I Was Spending 2 Hours Building a Little League Lineup. So I Did What Any Reasonable Person Would Do.

I coach a 10U baseball team.

Every Friday night I was spending 2 hours building the fielding lineup.

The constraints are genuinely hard. I have 13 players and only 9 can be on the field each inning. Every player needs 3 innings minimum. No one sits more than 3. No one sits twice in a row. Every kid needs infield time. Pitching limits. Rest requirements based on pitch counts. Star innings where you need your best defense up when the other team's best hitters are due.

Two hours. Every week. Rulebook open, spreadsheet open.

So I built an AI assistant to do it. Now I type one message and it builds the full rotation in 60 seconds.

Also — and I cannot overstate this — parents have stopped accusing me of favoritism. Turns out it's hard to argue with a system that has read the rulebook 1,000 times and has no idea whose dad brings the best post-game snacks.

Halfway through building it, I realized I was solving the exact same problem I solve for sales teams.

The constraints are different. The cognitive load is identical.

I upload box scores after every game. It updates stats, recalculates averages. The batting order is built on the full picture — not who looked good last Saturday.

Then I brought in two batting lineup methodologies — research on how to sequence a lineup for maximum runs. The assistant builds against both frameworks and flags the tradeoffs.

Same thing as loading a sales methodology into a motion coach. You're not just tracking what your reps do — you're training the system on what good looks like so it can measure the gap.

When you have a rep's wins and losses in the data, you stop guessing. The pattern is right there.

AI isn't making the decision. I'm still the coach.

It just cleared the board so I could actually coach — instead of counting bench innings.

Same problem. Same solution. One just involves more sunflower seeds and at least one kid crying. The other involves sales reps. So basically the same.