Tye Waller spent 27 years as a coach in Major League baseball. When serving as a coach for the analytics-progressive Oakland A’s in 2014, Waller used FileMaker Pro as his tool for analyzing player data to help prepare players for success in the major leagues.
“Your (iSolutions’) involvement has made an impact on the ability to get this tool in the hands of the players to see if it can become a resource that can help their individual games to develop to a higher level.”
-E. Waller, Oakland A’s“
Waller also dreamed of creating an app that players could use to log their “at-bats” in each game, to record their observations and successes. Since every player in the MLB already had smart phones in their pocket after each game, Waller imagined that an app on their phone could be perfect for recording post-game observations.
Waller leveraged his experience with FileMaker Pro and reached out to iSolutions to build a FileMaker Go app that would run on iPhones.
The ‘Player Journal’ app consumed league scheduled game data from a web service using FileMaker’s XML import functions and allowed Players to sync their app each game for the most up to data game data.
The Player Journal then allows players to choose the pitcher they faced and add notes about the pitches they received as well as base running tendencies. This journal data can then be shared with teammates and accessed next time the player faces that pitcher again.
FileMaker made it possible to take a concept from idea all the way to deploying on an iPhone without any web or XCode development. Creating an app for the app store could have cost 10xs what it cost to create the Player Journal and if any changes are ever made, the administrator just needs to go into FileMaker’s very easy layout mode to make changes on the fly that will be pushed out to all users immediately.