If you’ve ever dreamed of being a Major League Baseball scout, your day has come.
Last month, the St. Louis Cardinals announced a novel contest: Fans are invited to submit scouting reports on promising college ballplayers.
The “One for the Birds” contest is meant to help the team find talent at smaller, non-Division I colleges that don’t get much attention from scouts. Fans file entries by going to the Cardinals’ Web site and filling out a form, including the player’s name, statistics and a summarized recommendation of up to 300 words and other information.
When the submissions are in, the team plans to send its own scouts to evaluate a handful of the most interesting prospects and, in June, to possibly select one or more of them in baseball’s amateur draft. The winning fan — the one whose entry is judged most compelling, whether a player is drafted or not — gets a trip to St. Louis to see a pair of ball games.
Baseball is the latest business to take tentative steps toward tapping into a concept known as “the wisdom of crowds”, the idea that a group can make some judgments better than an individual. Industries from computer programming to drug making have been turning to the opinions of skilled amateur observers and open “prediction markets” to help with everything from designing software to deciding where to mine for gold.
Photo by ABC News.
Baseball Taps Wisdom Of Fans
March 18, 2008 by Rich | 1 Comment
In Internet, Sports, Strategy
Bryan on March 18th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Welcome to the world of mass collaboration. This is something discussed heavily in Wikinomics. This book is something worth reading. I know I will be commenting on it on my next radio show on http://www.businessonthemound.com. My listeners and readers discuss topics like this quite often and how they can help small business owners can collaborate to succeed.