InformationWeek
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April 9, 2001 |
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How To Make Web Baseball A Daily Habit
By Clinton Wilder (cwilder@cmp.com)
aseball fanatics don't come much more hard-core than Jonathan Mayo. The former fantasy baseball league columnist for the New York Post, Mayo is one of a group of diamond devotees whose challenge is to use interactive games, video highlights, and statistical analyses to make Major League Baseball's remodeled Web site as indispensable to serious fans as the morning box scores.
Here's an example that Mayo helped devise. In a game called Beat The Streak, a participating fan goes onto the site and clicks on one player each day--let's say defending National League batting champ Todd Helton of the Colorado Rockies. If Helton gets a hit that day, the fan's hitting streak begins. The next day, the fan can stick with Helton or bench him in favor of Texas' Alex Rodriguez--or anyone else on a list of the game's top hitters. The streak stays alive as long as that day's selected player gets a hit. Mayo and his fellow seamheads debate the odds of such a fantasy streak surpassing Joe DiMaggio's untouchable 56-game record, but there's no debate about the grand prize: a trip to next year's Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown, N.Y.
With gimmicks such as these, Major League Baseball hopes to lure casual fans who don't have time for or interest in full-blown Rotisserie leagues, where fans choose a team of players and have to activate a roster each week. "We need to appeal to people who haven't done this before," says Mayo. "Full-season Rotisserie sounds so intensive or geeky to a lot of people. We don't want to shut them out."
But for fans looking for intensive and geeky, how about keeping track of the location of every batted ball, the distance of every home run, and the velocity of every pitch? That's all slated to be available later this season, thanks to baseball's deal to use a statistical database from Total Sports Inc., owned by Quokka Sports Inc. Customizable, searchable video highlight clips, using video server technology from Virage Inc., are already up and running.
These kind of features are the reason the league pushed to get all the teams together on one site. "If you look toward the areas of stats, video, and fantasy, that's where the power of what we can do as a collective team will start to come through," says Michael O'Neil, the site's systems architect and acting chief technology officer.
How can the Web site be sure that it will serve up what true fans really want? To MLB.com CEO and president Bob Bowman, the answer is hiring fanatics such as Mayo to build it. Says Bowman, "It's like Sheraton hiring its best customer to design the hotel rooms."
Illustration by Adam McCauley
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