Elaine Allen, a professor at Babson college and friend of Spotfire, and her colleague George Recck were recently interviewed by USA Today about their use of Spotfire in helping to build the ultimate fantasy baseball team.  Using Spotfire and other statistical tools, they looked for factors which indicate strong contributors to your fantasy baseball team.

About a year and a half ago, she [Allen] and her students decided to see whether their studies could be applied to an important real-world topic, fantasy baseball.

Using tools developed by the Spotfire division of Tibco Software, Allen and fellow professor George Recck used 21 statistical categories to determine an index value for each player.

The conclusions were published last April and validated some long-held fantasy axioms. For example, consistency is more desirable than performance spikes. Another is that players who score a lot of runs (even if runs are not a category) help create a balanced and successful fantasy team.

However, one of the surprising aspects of the research was a connection between some relatively minor statistics and a player's overall value.

"Walks, doubles, caught stealing and strikeouts had a statistically significant (positive) impact on the index," Allen says.

Not only is it great to have professors like Elaine and George using Spotfire in and out of the classroom, I love seeing the application of analytics to things like fantasy sports.  It's easy to think of it as just a "fun" example, but I think that both wide participation in fantasy sports and the acceptance of analytics over tradition by various professional sports franchises (the current World Series champions, the Boston Red Sox are just one analytically focused team--there are many more) have both played a big role in demonstrating to broad audiences how useful and effective analytics can be.