Case Study: MLB Pitch Hit & Run

Connecting youth with America’s favorite pastime

Major League Baseball (MLB) holds a powerful and unique place in the cultural fabric of America, and continues to endear itself to millions of fans across the country. The organization’s commitment to the people and communities that support it is as strong as their fan’s love for the game. Its Pitch Hit & Run (PHR) competition is a free one-day event that encourages and supports young boys and girls across the country to play and enjoy the game. Local events are held at parks, schools, and community venues, while the team championship level events are held at all 30 MLB ballparks, giving children the exciting opportunity to showcase their abilities on the same field that they watch their favorite home team players on.

Client

MLB

Project Name

MLB Pitch Hit & Run Sport Competition Management System

Services

Streamlining registration and hitting it out of the park

Before Orases, registration for this event was largely paper-based. With nearly 2,000 competitions held nationally each year, it’s not hard to see the challenge here. Their previous site allowed participants to print out information, but had no database to store registrations, making it hard to keep track of participants and organize event information. They needed a one-stop shop where volunteers could create events and kids could register, and that would reduce overhead costs and streamline processes.

Finding the next Cal Ripken

With highly specialized knowledge in backend management processes and efficiencies, Orases provided a custom Sport Competition Management System (SCMS) to help ease the workload for local competition hosts and site administrators. The SCMS makes it possible for hosts, coordinators, and MLB staff to create and manage the entire competition process, from creating new seasons and collecting registration forms, to tracking competition results. Bearing in mind the community spirit of MLB’s PHR competition, we also added functionality to facilitate communication between event hosts and participants, ensuring that overall, our product didn’t just provide a better experience for users, it provided one that was ideal.

The PHR program also needed a new front-facing website to better serve all of its audiences. Orases developed a fully responsive website with rich functionality that allows visitors to quickly search for local competitions based on location or zip code, securely create personal profiles and register participants for competitions, or apply to host a local event. The site contains a database of all host and participant information and allows administrators to manage the entire program. Additionally, with different administrative levels for various users, and by using Amazon Web Service (AWS) Enterprise for hosting, the site is secure to protect the participants’ sensitive information, an important feature when working with minors.

Creating a digital experience as rich as the communities it serves

With the combination of 24Watch® and the Sport Competition Management System, and using the Orases agile methodology, we were able to save MLB employees hours upon hours of time and streamlined the entire PHR program from start to finish. Just six months after launching the site, commercials for Pitch Hit & Run ran during the historic 2016 World Series, and the site handled the increased traffic better than the Indians handled the Cubs.