Bloomberg Takes Cuts at Baseball

I attended yesterday’s Bloomberg Sports presentation in New York, in which baseball bloggers, writers and geeks (can I be all three of those?) got a sneak peek at their new (intriguing, with room to grow) baseball analysis tools debuting on Feb. 18.

There are two products, one is for consumers (really, mostly for Fantasy players but I could see some hard-core fans/bloggers/others who hate Fantasy also loving it for just the sheer breadth of info) and the other is for major league teams.

Here is what I wrote about the event today on Baseball Digest.  Many others wrote on it, you can track them on Twitter at #BBGSports.

The consumer product is broken up into two separate but related services: the Draft Kit and the in-season tool.  The charts and graphs are very fancy and useful and the I can see the news feeds on each player being very useful as a Fantasy tool and for media.

I’m also interested in the commitment of the R&D team to make this thing better, and how many of the suggestions and thoughts from Sunday’s group end up in the product.  I realize it’s a work in progress, and team leader Stephen Orban did well to indicate that the team is working on some of the issues brought up.

I had two questions of Mr. Orban involving the Draft product, which will need to do some things to stand out from the many projections and services already out there, particularly with at $19.95 price.  First, I was interested in the ‘B-Rank,” the proprietary ranking system that he called the “special sauce.”  As with most projections, the B-Rank assumes a basic 5×5 scoring system, and while the tools are very customizable — to look at the universe of second basemen by a power-speed combo, for example — the actual rankings are based only on 5×5.  The other involved the live draft function, which I can see being very useful if it were somehow able to import data from the draft in real time, and less so with its current functionality, as drafts often move too fast to keep switching between windows.

Bloomberg is expert in data and presentation, not baseball, which they readily admit.  If the developers can take the tools they have created with that expertise and marry them with info (statistics and news) from their content partners like MLB.com and Jonah Keri’s team of writers, they may be on to something.

I’m excited to test-run the products and review them when they go live in a couple of weeks…