quote:Originally posted by JMoff:
With my kids traveling all over the country playing various forms of softball and baseball, I can say I like it. I have sat through many a boring teleconference while watching one of my kids pitching real time on Gamechanger. Makes it much more interesting.
I have absolutely no qualms at all about “MOST” people finding it to be a very good product. I only know that it doesn’t meet my specific needs, but I’m trying to find out why.
quote:There were also a fair share of 'what the bleep???'. Mainly because the driver doesn't know what button to push and ends up playing catch up with some interesting choices.
Yeah, that’s a formidable obstacle to overcome. I know a way to do it programmatically, but I won’t bother just for myself. I just keep a notepad and a pencil close at hand, and mark down what’s taking place for the few minutes it takes me to correct any problem.
quote:One example was my son pitching with a runner at first. Fly ball to center field caught on good play and makes an attempt to throw out runner at first but throws ball into dugout to advance the original runner to third (that was what happened). It was scored F-8, E-8, balk (to account for the extra base). After the game I was asking son why he was balking with a runner at second and one out? He said, "Dad, I haven't balked in two years". Took a while to figure out what happened.
I totally get it. I’ve been faced with several of those myself, and have had to come up with literally a different programmatic solution to each. One thing that’s helped me is, my program for the automatic movement of runners is a bit more sophisticated and flexible. But trust me, this stuff ain’t easy by a long shot.
quote:In softball, there was a slap hitter who hit a chopper that hit her out of the batter's box. We lost two full innings while the scorekeeper tried to figure that out. Ultimately scoring pop out to catcher and then catching up with all the missed action by scoring hits and K's for every baserunner and out. When comparing his work to my wife's book it was quite a miss-adventure.
One of the problems with GC and IScore is apparently that they didn’t do as much “testing” as they COULD have. When I 1st generated my program, it took me about 3 months to get it from ground zero to scoring games. That was the easy part though. Because I was also a scorer and a programmer, I made a great many “allowances” for things I knew would be coming along that weren’t in the original plan. Trouble was, those things were of a much higher volume than I anticipated, so I can imagine the “issues” they’d have if they didn’t have someone who had a strong scoring background.
That’s why I score games constantly, and even take advantage of MLB.com’s pitch-by-pitch availability of every game to score games even when there aren’t any being played. I find a bug about every other game, and one of those situational “glitches” about once every 10 games. Unfortunately for testing purposes, MLB doesn’t have re-entry and “speed up rules”, so I have to wait for a HS game to get a good testing game, and since there’s no database like MLB has to go back and get games pitch by pitch, the testing becomes a very long and drawn out process for just one guy like myself.
quote:I have watched games finish with a score of 10-5 on Gamechanger and my wife will text me with "won 11-3". She has a book, is a decent scorekeeper (well taught) and with a gale force wind and driving rain, will come up with the correct score, so I trust her work.
What’s going to happen with this new way of scoring is, more and more people are going to find out just what you did, that unless the scorer is really paying attention and constantly checking on what’s been entered, there’s gonna be mistakes exposed that no one ever noticed before, but have been going on since the 1st scorer made the 1st mark on a piece of paper, or stone tablet if that’s the case.
quote:Parents log in and quote stats off this by the way.
I know they do, and that’s what concerns me just a tad.
quote:I haven't tried it, but would suggest its probably a good tool if you have a scorekeeper who knows what they're doing and 'dry runs' a few games to figure it out before going live.
As I said, the reason I’m even looking at it is to see what kind of Ideas I can “borrow”. To be honest, what little I’ve seen hasn’t shown me anything that my program doesn’t already do as “good” as or “better”, but that’s in relation to me, not 10 million different people of varying skills. But in answer to your observation, you’re correct. If someone really takes the time to practice and experiment before they go “live”, it is a pretty good tool.
quote:Stat's, I'd be interested to what you think and if it gives you all the options an experienced scorekeeper requires.
Well, I don’t know that anything gives “ALL” the options an experienced scorekeeper requires. After all, like anything else that has a wide variety of people doing it, there will be many ways to skin that cat.
One thing I noticed right away, and noticed in working on another baseball related project, was how when putting in the roster, “Handedness” is used. I’m gonna open myself up to some criticism here, but I have to be honest about how I see a lot of this “stat” stuff.
There was a time when I tracked “handedness”, just like the big boys do. But unlike the big boys, I never found that it had much impact on the players I scored for. Yeah its neat to know Johnny has a better OBP against LHPs than RHPs, but in the middle of a HS game, that doesn’t mean a great deal, and the lower the levels go, I’m sure it becomes less and less something anyone can do much about. College teams have a 35 man roster and Pro teams 25, where most HSs have 15-20, with probably at least 2 or 3 not really being even “average” players, and most lower level teams 12-15 players at most.
The more limited the number of players, the less “flexibility’ there is to consider relatively minor things like handedness. After all, where a ML manager might put in 4 different pitchers for 4 different batters, a HS or LLI coach doesn’t really have that luxury. And while I recognize that most coaches would overload the lineup with LHBs if they knew a RHP was starting, going much beyond that initial lineup is really asking a lot.
So, it didn’t take me very long to just drop handedness from MY metrics. I didn’t do it because it wasn’t a valid thing to be concerned about or a nice piece of information to have, but rather that there just wasn’t a lot anyone could do about it. Without it, its just one of many things I don’t have to worry about, although as with all such things, had a coach every indicated to me that it was something he wanted to see, I’d have been glad to accommodate him.
One thing I’d have done if I were GC, would have been to make the choices on things like “Ball”, “Fouled ball”, etc., a whole lot bigger. Judging by how many times it happened with the IPad, I can’t imagine how many times I’d have to hit the back or redo option if I was using a phone!
As to all the options, until I actually try to use it, I can’t say for sure, but it looks ok as much as I’ve seen. I was really surprised to see how close we were in the scoring options, but we differ a bit on how the approach to engage them. I’ll be able to tell more, the more I tinker around.
But in GENERAL, it sure looks like a great product. I didn’t know though, that there were different levels of “service”, and that there was a price involved. When I first heard about it from one of their partners, I was led to believe it was a totally free app, and the $$$ they’d make would come from some kind of advertising operation. Its not that I find their charges outrageous, but its not what I was led to believe.