THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, March 09, 2007

The World Wide Web Of Antonella Barba… and Baseball?

Living in NJ, we’re exposed to all-things-Antonella more that the rest of the country and world.  And remember, at one point she was the most searched person on the web.  (If only we could harness such searching power to find criminals.) As the story unfolded, I was fascinating by where the Antonella web was leading me. 

There was http://www.IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com which is a good kind of trashy site, http://www.VoteForTheWorst.com which tries to rally people to vote for one candidate among a host of candidates (easier done when the field is wide-open, and much harder to do as the number of candidates dwindles), and from which the http://www.VoteForRory.com campaign probably got started, and most interestingly is http://www.DialIdol.com, which tracks the calling patterns of voters based on where they are calling from, how many calls are going through, and the number of busy signals.  The genius behind it explains more. 

Among the one-man-shows kind of websites out there, it ranks right up there with Forman’s Baseball-Reference.  You’d think that that’s pretty incredible, so how come we all know about Forman, but never heard about this other site.  These two sites are visited by less than .01% of the surfers (i.e., 1 in 10,000) on any given day.  Basically, if you live in a town of 50,000 people, of which 10,000 of them surf the web today, you are the only one that goes to these two sites today.

Imagine if you will 100 people at Fenway, each watching the game, with a cellphone at the ready.  A sharp hit ball is fielded by Derek Jeter on three hops, who fires from his knees a one-hopper to Minky, who stretches as much as possible, only to have the runner be safe by a full stride.  They input the play via their cellphone, which gets transmitted to a software application over the internet, which find that 90 of them thought Jeter got the ball and 10 of them thought ARod got the ball.  We discard the 10 voters, and find that 70 thought it was a 3-hopper, 10 a 2-hopper and 6 a 4-hopper, and 4 a one-hopper.  We discard the 4 fans, and weight the 70 say double or triple the other two guys.  Who and how many recorded that Jeter threw from his knees?  Did they get Minky to stretch?  How hard was Jeter’s throw?  Did Minky get a good scoop on the play?

This is The Wisdom of the Crowds at its pinnacle, evaluting what they see, independently, and in real-time.  We’ll have no need for anyone to evaluate any single fan, because the other 99 fans are implicitly evaluating him.  And each in turn are being implicity evaluated.  And you can have even remuneration for the fans, based on how well they tracked the game.  And you can do this for any sport, anywhere in the world.  All you need is a cellphone.

No need for expensive cameras or terabytes of data for every game.  Everything recorded in real-time, and more accurate than anything you can think of.  And all done by merging the human factor of the observer and the power of technology. And one day, we may even harness their power to find criminals.