Bloomberg Shows Off New Baseball Products | 
What do financial technology and baseball have in common? Besides Roger Dorn‘s investment suggestions for Jake Taylor in Major League, that is…
A team at Bloomberg LP, known for nearly three decades as a leader in providing financial professionals with timely tools and data, is taking a swing at applying that clout to the national pastime with a consumer product aimed primarily at Fantasy fans and a professional program designed for the 30 Major League teams.
Check out Baseball Digest‘s Paul Greco‘s excellent review of the products in December, based on Bloomberg’s presentation of an earlier version of both at the Winter Meetings. Some features have been added since, and both are still works in progress, but Paul’s piece gives a good overview.
Just as Bloomberg’s financial tools aggregate information from many sources to give their customers the tools to answer questions, rather than trying to provide those answers, Bloomberg Sports Baseball aims to give Fantasy players a flexible, highly customizable tool to analyze players and teams.
On Sunday in New York, the research and development team, led by Stephen Orban, presented the products to a group of baseball bloggers and writers. The goal was twofold: to expose the product to a group that has covered and played Fantasy baseball and, by extension, to other fans through those blogs, and, importantly, to get feedback from that group.
Ease of use, according to the R&D team, is the primary concern, as the user-friendly and customizable graphs and charts attempt to replicate the visual nature of Bloomberg’s financial products. Indeed, the core idea for the consumer product grew when they noticed that the stocks they were charting could be replaced with player names, with the same goal of analyzing the data.
The consumer product is actually two different but related services, set for launch on Feb. 18, in the middle of pitchers-and-catchers’ reporting dates. The Draft Kit, priced at $19.95, allows fantasy players access to detailed reports on each player, with the key factors of comparisons by position and a “demand vs. scarcity” feature that is key to determining value in selecting players. The in-season service, priced at $24.95, updates constantly with data from a variety of sources, some furnished by an agreement with MLB Advance Media, some through a network of writers and bloggers led by veteran financial and baseball writer Jonah Keri, and by “scraping” many news and information sites. Bloomberg Sports is also offering the two services in combination for $31.95.
At Sunday’s introductory event, Orban talked about the “B-Rank,” which he termed the “special sauce” in evaluating Fantasy players. He fielded questions in public and in private, and although he was able to show how many of the concerns are addressed, the Bloomberg Sports team will get plenty of feedback from users and it is likely that it will need to address things like how the “B-Rank” is affected by different league’s rules, or how a “live draft” function might be done, more specifically as time goes on if the services are to break clear from the pack of already available Fantasy tools.
The professional product, which was provided to teams on a trial basis beginning at the Winter Meetings, is a completely different animal, with the small universe of 30 teams its target market. There is a scouting function and extremely high level of analysis available, which teams can customize based on the particular statistics or information they find most useful, as well as detailed data on every major league player’s performance in every conceivable situation. This will probably be either a big hit or miss with the teams, as each weighs the value of having the data collected in one place against whatever systems they already have in place.
Topics: Baseball Digest, Baseball Products, baseball statistics, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Lp, Bloomberg Sports, Core Idea, D Team, Draft Kit, Fantasy, Fantasy Fans, Fantasy Players, Financial Professionals, Financial Technology, Jake Taylor, Jonah Keri, National Pastime, Player Names, Professional Program, Roger Dorn, S Paul, Statistics, Stephen Orban, Three Decades, Visual Nature, Winter Meetings
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[...] 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. [...]
[...] two other great takes, check out posts by Jerry Milani and Amanda Rykoff. 0.000000 [...]
I purchased in the preseason. The service looked very good and I have always been impressed by their business and financial services. I have been very disappointed. I have several CBS and Yahoo teams. I registered with Bloomberg through the CBS League link. It actually generates a CBS unique e-mail which must be linked only from the CBS site. Bloomberg assured me that my Yahoo leagues would be covered also. Unfortunately, now the link has disappeared from the CBS site and the main Bloomberg site does not recognize the CBS generated e-mail. After several e-mails with Bloomberg support, who are very responsive, they concluded that the only solution was to re-register at the main Bloomberg site. In order to do so, you must purchase a new subscription. I have given up for this year.