WATERLOO, ON – Two former BlackBerry execs have teamed up on a new baseball scoring app that pitches the ‘Moneyball’ statistical approach to youth and amateur teams.
Mike Kirkup, now director of the University of Waterloo’s startup program Velocity, and Brian Zubert, executive in residence at Communitech, are behind Score More Baseball which launched this week for Android, BlackBerry, and iOS. According to the announcement, the app allows any coach, teammate, or parent to quickly and accurately score the game on their phone or tablet. The app applies the ‘Moneyball’ approach to the team’s batting order, setting up the team to enjoy longer rallies, strand fewer runners, and ultimately, score more runs.
All stats are stored in the cloud, allowing coaches and players to track both their team and individual progress. Score More Baseball is free to try, and may be purchased for $5 for a tournament, $15 per month, or $50 per year.
Zubert said that the idea for the app came to him while manually stat tracking his own men’s slo-pitch team in Microsoft Excel using the ‘Moneyball’ approach.
“After each game, I used to take the pen and paper scoresheets, try to make sense of what our scorekeeper wrote down, and manually enter all that data into Excel”, he said. “It took a lot of time, but it was worth it. We went from bottom third of the league in runs scored to top third, in just one season.”
