Many of us have gotten to the point where data plays a significant role in the decisions we make in our professional and personal lives. Before making these decisions, it’s important that we trust the data because while having data on our side is a really positive thing, relying on flawed data can be very detrimental. In most cases, the negative impacts of incorrect data far outweigh the upside of having accurate data. You can drastically improve your college baseball search experience by utilizing data, but you need to ensure that you are using baseball recruiting data that you can trust.
For small businesses, it can be hard to compete with the reputation that comes along with a larger, well known company. TeamFacts certainly falls in the small business category, so we want to proactively give you a behind the scenes tour of how our database is generated. Most importantly, at every step of the process, precision and accuracy are the main focus.
We provide analytics for every NCAA baseball program across all divisions, so the number of college programs we evaluate is over 950 (we plan on adding NAIA programs in the future). For each program, the current roster, along with the four previous years’ rosters are ingested into our analytics system. In total, about 100,000 data points are evaluated across the 4,750 rosters that are ingested
In order to make sense of the data, it needs to be standardized, which can be pretty cumbersome. Let’s take player positions for example. It seems like a pretty simple category to get standard values for; P equals pitcher, SS equals shortstop, OF equals outfield, etc. Due to a wide variety of position abbreviations, spellings, and combinations, there are over 900 unique position names that need to be accounted for. Some of the other categories like academic major and home state have an even wider range of values.
Once the rosters are ingested and standardized, the data is analyzed and presented through 12 metrics that we’ve identified as key indicators in assessing a baseball program. To generate these metrics, we rely on hundreds of logic based calculations, which have been fined tuned to get the most accurate results. The data from every school is then compiled into a database, which has filter functionality to help users navigate through the extensive set of data.
The end result is baseball recruiting data that you can trust. No shortcuts are taken when pulling the data together, and accuracy is the main focus from start to finish.