State of the Prospectus: New Features

Hello, everyone.

This is the time of the year when we like to say “thank you” for your support of Baseball Prospectus. Our growth in traffic, subscriptions and media coverage never ceases to surprise us, and it’s our intention to use that growth to continue to enhance your experience. In the past year alone, we’ve added Kevin Goldstein, Dan Fox, Maury Brown and Marc Normandin to our roster, increased our on-the-ground coverage of events like the World Series and the winter meetings, overhauled our statistical reports and PECOTA cards, and provided approximately 1100 articles to our readers. We hope that you’ll tell your friends about us if you’re a loyal subscriber, renew your subscription if you’re on the fence, and give us a try with a monthly subscription if you’re new to the site. Baseball Prospectus has always been a customer-centric, word-of-mouth business.

We intend to introduce several new features over the course of the winter and as we roll into the 2007 season. In particular:

• A BP blogging project, tentatively titled Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered, in which BP authors share their quick takes on the latest baseball developments;
• Community-based pages, including a series of forums for BP articles and Unfiltered posts;
• Increased use of multimedia, including original photography and podcasted audio;
• Improved sortable statistics, including player splits (what was Johnny Damon’s VORP in games played at Yankee Stadium?);
• Earlier debut of the PECOTA cards, in time for early-bird fantasy drafts.

Some of these features you’ll simply see pop up onto the site; others will get a more thorough introduction as they come into being. Either way, they’re a reflection of our philosophy of continuing to re-invest in our business. We also hope to have a new book project to introduce shortly, with a tentative ETA of Labor Day, 2007.

One other thing that you may notice on the site is the use of advertising. We anticipate doing a little bit of advertising–more than we do presently–to underwrite our new columns and features. However, we pledge the following:

• Baseball Prospectus has generally had a policy of not showing third-party ads to our subscribers. In recognition of that, no paying customer will see any ads until his or her current subscription expires. If you decide to renew your subscription, you may then begin to see some ads.

• The ads will be limited in number and unobtrusive. You won’t have to deal with pop-ups or pop-unders, floating or expanding ads, interstitial ads or streaming audio ads. Nor will you see ads for products that diminish our brand. We won’t be selling your eyeballs to the highest bidder.

As always, I encourage you to communicate with us directly. I know that my batting average on responding to user e-mails can be somewhat below the Mendoza line, especially at this time of year. But I do read each e-mail, and customer feedback makes a huge amount of difference in the business decisions we make at BP. We hope that we’ve earned your trust.

Thank you and happy holidays, and don’t forget to tune in for our wire-to-wire coverage of next week’s developments in Orlando.