MELVILLE, N.Y. — In a mid-sized office building in the suburbs of Long Island, a company called LBi Software, with its sports-focused division LBi Dynasty, has been stealthily building scouting software for Major League Baseball since the late 1990s.
Now, after moving to a shiny new office in November meant to accommodate a growing team of developers (40 of its 56 full-time employees are developers), LBi is setting its sights on expansion.
LBi Dynasty’s engineer-heavy team started off developing customizable software systems that for years were used by the league’s scouting office. As the impact of the scouting office waned, LBi added the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Detroit Tigers, Miami Marlins, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays to its roster of clients. And soon it hopes to add teams from the NBA.
Baseball’s Moneyballer
LBi Dynasty has done little in the way of marketing since its inception, instead relying on word-of-mouth connections that have largely stemmed from its intimate relationship with the MLB commissioner’s office.
A noteworthy ally has been Jay Sartori, who has served as senior director of baseball operations and analytics for the Tigers since he was poached from Apple in 2015. Prior to that, he served for three seasons as the Blue Jays’ assistant general manager, where he helped develop the team’s analytical database using LBi software. Before that he served for a season as the director of baseball operations at the Washington Nationals, after working for five years as a manager in the labor department at the commissioner’s office, where he was first introduced to LBi Dynasty.
Over the past two years at the Tigers, he has helped build out a new central analytics system called Caesar that’s powered by LBi Dynasty. While Sartori wouldn’t expand on the capabilities of Caesar for competition reasons, he said Caesar, which was implemented in early 2017 and has only been in operation for one full season, forms the technology backbone of the organization, connecting the various divisions of the team and its front office, and making its scouting team more efficient.
“It’s our proprietary baseball operations software that’s we’re really using through all aspects of the organization to support decision making,” he said. “The goal at the end of the day is to support every piece of analysis that we do here, for any player evaluation or baseball-related business evaluation.”
LBi Dynasty also wouldn’t expand much on what it does for individual teams, citing strict compliance contracts that protect their proprietary scouting and player management tools. At its core, however, it builds customizable cloud-based software and apps that help leagues and teams manage a variety of player development and front office operations.
In the late 1990s, LBi started down this path by creating an official scoring system for the MLB. A few years later it helped design the league’s player management system. Today it helps the commissioner’s office manage team rosters and transactions, as well as player contracts across major and minor leagues, and provides tools for both amateur and minor league drafts.
For the clubs themselves, LBi Dynasty can customize each team’s app to provide information about player statistics and a host of other information that can help coaches and scouting officials make more informed decisions and aid in player development. It pulls in data from a wide range of third-party sources and complements stats with game video feeds to offer visual context alongside mountains of numerical data. It has even started to pull in video from minor, collegiate and international leagues.
“The latest trend is to get that video at the lowest level possible — even college, or Japanese/Korean baseball,” said Keith Hennessy, LBi Dynasty’s lead baseball team developer. “As much video as they can find they’re willing to put in there to make decisions that are important.”
The data feeds and reports LBi Dynasty’s software can produce assist with international scouting, amateur scouting and pro-level scouting. They can provide information about individual players or statistics by position, such as catcher game reports, predictions on how a player is expected to progress in any given season, and projected values on what a player is worth.
Teams can analyze injury reports and specific statistics, such as home run counts. Advanced player-searching tools can offer scouts answers to specific queries, such as a list of players who’ve signed a contract over $100 million.
Altogether, LBi Dynasty’s software not only ties together the various divisions of a baseball franchise but also forms detailed player bios that teams can analyze like interactive baseball cards as they make important scouting and player-development decisions. Think of it as a very sophisticated aggregator.
“The idea of the club apps is to consolidate all the disparities of information the club gathers from different departments and put them into a single unified piece of software,” Hennessy said. “Clubs wants as much information as possible, and they’re willing to pay to get as granular as possible.”
Basketball And Data
More recently, LBi Dynasty has extended some of its services to the NBA. While it doesn’t yet serve individual basketball teams, it’s helping the league navigate a complicated player management system that touches upon rosters, salary caps and the convoluted world of NBA contracts.
The basketball league’s software can track players and monitor the legalities of a trade to make sure teams are complying with regulations. LBi is hoping this maturing relationship with the NBA will give it an in with certain teams in the same way its relationship with the MLB has evolved over time.
All of this, of course, comes as player-tracking technologies and analytics continue to shape both sports and the industry as a whole. The commissioner’s office has been helping the clubs by spearheading its own league-wide analytics initiatives, including the installation of the camera-based Pitch F/X system at every park to track the velocity and spins on pitches and, subsequently, the jointly radar- and camera-powered Statcast system that catalogs just about every motion on the field of play. MLB also became one of the first professional leagues in 2016 to let players wear specific wearables during games.
“I think we’re seeing a real explosion in baseball analytics throughout the game,” Sartori said. “The amount of data that’s available to clubs is now exponentially greater than it was even five years ago. There’s been really rapid growth in what teams can do.”
The NBA, meanwhile, struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Sportradar and Second Spectrum in 2016 to track and visualize game-day statistics, and while the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement for now bans wearables during games, the league has experiment with wearables in the G League and has approved of a limited list of wearables that teams can have players voluntarily use during practice.
In a blog on sports analytics posted last month, MIT graduate Evan Wasch, who now serves as senior vice president of basketball strategy and analytics at the NBA, said that the “biggest story in basketball analytics on the horizon will be the integration of disparate data sources to uncover unique and powerful insights,” which is the niche in data aggregation that LBi Dynasty has targeted.
“Right now, teams and the league office collect and analyze many different data sets — game events, game and player tracking, practice and training, wearables, and injury and medical, just to name a few,” he wrote. “Each data set is relevant for one or more set of stakeholders, from general managers to coaches to medical personnel to analytics staffs. But the ability for these data sets to fully speak to each other is still relatively limited, and the opportunity exists to combine them in potentially game-changing ways.”
If successful, he said, this would create a data revolution that would potentially “advance basketball competition” and “quality of play.”
Rounding out the top three professional sports leagues in the U.S. is the NFL. The league has grown more tech-savvy in recent years with trackers in NFL jerseys and balls and a fresh deal with Amazon.com and Zebra Technologies to better visualize data next season.
LBi Dynasty was tight-lipped about future plans involving other leagues. But a few months ago it initiated a preliminary working relationship with the NFL. It wouldn’t comment beyond that, but perhaps it’s a sign of what’s to come.