Joel Carben attended his first professional baseball game in 1980, at Yankee Stadium, as a five-year-old. He and his father sat in the upper deck, in right field, “way, way up in barely-see-it-ville,” he recalls. He remembers a man sitting behind them with a jug of moonshine, yelling vulgarities at Reggie Jackson, and he remembers his father admonishing him to keep his eyes on the ball, a lesson that he has internalized with near-fanaticism. Today, when he attends a game, as he often does, he tracks foul balls: where they land, their angle of approach. He is not interested in what this might reveal about the players producing the foul balls, or in how teams might improve their performance, using his data. “I kind of feel like a bit of a stadium scientist,” he said recently, and likened himself to the Bill James of the fan experience. He simply wants to know where you should sit if you’d like to take home a souvenir.

Carben was at Yankee Stadium for a game against the Seattle Mariners, with his wife, Rachel, and their two daughters, Zadie and Roxanne, who are four and two. It was his twentieth ballpark out of an eventual thirty, on a cross-country tour to help spread the word about his company, IdealSeat, which offers an app to help you choose (and purchase) tickets to games. He thinks of it as “StubHub with data.” Demonstrating on his iPhone, he selected an upcoming Yankees-Blue Jays matinée, and optimized for foul balls. The app proposed four seats in Section 112—lower tier, short right field—and Row 25. Cost: a thousand dollars. Yikes!

“Now you just throw it back, apparently.” Facebook

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The Carbens’ seats for this particular game were twenty dollars apiece, owing to the budgetary constraints of a startup and a commitment to bonding with the common fan. This put them in Section 236, on the second tier of the left-field bleachers, where foul balls are out of the question but mammoth home runs are a remote possibility. “Keep your eyes up!” Carben said to his fidgeting girls, as the Mariners’ cleanup batter, Nelson Cruz, came to the plate in the top of the second. Carben pulled a Rawlings mitt out of his backpack and put it on. “My prediction is Nelson Cruz is going to put a bomb in here,” he said.

“Is that probabilistic?” Rachel asked.

“It’s a science—and an art,” Joel replied.

The highest likelihood for catching a home run, Carben admitted, lay in Section 136, down beneath them, and across the field in Section 103, below a Modell’s billboard. Cruz, in any event, grounded out to second. Carben removed his glove and resumed tracking fouls on a piece of paper with a diagram of the stadium. Soon, an old friend of Carben’s from high school, named Shawn, arrived, looking a little ragged from the previous night’s U2 concert, at Madison Square Garden. “Fifth row, front and center,” Shawn bragged. “No, they didn’t throw any drumsticks in the crowd, unfortunately.” The stadium scientist appeared to make a mental note.

Foul tracking requires live attendance, because the TV cameras routinely cut away after the ball leaves the playing surface. Carben relies on a network of about a hundred volunteers, including a dedicated Twins fan who files nightly reports from Minnesota. On this occasion, the demands of parenting led Carben to deputize a seatmate, who feels certain that he missed a few, because of a habit of making small talk whenever the action on the field ceases.

Nonetheless, the deputized tracker found himself recording the number 112 in several instances, and realized that a secret to that optimal section is that it sits near the ball boy’s perch. What you may be getting, if you shell out for those seats, is a chance that a Yankees employee will toss you an errant ball. Rawlings not required.

The game was shaping up to be a pitchers’ duel, and the faint promise of home runs gave way to a more pressing concern: getting out of the sun. It was ninety-some degrees, and the ideal seat was anywhere that was less sweaty. Carben’s app allows you to prioritize things like shade and proximity to beer, too, and as the Carben family headed for cover they passed a long line outside the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar. ♦