Today Antinoja’s young company, Tendu, is aiming to develop data software not for some town softball league, but for Major League Baseball–and to do so with the precision and detail the national pastime has never seen. Some might ask if the world truly needs this: after all, baseball is already the home of such esoterica as slugging averages against lefties on artificial turf, and homers on 2-and-1 outside curveballs. But fans, teams and media only seem to thirst for more. Antinoja sold his house for $1.2 million to finance his idea. “The best data out there hasn’t been seen yet,” says Antinoja, 54, bubbling like the kid scorekeeper he once was. “I’m going to do a better job than anyone ever.”
Make no mistake–baseball statistics are big business. Nothing escapes the stat keepers. Every one of the 700,000 pitches each season–not to mention pickoff throws, line-drive trajectories and more–is databased by a half-dozen companies. Industry leader STATS, Inc., based in Morton Grove, Ill., packages its real-time and archived numbers to media outlets such as ESPN, the Associated Press and Yahoo, as well as more than half of baseball’s 30 teams. The cost ranges from roughly $50,000 to $200,000. (STATS became so profitable that in 2000 the company was bought by News Corp. for $45 million.) The Elias Sports Bureau, privately owned in New York since 1913, is the longtime official statkeeper for MLB and the other three major sports leagues, while SportsTicker (an ESPN subsidiary) and Baseball Info Solutions (a Bethlehem, Pa., start-up) sell up-to-date statistics as well.
Tendu’s offices hardly scream big business. Nestled in a woodsy corner of Bainbridge Island, Wash., near Seattle, Antinoja’s team of 17 former college and pro ballplayers spend hour upon hour watching games off satellite feeds and inputting into computers everything that happens. (Breaks are taken to play Wiffle ball outside.) They record every conceivable detail: the speed, type and location of each pitch; where and how hard the ball was hit, and the results of every play. STATS and a few others do the same thing, preparing reports for teams on which hitters mash first-pitch curveballs, where to position fielders and the like. But none has Tendu’s software interface, which even tobacco-chewing athletes can master–it allows them to troll around the data themselves for patterns that can yield an edge.
For example, the user can identify the most likely pitch–inside fastball, low-and-away change-up–that Boston’s Pedro Martinez is probably going to throw at any point in the count; then, depending on the result of that pitch, what he typically throws next. Cracking this code has been one of baseball’s holy grails. “I’d like to get my hands on that,” said Alex Rodriguez, the Texas Rangers’ All-Star shortstop when he learned of Antinoja’s data service. “You always want to know everything about your opposition.” Adds New York Mets general manager Jim Duquette, whose club this season bought Tendu’s full $30,000 annual service: “This gives you a chance to validate what an advance scout is telling you, and learn trends they can’t pick up.”
As a newcomer to the stat biz, Antinoja served only two clubs this season: the Mets and the Oakland A’s (who got the data free of charge because their pitching coach, Rick Peterson, helped develop the software). But several more teams are considering purchasing the service for 2004. Media outlets are also interested: MLB.com, baseball’s flagship Web site, is in talks with Tendu, while ESPN has spoken with Antinoja about purchasing specialized stats for its playoff broadcasts that begin next week. “Fans are really interested in matchups,” says John Zehr, general manager of ESPN Data Services. Does Barry Bonds look for inside pitches early? How does Roger Clemens set up his strikeout pitches? Someday viewers might not need the TV to play along. Antinoja has dreams for a wireless application that would allow fans to predict pitches and other strategic decisions–using Tendu intelligence data, of course–through their cell phones or PDAs.
Antinoja wants to branch out to other sports, but first he must get the kinks out of the baseball system. Each of the season’s 2,400 games takes up to 12 hours to log. Cost: about $300,000 a season. Cash-flow issues this summer caused Tendu to fall behind at times–a huge no-no in a sport that demands its minutiae up-to-date. To catch up, Antinoja has a $2.5 million loan in the works, but he won’t survive with just one paying client for long. He must get companies that invariably rave about his software to actually ante up for it. The next six months could well determine his fate.
Apart from his baseball enthusiasm, Antinoja’s chief selling point is his tech background. Early on, he received a zoology degree from the University of Hawaii, specializing in the learning processes of dolphins and whales, as well as a master’s in computer science. That led to an interest in software engineering, so he moved to Silicon Valley, which led to AI consulting. “I studied how the memory works and how people retrieve the right experience and apply it,” Antinoja says. “How do you present complex information to an expert so someone can make decisions? That’s the same thing I’m doing now with baseball data.”
Baseball has generally bristled at high tech. The Chicago Cubs experimented with mainframes in the mid-1960s, and in the early ’80s several clubs kept detailed statistics through a young software start-up called STATS, Inc. But front-office skepticism ran deep. “The computer can’t tell you how a player feels on a given day,” longtime manager Chuck Tanner said in 1984. These days the tech-savvy Oakland A’s–celebrated in Michael Lewis’s best seller “Moneyball”–remain the exception rather than the rule. And while the Boston Red Sox signed up the high priest of baseball statistical analysis, Bill James, other clubs privately scoffed at the move.
Antinoja’s task is to persuade teams to pay for his trove of predictive data. If you know what the pitcher’s likely to throw, or what the batter hits best in a given situation, you’re ahead of the game. Information–and technology–matter. Just ask Kirk Gibson. In the 1988 World Series, a scout tipped off the Dodger slugger that A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley threw backdoor sliders on 3-2 counts, and Gibson used that information to hit his dramatic home run to win Game 1. Antinoja is hoping to make those coups commonplace–and invite fans inside the game like never before.
