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How would you like one of the world’s smartest computers to sift through gads of baseball stats and help you pick the perfect Fantasy Baseball team, then personally advise you on which players to play or bench all season long?
In November, you’ll be able to do just that, an IBM spokesperson tells Business Insider.
That’s when a new Fantasy Baseball beta service will launch from baseball stat company AriBall. The service will use Watson Analytics to help people draft their Fantasy teams and then choose which players to play for any given game.
Watson is a super smart computer service that understands regular language, reasons like a human and learns. The plan is to feed Watson heaps of baseball data from Baseball Reference.com and have the computer learn which stats for each player are the best predictors of future performance.
Watson can, for instance, understand details like how right-handed hitters do against your star pitcher, or if your pitcher’s fastball is getting slower late into the season, helping you know who to play for any given game, the spokesperson tells us.
There’s a similar service using another IBM Watson technology in the works for Fantasy Football fans. A startup called Edge Up Sports is working on it after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
The Fantasy Baseball service is all part of a new kind of computing that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty calls “cognitive computing.”
She’s on a mission to make computers that are so smart, they’ll become the go-to advisor for just about every decision you make in life, including the really important stuff, like who to draft to your Fantasy sports teams.
