I am not a sports guy, but the math surrounding baseball has always interested me. The magic number is the number of wins that a team must have to guarantee a spot in the playoffs. I wrote a php program the recalculates the magic number every hour based on public stats.

I have several urls, like www.MetsMagicNumber.com, and they are getting hits! My Magic Number sites are getting about 5,000 page views a day, and are growing exponentially. Today they nearly tied the average for HarpAmps.com. When they hit 11,000 a day (any minute now) they will surpass my harptab.com site.

I don’t get good ad revenue off of the site, though. My musical instrument sites pay the best and the lyrics site pays the least. It turns out that sports statistics doesn’t pay as well as the lyrics site. I hope to get about 50,000 hits a day by the end of September. That should earn from $40 to $60 a day. Of course, once the playoffs start, I’ll have no hits at all until next year.

I hope that by next year, some of those 40,000 surfers will remember the site and I can build on that. Maybe I’ll be doing $500 per day in September of 2007. (And in 2008 I can retire.)