‘The fan who built an alternate MLB app got hired by the league’ ↦

Joe Lemire of the Sports Business Journal detailed the story of how Major League Baseball (MLB) hired Jason Weingradt, the creator of the baseball app Mosaic. Weingradt built the app using public APIs from the league and other sources, and shared it via TestFlight and social media to gather feedback. On the same day, MLB Executive Vice President Kenny Gersh received a Slack message about Mosaic and asked if the league's legal team should intervene.

While not wanting any developer to profit from baseball's intellectual property, Gersh appreciated the app's controlled environment, which required an MLB.tv subscription to access premium features. He replied, "Not ideal, but it's not a huge problem yet. Maybe we'll hire." Indeed, they did hire Weingradt. Despite skepticism about whether the large organization would crush the smaller app, It signals MLB's tech acumen to have embraced Weingradt, who continues to add impressive new features to the app regularly.