Where This Started
For six seasons coaching youth baseball, I was the guy in charge of GameChanger. Every game, I was on the tablet keeping score, tracking pitches, and logging at-bats. After games, coaches would come to me with questions.
"How many walks did we give up?" "What's his K/BB this season?" "Who's been our most consistent pitcher?"
Finding those answers in GameChanger was painful. The data existed — it was all in there — but surfacing it meant exporting CSVs, building formulas in spreadsheets, and manually computing stats that any major league team would have on a screen before the question was even finished. And there were no visualizations. No trends. No way to see that a pitcher's strike percentage had been climbing for three weeks, or that a hitter's QAB% had cratered since the third game of the season.
I'm a software person. I've spent more than 30 years building and selling enterprise software platforms. I've architected APIs that handled billions of calls per month. I knew exactly what the problem was: GameChanger captures great data and then buries it. So I built Dugout to fix that.
Why It Matters
Youth baseball coaching is mostly done without data. Lineup decisions are made from gut feel. Pitching rotations are based on whose arm feels okay and who was good last week. Player development conversations are vague because nobody has the numbers in front of them.
That's not because coaches don't care — it's because the tools didn't exist. A Little League coach volunteering their Saturday mornings doesn't have time to build a stats platform. They have a team to coach.
Dugout changes that. Import your GameChanger season CSV and boxscore PDFs, and within seconds you have a full coaching dashboard: strike percentage leaderboards, QAB% trends, pitch count compliance, AI-powered lineup recommendations. The data you were already capturing starts working for you.