SportTechie’s Athlete’s Voice series features the views and opinions of the athletes who use and are powered by technology. SportTechie recently spoke to Minnesota Twins relief pitcher Trevor May about video games and his growing presence in the esports world.
As a young pitcher, Trevor May made all of the top prospect rankings. The Philadelphia Phillies drafted him in 2008, and Baseball America named him that organization’s top young player in 2011 and 2012. The Phillies later traded him to the Minnesota Twins, where he made his major league debut in 2014. May can throw 98 miles per hour and is now a key reliever for the Twins, who currently hold the best record in the American League Central.
When fans approach, however, May is much more likely to get recognized for Fortnite than fastballs, and to be asked about Ninja than Nelson Cruz. He is a brand ambassador for Luminosity Gaming, an esports group that also counts Ninja (Richard Tyler Blevins) among its gamers. May and Ninja have regularly streamed together for a couple of years and first met in person last fall at TwitchCon.
May grew up playing video games in his hometown of Kelso, Wash. His interest in gaming accelerated during pro ball offseasons, and especially in 2017 when he missed a full year of competition while recovering from Tommy John surgery.
His Twitch channel, iamtrevormay, has 132,000 followers, but his involvement in the space extends beyond just playing games himself. He founded a company called Esports Lab to try to take some of the best practices of analytics from other sports and apply them to esports. (Esports Lab includes the consumer-facing Winston’s Lab.) He has also advocated for using traditional sports training for esports athletes. May hosted a “FortDay” at the Twins’ Target field last season and has been involved with the MLBPA’s Fortnite Challenge and Esports Challenge Invitational.
Rookie Gaming
“I had a brother six years older than me. We grew up in a smaller town in southwest Washington. Middle class. And we all kind of shared our gaming consoles. The first one we got was a Super Nintendo. We got that late. And then the next year, the [Nintendo] 64 came out, and we got that, too. The first game I ever owned to my name was Donkey Kong Country, and my brother had a fighting game called Killer Instinct. I have no idea why we were allowed to play Killer Instinct.
“My biggest influence, actually, was from my neighbor. My best friend growing up was also my neighbor—he’s two months younger than me—and his dad was a mechanic who built racing Mack Trucks. His hobby was building computers, so we had PCs starting in the late ‘90s. They had a small LAN center at their house. At the peak in my high school years, they had four or five computers running from their house. Early 2000s, 2004 to ’08, was mostly when we got really into it. World of Warcraft, all the Warcraft series. They also had a PlayStation 2, and we played Twisted Metal a lot. But World of Warcraft and League of Legends were really the two.
“WoW really hooked me in and lined up to when I had a bunch of free time, too. I took five years off, from like 2010 to 2015. Not off. In the offseason, I would play League of Legends, and in-season, I would play nothing. I actually produced music instead. That was my hobby, the DJ-ing thing. Then I got hurt in 2016, I had been playing Overwatch for a while and had a new console. I was like, I think I got to get back into the PC gaming. I started playing on a PC, and the rest is history. I haven’t stopped.”
Fortnite Fame
“I started playing Fortnite in beta. I played it with a guy named Lassiz [Drew Boyd], who was a big streamer for Overwatch. We gave it a chance. No one built anything, and we had no idea how to play. I probably got back into it three months into the game. I came back after playing PUBG. A lot of my friends were like ‘This Fortnite game runs a lot better than PUBG. It’s a little more fun, a little more fast-paced.’ I gave it a chance and just committed. It paid off. It was a lot of fun, and then everyone started playing it. There was always someone on.
“Every time I stream [on Twitch], I get a couple hundred followers. It depends on whom I’m playing with. [I’m] figuring out how to get two or three streams in on the road, even if it’s just chatting or just sitting there talking about baseball—just so I’m showing my face because disappearing for two weeks at a time isn’t the best thing for your channel. But I’ve been fortunate that I have time off when guys like Ninja and TimTheTatman are streaming. If they need somebody, I can just hop in and play. I hang out with them and play with them every once in a while because they’re my buddies, and we always have a good time when we play.”
“Even at the baseball field, guys are asking me to write Fortnite stuff on balls. That TwitchCon thing was really weird because not a single person mentioned baseball. It was weird because I have had that experience as a baseball player, to an extent. In the Phillies organization, you’re a little bit more noticeable than in Minnesota. It’s just a little bit different of a culture. I’ve had those moments where I’d be at Twins Fest or something, and everyone knows that you’re on the team, right? And then I was there [at TwitchCon] for something completely different that had nothing to do with [baseball], and it was the same feeling. It was really, really, really crazy. It’s funny to me.”
Esports Stats
“A lot of [the idea behind Esports Lab] comes from my baseball experience, just seeing the renaissance of sabermetrics, advanced analytics, and technology that’s helping organizations make more educated decisions on why they do the things they do from the people they draft to the decisions on the field. Now, that can have positives and negatives. But esports is a very who-you-know, eye-test-driven [industry]. And that’s at the professional level.
“I really took a deep dive into why teams are making the decisions they’re making, from their comps to their personnel to what stats they’re looking at to how are they aggregating stats, what are their sample sizes. In baseball, the currency we trade in is runs. Everything’s converted to runs.
“What do you do for Overwatch? I found a guy who had answered them all already but didn’t know exactly what he was doing yet. He knew that he had something. He had very valuable information, but he didn’t know how to be valuable to a lot of people. It’s kind of early in the idea. He’s actually now an analyst. Our esports lab has kind of stopped for now pursuing that because our head analyst is an analyst for a team. His name is Dennis Matz. ggBarroi is his screen name. He is the head analyst for the Toronto Defiant, and in the first stage, they outplayed their predictions by a lot. No one thought they’d make the playoffs, and they did.”
(Photo credit: Andy King/Getty Images)
Pro v. Amateur
“The developers who make games, they tend to not want to separate their professional scene from their casual scene too much because that splits the player base of their game. Which is counterintuitive. Fornite, for example, isn’t doing a very good job at it. They introduce random mechanics right before tournaments—things that just undermine all stats, right? I tried it with Fortnite, too, where we were trying to figure out ways to get access to the API and what you can pull out from the API.
“The problem is, the game is played differently at the pro level than in a public match. If everybody’s trying hard and wants to win the game or score points, then those stats are more consistent. How do we get only those ones? Nobody’s building the tools to allow you to do that.”
Gaming Fatigue
“Because it’s a different type of fatigue, you have to have a better understanding. it’s just more subtle. You have to have a better understanding of what that fatigue is and how to combat it. Even I try to switch to eight-hour streams in the offseason. I couldn’t do anything after that. I was a zombie. I wasn’t physically exhausted—my brain just did not [work]. My wife was like ‘Do you want to order out?’ I was like ‘I don’t want to think about dinner. I want you to just put food in front of me.’ She’s like ‘This isn’t going to work.’
“Not only that, like in baseball, if we focus only on baseball the whole time, you burn yourself out and every little thing that wouldn’t bother you much before becomes the biggest deal. And that makes it hard to perform.
“I had a really good conversation with a guy from the Houston Outlaws Overwatch League team, Jake. His name’s just Jake in the game. He was all about sleep tracking. He would change his bedtime based on what time the match was because he knew when his mental peak focus was. When you care that much, getting off the game is more important than being on the game. But that comes from maturity and experience. You almost have to be exhausted during a match and go ‘Wow, I really need to not play as much.’”
To be the first to read Athlete’s Voice, subscribe to the newsletter here.
