As some of you already know, I originally created this site as a hobby site for a softball team I used to play for in 2003. At that time I had just graduated from the University of Southern California and I was looking for ways to improve my skill set as a software engineer. I was playing on a softball team called Acme and one of our players Robin Blomquist was a stats guru. After every game, Robin would hand out a booklet of stats that included season totals, career totals, milestones, all time records, and occasionally game recaps. The players loved it. It dawned on me that it would be fun to do something similar for another team I managed called the SledgeHammers. I decided to create a website for them and started posting our game stats and recaps online. Other teams saw what I was doing and asked if I could do the same for them. Thus StatsFanatics.com was born.
Over the years the site has grown to include other sports as well as the ability to host and manage entire leagues. While holding down other full time jobs, I did my best in my free time to build new feature requests from users. However, with an outdated code base, it was getting more challenging to full fill those requests. So in 2015, I decided it was time to rebuild Stats Fanatics from the ground up and apply things I have learned from working for other companies. After working many late nights and weekends, version 2.0 was officially launched in 2017.
Some of the things that I changed included giving the site a more responsive design so it will work better on mobile devices. I also added a recap generator for team and league managers who don't have the time to create their own game write ups. I built more custom design settings to give users more options in updating the look and feel of their site. I also added more statistical categories for softball/baseball including dead ball outs, solo home runs, home run outs, reached on errors, and the option to count reached on errors towards on base percentage.
Stats Fanatics was also moved from a private server to being hosted on the cloud. A special thanks goes out to Greg Ippolito who has hosted this site since its beginning. I also want to thank my friend Christopher Soto who is someone I could always lean on for technical advice. Their guidance, encouragement and support is another reason why Stats Fanatics exists today.
Finally, I want to thank all of you that have inspired me to create and maintain this site as well as for your valuable feedback. If you have more suggestions or feature requests please don't hesitate to send them my way.
Thank you again for your support,John Bischoff
Founder
