Throughout my gameday 2012 position with the Durham Bulls, I quickly saw that the team wanted to display more data than the current MLBAM plugin was allowing for through their CrossFire and Daktronics Venus systems. The team wanted to get purchase a system to do so, but I decided no system would fully satisfy their needs, so I developed this program, which I dubbed FireStats, since the main place we were putting the statistics was into their CrossFire machine.
The program, which I continue to assist in developing to the Durham Bulls’ needs, now outputs full lineups for each team, season and current game statistics, including a summary of what each player did in each at-bat, data used to animate a scorecard, pitch count and other pitching statistics, room to input facts about each player and their Twitter handles, and due up data. All of this data output with the goal of minimizing down to nearly zero manual input of data during the game on the production systems, so that those operators could focus on producing the game. This allows a single operator to simply score the game on any system connected to the network as the production equipment and populate data automatically.
The only manual input required is the filling out of any statistics that you want to keep track of into an Excel sheet before the games starts. Once that data is input (roster data, plus season statistics), the program keeps track of all of them, and allows you to export it back into an Excel sheet at the end of the game, allowing for an operator to simply import that sheet when the teams are ready to play another game, without additional work.
With the renovations to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park in 2014, this program now runs the entirely of all statistics seen on videoboards at the DBAP. Currently, FireStats feeds data to the Bulls’ Broadcast Pix/Rapid CG setup, as well as Click Effects’ Blaze product.