How To Read Like A [Wannabe Billy Beane]
Russell’s Note: Today’s guest blogger is Shayn Diamond (@Shayndmnd). Shayn and I have been close friends since high school, we lived together at university and now we work together (and share an office!) at Whitecap Venture Partners. Shayn is without a doubt the best person to write this post! Prior to joining Whitecap, Shayn was a corporate lawyer at Wildeboer Dellelce and prior to this he completed an MBA and JD at Queen’s University.
Shayn’s Disclaimer: We will be taking a short hiatus from Russell’s usual focus on tech stuff like LTV, CAC, API and NoSQL and moving into the world of WHIP, ERA, PF, TD and QBR.
I don’t think that obsessed would be an adequate characterization of my relationship towards professional sports. I love sports. I really f^*&!#g love them. I don’t pick and choose; each of the “Big Four” (Baseball, Football, Hockey, Basketball) provide their own unique brand of excitement that hypnotizes me nightly.
Like anything in life, it is much easier to enjoy sports if you understand them. My legal education was great, it taught me how to read quickly. I could fly through cases and get back to Monday Night Football. After finishing law school, I did an MBA which turned me from a basic fan into a quant — that’s a fan with spreadsheet.
The list below gives you everything you need to understand the game, the players and the numbers behind the players. My lofty hope is to help fulfill your dream (aka my dream) of becoming a General Manager.
(1) ESPN
ESPN is the holy grail of sports; it is both the Old and the New Testament and its breadth of coverage is unmatched. Some people get into “holes” on Instagram where they find themselves looking at pictures from their cousin’s best friend’s co-worker’s wedding. I find myself reading about Ben Roethlisberger’s completion percentage on passes more than 20 yards down field to Antonio Brown when he’s in single vs. double coverage.
While your basic ESPN surf session can land you anywhere from the Big Four to Horse Racing, Cricket or the X-Games and turn up some valuable insights, the real value of ESPN comes from the Insider subscription. For $30 per year (yes, even ESPN is a “SAAS” (Software as a Service for my sports readers) company now) you can buy your way into the minds of some of the top sports writers the internet has to offer. If you think ESPN is great, ESPN Insider is about to blow your f^*&!#g socks off. Insider is the place where weekends go to die; it is the best place on the internet to find rankings, analysis, predictions and whether or not Johnny Football was actually in Las Vegas.
(2) RotoWorld
If you play in any fantasy sports league, Rotoworld is the place to go for up to the minute injury and PT (that’s Playing Time, for the Startup/Developer crowd) updates. Rotoworld scrapes all of the sports sources on the internet and provides a user friendly, easy to read UI (User Interface) for any and all player updates.
Opening the site now, there are headlines covering each of the Big Four: Walsh’s missed kick (yes, that happened), Ovi’s 500th goal, Spieth trouncing the field in Hawaii and a triage of the Steelers injuries. Rotoworld is the equivalent of a Twitter feed full of only sports information and in my mind, it’s the best source for anything player specific.
(3) CBS Sports
Read #2 above to understand the passion and importance fantasy sports plays in a wannabe GM’s life. CBS Sports pales in comparison to ESPN, its articles contain minimal substance and its staff (for the most part) are the ‘B’ squad.
CBS does have two things going for it, first, fantasy baseball. The UI is better than the competitors (ESPN and Yahoo Sports). The updated player news is an A- compared to Rotoworld and the weekly league updates are a great touch.
March Madness! Boss Button! Enough Said! CBS has secured some high quality coverage and live streaming during the madness of march (College Basketball Bracket) and has in turn ensured website traffic leading up to MLB’s first pitch.
Please don’t let my soft endorsement of CBS confuse you into bookmarking the page. Save yourself the embarrassment of getting lost in a CBS hole.
(4) Grantland (RIP)
Grantland was the ultimate source of entertainment prior to its untimely death. I must be fully transparent and let you know that Grantland was in fact owned by ESPN but was built and championed by its founder Bill Simmons. Grantland provided commentary on both sports and pop-culture, making it the perfect place to go for articles on the Performance Enhancing Drug Scandal in professional sports or a 5 minute summary on last night’s episode of The Bachelor (aka fodder for dinner conversation). Grantland never shied away from controversy; in fact, they often embraced it. Unfortunately, the authors and editors didn’t know where to draw the line and an essay published in January of 2014, started the 18 month death spiral.
Unlike Rotoworld, Grantland was not a site for stats or analytics updated in real time. The authors, however, were always sure to anchor their articles with historical data & analysis. It was subway and Toilet Reading; entertaining articles for when you have 5–7 minutes of nothing but free time.
(5) FiveThirtyEight (“538")
Again, let me preface this with full transparency, ESPN purchased 538 in July 2013. 538 is the one sports site that may get the Startup/Developer crowd a little bit excited, which is why I saved it for last.
The site was built by Nate Silver, a statistician (or, “Data Scientist”) focused on analyzing two of the most perplexing data sets known to man: baseball metrics (“sabermetrics”) and elections. 538 is the site on my list where I can truly nerd out. I can get lost in analysis of the 2008 election, the #OccupyWallStreet protests, the March Madness (see #2) selection process or the collapse of the 2011 Red Sox.
538 has the unique ability to provide me with analysis relevant to work and play and I will forever keep it bookmarked as one of my favourites.
I hope this list helps you understand my approach to sports. Yes, I really do enjoy Facebook and Instagram but at the end of the day there is nothing embarrassing about having to click the ‘back’ button ten times to land on one of the five sites above. A sports hole is always > than an Instagram hole.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Russell’s Note: If enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter or check out my most recent posts:
S&P 500Startups or, The Takeover by Russell Samuels
Read Like a [Marketing Manager at the World’s Fastest Growing Startup] Or, How My Daily Distractions Power My Marketing Ideas by Lucas Samuels
Or, learn more about our venture fund at WhitecapVP.com
