The Digital Fan

So you think you know a little bit about sports? You’ve been following the major leagues since you were a kid and always bested your buddies in trivia games? You’ve long reigned as the informal sports authority at family barbecues?

Then you’d better get with the program--a computer or World Wide Web program, that is. Because the statistics are gaining on you. And so is a raft of new services for following games and analyzing players.

Consider, for example, the service that ViewCom Technologies of Seattle began offering this baseball season. Its software, called Lead Dog Stats, allows you to download daily feeds of 100,000 “statistical events” from Major League Baseball and create your own custom statistics. (https://www.leaddogstats.com)

“If I want to see [Dodgers pitcher] Hideo Nomo’s ERA in a certain month against certain opponents, I can pull out that number,” said Dave Mayer, the company’s president.

Can’t get your favorite team on television? (Or you want to catch the game in the comfort of your own office?) Try Instant Sports (https://www.instantsports.com), a Web service that turns raw data into live, animated play-by-plays of every game in the major leagues, replete with hitting, running stick figures. It was invented, naturally, by a rabid fan, David Barstow, who happens to have a PhD in artificial intelligence.

If you were somehow to find yourself directing the action from the sidelines, you might consider an IBM software program called Advanced Scout, derived from so-called data-mining technology for identifying interesting patterns in databases.

During the recent NBA playoffs, for example, Advanced Scout helped Orlando Magic coaches recognize that when backup players Darrell Armstrong and Danny Schayes were on the court at the same time, the team consistently outscored its cross-state rival, the Miami Heat. The National Hockey League has ordered a version of the software too.

The marriage of technology and sports already has a long and rich history. Television and radio broadcasts have played an enormous role in broadening the reach and appeal of sports such as basketball, football and tennis. For a couple of decades now, computers have been giving birth to new statistics, such as the slugging percentage in baseball that gives extra weight to doubles, triples and home runs in addition to base hits.

But the rise of powerful personal computers and the Internet have taken the sports/technology combination to a new level. It’s a natural fit--both sports enthusiasts and Web surfers tend to be young, male and upscale--and sports is now solidifying its place alongside news, financial information and pornography as one of the most popular topics in cyberspace.

Professional teams and individual athletes hosting their own Web sites is almost old hat already, though it was only two weeks ago that Michael Jordan agreed to let CBS SportsLine (https://www.sportsline.com) introduce him to another kind of net. ESPN’s SportsZone (https://espn. sportszone.com) has long since established itself as one of the most successful sites of any kind on the Internet.

Now a new wave of upstarts is finding inventive ways to turn untapped sports information into valuable online content.

Many of these services begin with data from STATS Inc. of Skokie, Ill., which meticulously collects records of every pitch, pass and goal in professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey, as well as collegiate basketball and football.

STATS’ traditional customers are newspapers and news wire services, but technology has bred a vast new client base and prompted STATS to collect more information than ever before. Live game information from STATS is now broadcast over special paging services--Motorola sells two wireless devices for sports information--and is used for Web services, including Instant Sports.

Fans who play in rotisserie leagues and manage make-believe teams are probably the biggest statistics consumers, sometimes spending $100 or more per season on raw stats that used to be calculated by hand. Their teams are judged based on the actual performance of real players as measured by statistics.

“The use of statistics combined with technology is the key,” says Mayer. “Before, we didn’t have the tool to crunch these numbers. Now it’s a lot of fun.”

Gamblers are another big market, analysts say, despite vendors’ efforts to distance themselves publicly from a popular activity that remains mostly illegal.

“If this isn’t driven by gambling interests, I’d be shocked,” says Art Taylor, associate director for the Center for the Study of Sports in Society at Boston’s Northeastern University.

He believes that’s a dangerous thing: “Gamblers are using it, and worse yet, they’re feeling a little more confident.” That, in turn, makes it more difficult to convince kids that gambling is a risky and dangerous activity, he said.

Jim Capuano, vice president of sales at STATS, said that although gamblers almost certainly consult his company’s statistics, STATS goes out of its way “not to cater to that audience. We don’t enter into deals with companies that put out publications oriented mainly to gamblers.”

Coaches are also a big market for some kinds of sports software and services, such as IBM’s Advanced Scout and a soccer program called SecondLook.

SecondLook analyzes soccer players’ performances by taking a complete inventory of the 4,000 or so events that make up a 90-minute match. Aerospace engineer Zvi Friedman created the program from software he wrote to analyze air-to-air combat situations.

Instead of following all 22 players on the soccer field, SecondLook focuses on the ball and the one player who is touching it. With a computer mouse, a user can place the ball on the virtual field and type in the team and number of the player who is with it. Then a coach can dissect that data to study all of Los Angeles Galaxy forward Cobi Jones’ intercepted passes, for example.

Friedman said several professional soccer coaches have paid his company, Canoga Park-based SoftSport, consulting fees in the $5,000 to $10,000 range to analyze their teams. SoftSport also licenses SecondLook to amateur and college coaches for $500 a year.

In about two months, soccer fans will be able to use a derivative program called MatchViewer to follow matches in progress on the company’s Web site (https://www.wp.com/softsport). The firm has a contract to use its software tools to analyze selected matches at the 1998 World Cup in France for FIFA Online (https://www. fifa.com), the Web site for soccer’s international governing body, Friedman said.

FIFA Online is produced by the Santa Monica sports and technology firm En-Linea (Spanish for “online”), a company founded by some of the people who computerized the administration of the 1994 World Cup tournament in Pasadena.

The next big trend in sports technology products, predicts Kate Delhagen, a senior Internet analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., will be online games. Raleigh, N.C.-based Total Sports (https://www.totalsports.net)--which started out producing live audio cybercasts of college basketball games accompanied by charts and photos that are updated every 15 seconds--now offers a game called Head-to-Head Baseball, which pits two Web surfers against each other as managers of opposing teams.

They use statistics to draft players, call plays and decide what pitches to fire. Then the game consults Total Sports’ statistical database to determine the most likely outcome of each play.

What effect all of this might have on once-normal sports fan is anybody’s guess. The efficiency-minded fret that previously dedicated workers can now dally at their desks fiddling with statistics and listening to RealAudio broadcasts of their favorite team (the one that never seems to make it onto local radio).

Taylor worries that these technologies take the collegiality out of the sports fan experience and can even be dangerous to those lacking in self-control.

“If your addiction is watching sports--and for many people it is--this could be scary,” Taylor said. “It could end some marriages.”

But if you can avoid such perils, it could also be fun.

Staff writer Karen Kaplan (karen.kaplan@latimes.com) covers technology and aerospace for The Times.