There was another baseball story in southern Ontario on Thursday, and this one involved a Kitchener-Waterloo-based startup.

Amid the hysteria over the Toronto Blue Jays winning the American League East title, Top Score Baseball – previously Score More Baseball – announced that it had wrapped up a successful inaugural season with 2,000-plus coaches using the app.

Launched by Communitech Hub veterans Mike Kirkup and Brian Zubert, Top Score was unveiled to great fanfare earlier this year as an app that brings the power of Moneyball to amateur, recreational and youth baseball teams. The app simplifies the scoring and uses the same performance-based approach now used by over a dozen Major League Baseball teams.

In an interview Wednesday, Zubert said the he and Kirkup were pleased with the takeup in the first year with more than 8,5000 downloads and 2,000 paying clients, but there is huge room for expansion.

“We’re just scratching the surface,” said Zubert, a former Communitech executive-in-residence. “There are 250,000 youth teams in the U.S. alone.”

Most of the clients were in Canada or in the baseball-mad regions of the U.S., such as Florida. And one surprising aspect of the first season was that more than two-thirds of the downloads were carried out on BlackBerry platforms. Android was second and Apple’s iOS was third.

Zubert said he and Kirkup, the director of the University of Waterloo’s Velocity accelerator, had three main takeaways from their first season: First, it’s better to over-estimate rather than under-estimate the amount of server capacity, as it’s “it’s easier to throttle back than it is to scale up to demand”. Second, admit your faults and be honest with the customer. And third, the speed at which new features can be introduced slows dramatically after the launch as attention shifts to customer support rather than product development.

As Top Score Baseball – the name adopted just this week -- looks to deepen its penetration into baseball, it is also contemplating expanding into other sports. And Zubert said the company has a surprise for the next sport it’s looking at – cricket.

The high profile candidates like hockey, basketball and football all have too many players in action at once, and it’s difficult for the coach to monitor individuals. But cricket, like baseball, allows a focus on one player at one time and encompasses a huge international market.