Rule42 Sports, a Portland, Oregon sports technology company that builds tools for discovering amateur baseball and softball players, announced on October 6, 2026 that it had acquired 64 Analytics, a service that tracks and ranks college players entering the NCAA transfer portal. Terms were not disclosed, and Sports Business Journal reported that the two companies negotiated the deal directly.
64 Analytics founder Jason Ratcliff is joining Rule42 as director of amateur baseball analytics, reporting to Rule42's executive vice-president of baseball, the former Major League Baseball infielder Jed Lowrie.
Rule42 does not plan to run 64 Analytics as a separate product. Chief executive Renée James told Sports Business Journal that the company will take the platform's customers and track record and rebuild it in Rule42's own format, designed to work at much larger scale for coaches.
What 64 Analytics built
64 Analytics was founded in 2023. According to its own account, it started as a free Google Doc that ranked players in the transfer portal and tracked which teams they committed to. When more than 80 teams got in touch asking for deeper analysis, the founder teamed up with others to build a full service.
Heading into the 2026 season, the platform offered live rankings, a data matrix covering all divisions of college baseball, and detailed transfer portal coverage. Athletic departments use its real-time database of player statistics, rankings and portal entrants to manage their rosters. It has also worked in college softball.
Ratcliff said Rule42 shares 64 Analytics' belief that concrete, validated data should drive talent evaluation, and that the combined technology would bring clarity to teams and more opportunities for amateur athletes.
Lowrie said that for many mid-major and smaller programmes, the service had become the tool that helps them stay competitive.
“Transfer portal talent management is essential for building winning programs in college athletics,”
Why Rule42 is buying
Rule42 was founded by Renée James, a former president of Intel who later founded the chip designer Ampere Computing. Its AI platform aims to give every amateur athlete an equal chance of being discovered, while helping scouts and teams evaluate talent more objectively. It started with baseball and softball and plans to add other sports.
James said transfer portal talent management is essential for building winning programmes in college sport, and that 64 Analytics had set the standard for portal analytics in baseball and softball. The company plans to combine the 64 Analytics data with its own sports language model to build a single tool for coaches to find, compare and manage players.
Lowrie told Sports Business Journal that since name, image and likeness payments and the transfer portal changed college rosters, programmes have been asking assistant coaches to act as de facto general managers. Outside the Power Four conferences, he said, most schools cannot afford a dedicated person for that work, and 64 Analytics is a well-regarded resource for those stretched staffs.
James told the publication that putting Rule42's tools together with the 64 Analytics database would create what she called the single best management tool for a college baseball or softball coach, because staff could track players and attach analytics, video and coaching notes in one place. She described Rule42's mission as having two parts: helping overlooked young athletes get discovered, and helping coaches, scouts and agents find talent. This deal serves the second.
A busy year for Rule42
The purchase is one of several moves by Rule42 in 2026. In August it launched an AI-powered scouting tool; it has also bought the softball media outlet Softball America and invested in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, where James sits on the board.
Rule42 is also preparing a consumer app that will track athletes' metrics across their amateur careers. It has not set a price for that app. James said the 64 Analytics deal will extend into softball, where Rule42 plans to strengthen what it offers coaches.
