The Chicago Cubs fan found the ideal seat at Wrigley Field almost by accident, sitting in the sunniest of spots along the left-field line and finding a friendly vendor to bring some nachos for his buddy. He even caught a foul ball that day.
Of course, that was Ferris Bueller, enjoying his day after ditching school in the 1986 classic "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."
Now the casual fan can find that ideal seat at a major-league park - with no principal chasing behind, either.
Joel Carben and two of his sports tech-savvy buddies created IdealSeat, a fan engagement platform that uses heat maps to chart the most likely sections to snare a souvenir foul ball. The site also gauges weather data and ranks concessions.
In three years, research teams have logged the landings of 10,000 balls. The company is currently in six MLB parks.
Carben's crew came up with the concept innocuously enough as they watched a fan catch a foul ball at a Mariners game.
Good fortune for that fan or good planning?
"Our brains went off: How can we use statistics to find seats with highest probability to find a foul ball?" Carben said.
Teams didn't actively track where foul balls were landing, Carben discovered. So, they began creating a mobile system to track baseballs. The sections shaded in red on the app means have your glove ready. The blue? Probably no need to bring out your mitt.
There's eve a link to see if tickets for those best seats are available.
To broaden the fan experience, the company is now looking at stadium food and weather.
What's more, they're examining factors outside the gates of the park, in an attempt to become a TripAdvisor for the baseball fan.
"This is still evolving," said Carben, who co-founded the company with Luis Carlos Hillon and Zain Khan. "We're looking at the role of technology to understand and give the fans a great experience."
This is how the operation works: The researcher in a city tracks the flight of every ball hit, logging on their phone app - or noting in an email - whether it's fair or foul, even the angle at which the ball comes off the bat. Those numbers are then entered into the system.
Just to get a lay of the land, Erika Schaub, the research team manager for IdealSeat based out of Citi Field, even sat in every section. Ask Schaub the most likely place to catch a ball at Citi Field, and she instantly responds with section 128. It's between third base and the left-field foul pole, incidentally.
"If you're in that area, you always seem to get a foul ball," Schaub said.
Important, because, "everyone's Holy Grail is to get a game-used ball," said Davis Williams, a researcher at Tropicana Field.
Oakland A's outfielder Sam Fuld is certainly intrigued by the concept, so much so he joined the group as an adviser.
Fuld has long been a statistics person and once interned at the STATS company. He kept a detailed notebook of every pitch delivered to Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera and World Series MVP Mike Lowell a few seasons ago with the sole purpose of seeing if there was any correlation between fouling off pitches and their respective on-base percentages.
Before he crunched his numbers, his notebook was stolen.
Hearing about the theft, Carben contacted Fuld and told him all about their research project. Fuld lends his expertise in blog entries on the website.
About Toronto's Rogers Centre, Fuld wrote: "Usually jammed with autograph seekers by dugout. RF line during BP is a good spot. Also worth a try at getting a seat or a hotel room way up in CF. We players tend to like to throw baseballs all the way up there during BP (high degree of difficulty)."
"I've never been involved in anything like this. It's cool," Fuld said in a recent interview.
It's already led Carben to the ideal place at Safeco: section 142 on the third-base side, where the sun for an afternoon shines the brightest and there is a convenient concession stand to get a brat smothered in onions and peppers.
Oh yeah, quite a few foul balls land there, too.
Had Ferris Bueller been visiting Seattle, Carben believes the character "would definitely have ended up in that seat."