In mid-July we launched a baseball application, but only on batters. Users would enter the name of a hitter and year (plus team if the player was traded in mid-season) and get OnlyBoth insights back. The idea was to launch a separate service on pitchers later.

We’re happy to announce that it’s been possible to mix hitters and pitchers in the same application.

Users can now enter either one, and the insights that come back will, of course, mention performance statistics that are unique to batting or pitching. All players have some characteristics in common, such as throwing hand, birthplace, height, weight, etc. but most of the data are different in the two cases.

Here’s output #2 for last year’s National League Cy Young Award winner:

Clayton Kershaw of the 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers had the 6th-highest salary ($11.75M) of the 107 pitchers who won a Cy Young Award.

beat out by Roy Halladay of the 2010 Philadelphia Phillies ($15.75M), Randy Johnson of the 2000 Arizona Diamondbacks ($13.35M), Randy Johnson of the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks ($13.35M), and Randy Johnson of the 2002 Arizona Diamondbacks ($13.35M), and 1 other.

The combined application contains 98,353 entries – all player-team-year triplets from 1871 to 2013. Thus, Andrew McCutchen of the 2013 Pirates is a different entry than McCutchen of the 2012 Pirates, although the software knows that both refer to the same person.

The OnlyBoth software generates over 15 million words of answers to the question “What was unique or special about that player during that season?”. The Encyclopedia Britannica contains about 40 million words.

These baseball launches, added to our earlier colleges launch, continue our goal of acquainting the world with this technology which uniquely does both discovery and writing of novel insights.

Raul Valdes-Perez