(670 The Score) The founder of Codify – a proprietary system that uses technology to produce tailored game-planning charts and heat maps, typically for pitchers – indicated the White Sox showed interest in purchasing his company.
Codify owner Michael Fisher explained on the Dan Bernstein Show on Thursday that the White Sox have been among his most devout adherents, with right-hander Lucas Giolito, right-hander Dylan Cease, closer Liam Hendriks and catcher Yasmani Grandal using the information his system produces on where to attack hitters. Fisher also has a good relationship with White Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz, who was proactive in reaching out to see how they could best work together to support the team's pitchers and accomplish their goals.
“As far as cutting a check, I think that there are teams that have entertained that,” Fisher said. “I probably shouldn’t say who or how local they are to you. But they may be very local to you. But they have reached out and tried to figure out what would it take. Because it seems like if this works up top and you’ve had success giving this information to minor leaguers and seen them shoot up faster than we expected and stay up longer than we would’ve expected, then it seems like maybe this would really work well organizationally for someone, especially if you could make sure that no one else has it. Maybe I’m biased here, but I would think at some point, yeah, that a team would come up with a number that was enough to make it worthwhile (to sell).
“I don’t know what the number is, but it’d probably be a pretty crazy number that they’d have to work into their budget ahead of time in the offseason.”
Bernstein then asked how far negotiations with the White Sox got.
“I don’t think I said that it was the White Sox, but let’s just say I did,” Fisher said. “They went pretty far. It just gets to that number where you’re like, ‘OK, this is what we pay our executives.’ It’s just an alien number (to put a price tag on Codify). I think it’s hard for the teams in a corporate culture to look at something and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s worth whatever – $30 million in wins this year or whatever it is.’ It’s some crazy number. You know how much wins are worth. But our assistant VP makes 180(K) or whatever it is. It seems like too much of a leap so far for teams to jump out of that shell and come up with something completely unique like it should be to have it work.”
You can listen to the full interview with Fisher below as he further explains how Codify works and how the information helps.