Baseball Assistant: fair lineups for a youth team, without the guesswork
- What
- A coaching app for the youth baseball teams I coach
- Status
- Live
I coach two youth baseball teams, one T-ball and one machine pitch. Baseball Assistant is the app I designed and developed to run them. It builds fair fielding rotations, works out batting orders, keeps score on game day, tracks the season’s stats, and prints the sheets I carry to the dugout.
The heart of it is fairness. Over a season, every player should get a fair share of the infield, the outfield, and the bench, and the app keeps that count so I do not have to.
What it does
- Fair fielding rotationsEach inning, the app looks at how far every player is from a fair season share of infield, outfield, and bench time, and fills the field to close the gaps. Nobody sits twice until everyone has sat once.
- A dial between fairness and skillOne slider moves the position choices from pure fairness toward my own grades for each player, anywhere from zero to one hundred.
- Batting ordersFor machine pitch, the app matches players to the spots in the order that suit them. It keeps anyone from landing near the bottom again and again, and nobody bats last who did so in either of the previous two games.
- Grades that learnEarly in a season the app leans on my grades for each player. As games add up, each player’s real results count for more and more.
- A game-day scorecardScoring by tapping on a diamond: at-bats, runners, the other team’s score, a play-by-play, and undo. It knows when a half-inning is over, at three outs or five runs.
- Stats, awards, and printoutsSeason stats, a table of who has played where, end-of-season awards, and printable coach’s sheets, batting slips, and player reports.
Under the hood
Game day runs in three steps: take attendance, generate the lineup and adjust it by dragging players between positions, then enter the results afterward. Everything a game produces feeds the next lineup.
For the technically minded: the app is React and TypeScript on a Node service with a PostgreSQL database.