The convergence of sports and esports has another intersection courtesy of Minnesota Twins pitcher Trevor May. Not only a popular streamer on Twitch and a member of Luminosity Gaming, May is now also in investor with an eye to expand the esports ecosystem through a multi-pronged approach of stats and content through his company Esports Lab, with an eye toward leveraging analytics and statistics to help train, scout and develop players and teams as well as consumer interest.
Cynopsis Esports chatted with May about the similarities with traditional sports, his interest in the industry and vision for the esports ecosystem.
May on getting involved with esports: Last year, I got really into streaming on Twitch. I have always loved games my whole life and really enjoyed being able to do it. As I got more acquainted with how influencers are doing business by streaming, I found it to be an interesting dynamic for me because of the subtle differences between esports and traditional sports. That said, there are a lot of parallels as well that I think will lead esports to more of a mainstream following and more business success. Also seeing all the general hype around esports and the businesses that are now investing big numbers into the industry is an exciting proposition. So I said, there is something there and given that I had to have Tommy John surgery and unable to play baseball, I decided to pursue some of these interests that I wouldn’t be able to go after if I was playing.
On launching Esports Lab: It became very clear that the gatekeepers and the buy-in were beginning to become a little more set and the days of launching an esports org for $5,000 were gone. So when Overwatch and League of Legends announced plans to start franchising teams, it was interesting to me because the means we will see contracts that bring in a more mainstream audience. It occurred to me that people would now be wondering how to become a player or a coach. In sports, you have a path you can follow to get to the Major Leagues and when I was 12, I knew what I had to do. In esports, the 12-year old doesn’t have that path. So I decided that my path here would be to build several businesses building around the franchising of teams and developing that structure in the amateur scene to feed into it.
On goals: The world we live in is obsessed with data and the idea that data drives everything is how I’ve functioned my whole life. In baseball, we are becoming more data driven although we have been slow because we are so traditional. The amount of data taken from video games is gigantic so I saw the opportunity there and I found two terrific guys who were developing technology in this particular area that didn’t really have this particular vision. A big part of this was Winston’s Lab, the sabermetrics website of Overwatch. It started as a blog and now it is being used with publicly broadcast games and featured technology that can take a video of the game, pull stuff of the screen, create a timeline and make the whole thing searchable for people looking for analysis of the games they just watched. The other side of it involved an app that basically is a stand-in API for Overwatch that pulls statistics from custom games and offers more detailed stats for users.
On the path ahead: We decided that it would be extremely valuable to not only have a professional take a look at your stats and see where you can improve and see peripherally that I should be playing a certain way. While we want professionals to be able to use it, the plan is for this to be used by your everyday consumer as well, who can track who their statistics have changed. So we are partnering with two other start-ups, one is called Wild, Wild West Bootcamp that is now starting to develop a coaching curriculum that is going to incorporate our statistics. So you can start to see how vested we are in player development and when owners of teams in leagues such as Overwatch League move forward with professional players, they will realize that at some point, they will need to compete with players that are cheaper, that are new the same way that every traditional sport tries to find that diamond. It is a natural step.
