Yankees. They were fast in hiring and wanted her to come to New York for an interview, so she drove four hours each way for a 45-minute interview.

Beau supported her even though he was in disbelief. He sent clips of George Costanza from Seinfeld interviewing with the Yankees. She tried not to get her hopes up but, three days later, she was offered and accepted a year-long associate position working with the analytics and baseball operations departments.

Jasmine made cards that pitchers used before PitchCom. When the Yankees reached the playoffs, she helped in advanced scouting and focused on details that could give her team a competitive advantage.

“Are they rounding first base too hard that we can throw behind them?” Jasmine said. “Just anything like that and I really, really enjoyed that.”

After the season, she accepted a year-long diversity fellowship where she’d split time between New York and the team’s training complex in Tampa, Fla. She wasn’t enamored with leaving New York, but she couldn’t pass the opportunity up.

The Yankees had a board with everyone’s birthday and people would bring in desserts on those days to celebrate them. Little things like that made Jasmine love the office culture and want to grow there.

But the pastry-loving Jasmine wouldn’t get to experience her birthday.

She was called into general manager Brian Cashman’s office one day after the season. Theo Epstein, then then-Cubs’ president of baseball operations, had called; they wanted to hire her and asked the Yankees for permission as an industry-standard practice.

The rest is a blur for Jasmine.

“It was like the principal’s office,” Jasmine recalled.

Kantrovitz had just been hired by the Cubs as the vice president of scouting and he wanted to bring Jasmine with him to help in the team’s draft process. Jasmine immediately called Beau before reaching out to the Cubs. What should she do? The Yankees were close to home, so why move to Chicago?

“It’s so hard to give advice in those situations,” Beau admitted. “I’m no authority. I think what I just kept saying was, ‘You can’t turn down full-time jobs for a fellowship.’”

Jasmine called Kantrovitz and accepted the position the week before Thanksgiving. She cried as she told her Yankees supervisors she was leaving. At home, she secluded herself in her bedroom, refusing to leave.

“For her to completely remove herself from that experience, from that week was out of character,” Beau said. “So, I just tried to mirror image reaction [her emotions] and try to help her out however I can.”

Eventually, Jasmine left her room and the two spoke more about the opportunity. This was a golden one for her. Beau stressed that with his advice. She was wanted in Chicago, and she’d be helping in amateur scouting. It was an area unfamiliar to her but would be a fun challenge to undertake.

Major League Career

Jasmine moved to Chicago after the Thanksgiving holiday and has worn numerous hats since joining the Cubs in the fall of 2019. She was in amateur scouting, using the Cubs’ draft model to help evaluate players. She also interacted with the scouts, serving as a bridge between the analytics department.

She bounced to the pro acquisitions side in 2021 and moved to her current role as manager of baseball operations in 2023, where she helps with budgets, contract structures – from the minor leagues up – and other logistical aspects that can often be overlooked.

Beau has been with Detroit his entire professional career and serves as a conduit between their analytics department and their pitching staff. He also travels with the team.

“It’s so important having someone that can help you get the data that you need but also really [get it to] a place that’s digestible that you can really get to the point,” said Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd, who was with Detroit from 2015 to 2021 and then again in 2023. “He helped us from everything from scouting reports to usage, metrics and kind of was everything in that realm.”

Jasmine did bring one big thing over to Chicago. When employees returned to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic, Jasmine put up a big board and everyone wrote down their birthdays. On their day, colleagues received a baked good made from Jasmine – and “I don’t know that she’s ever repeated anything,” general manager Carter Hawkins said.

“It’s a nice little reminder – it kind of has to be a family atmosphere with the amount of time people spend up in the office,” Hawkins said. “They’re doing a fun job, everyone realizes it’s a privilege to work here, but just reminders of the humanity of it is always really great, too.”

Family, baseball bond

In 2023, Jasmine threw out the first pitch before a Cubs game at Wrigley Field to kick off Women in Baseball Week. Beau asked the Tigers for a rare, in-season day off and drove to and from Chicago in the same day to watch his baby sister – also his first time at Wrigley Field.

“The fact that he missed a game – that’s wild,” Jasmine said.

The nature of their jobs means the two don’t see each other often during the season. But, with the new schedule format, they face off once a year. Last season was the first time the Tigers played the Cubs in Chicago since the siblings were with their respective organizations.

Jasmine’s excitement was palpable on the first day of the series. She couldn’t focus on work, only thinking of her brother being in town and being at her home park later that day.

“I was going around the office like, ‘Oh my God, my brother’s here,’” Jasmine said.

Jasmine went down to the field – something she doesn’t do often – and met her brother, snapping a photo to document the big family moment.

“It was just a really surreal moment,” Jasmine said. “He’s not always super sentimental, but in that moment, he’s like, ‘This is crazy – I can’t believe this is happening.’”

She took solace in the fact that the Cubs took two of three from Detroit. When the Tigers reached the playoffs, she had a soft spot for her brother’s team. She didn’t root for them, but she knew what role he had in helping them reach the American League Division Series.

Jasmine hopes this season she can experience the postseason. And, as the two teams square off this weekend, it’s not impossible to see them go at it again in the Fall Classic with the way both teams are playing.

But that’s jumping way too far ahead. For now, they’ll keep cheering each other on – except for this weekend.

“I really want to win,” Jasmine said. “But I also want them to do well – [but] not against us.”