Major League Baseball season is here and the Yottaa Team is freaking pumped!  Many of us here at the Boston office are die-hard Red Sox fans, so the start of each season is a momentous occasion.

[A note to our NYC users: unlike some of our local compatriots, Yottaa is all about respect and civility when it comes to baseball. We’ll keep the trash talking to a minimum if you’ll do the same! At least until September…]

Not only does opening day mean we’ll get to watch our beloved team play meaningful games for the first time in months, but it also signals that the statistics-mad baseball fans of the world will once again have a new streams of fresh stats to slice, dice, and savor.

America’s Passtime: Website Monitoring?

We can relate.  At Yottaa we?re all about data-driven decision making, so the ?Sabermetric? approach to baseball is a natural fit for us Sox fans.  We love digging into baseball with VORP, NERD, and EQA as much as we love digging into websites with asset count, page size, and time to title.

To celebrate the 2012 season we are going to be writing about how to look at a website with a Sabermetrician’s eye.  Using Monitoring tools like Yottaa’s its possible to go so much deeper into website performance than merely the homepage’s load time or its Yottaa Score.  Close analysis will allow one to achieve a better understanding of the website and to zero in on areas of improvement.

As a teaser for the posts to come, we took a quick look into popular Red Sox blog Boston Dirt Dogs see what might be hiding there.

What’s the Dirt Dogs’ OBA?

No, we don’t mean On Base Average.  Looking at the Boston Dirt Dogs blog, Yottaa’s waterfall chart shows that one asset takes over 5 seconds to load, comprising around 22% of the page’s total load time.  This is what our CTO Bob Buffone calls the One Bad Asset, or OBA.  Many sites have a high OBA, but it’s something that not many people notice.  In these cases, the site can be very well optimized, the result of hard work and money spent, but dragged down by one rogue asset.  It’s like if the manager of a great team were oblivious to the fact that one of his hitters was batting .000 on the season and dragging down the offense game after game.

We will dive deeper into OBA next week, and into other metrics in weeks to come.