State of the Prospectus

Baseball Prospectus

This is a time of tremendous change at Baseball Prospectus. You may have noticed that we've been largely dark for some time, while we've been hard at work on this year's book, and preparing for a relaunch of the web site.

That relaunch will take place in the next month, and the new Baseball Prospectus site will have more to offer than it ever has. We've gone out and aggressively recruited talented contributors who have a tremendous amount to offer, and worked to develop demanding editorial and production standards to guarantee that we can provide you with better content than ever before, on a consistent, daily basis.

Toward that end, we're proud to announce that we've brought in Will Carroll, of Under the Knife fame (see sample articles Knife Bids Kid Adieu, Bowden's Blunder, Six Man Madness, and Rolen Goes Down), Nate Silver, creator of the PECOTA pitcher performance forecasting system (see sample PECOTA / BP Historical comment player cards for Adam Dunn, Nomar Garciaparra, Mike Mussina, and Mark Prior), and Joe Sheehan, former managing editor of Baseball Prospectus and producer of a tremendously entertaining and informative newsletter (Singles From Heaven, Free Agents, Part 2, and about a million articles available in the Baseball Prospectus archive). All three will be providing content at baseballprospectus.com going forward.

In order to produce content of a level of quality that we're proud to put our name on, we've had to make some dramatic changes. The first change, and the one that affects you most as a reader, is that most content on the web site will no longer be free of charge. We have to be able to compensate the people who make BP possible, and that means we need to charge a subscription fee to generate the necessary funds.

The BP site will still have a front page with content available free of charge, with articles from familiar BP contributors. But much of the material will be available only to subscribers of Baseball Prospectus Premium. Subscribers will receive a newsletter each day with direct links to password-protected areas of the BP web site, where they'll find articles, interviews, special features, and access to other premium features. This content will be updated every weekday from March 1st to October 31st of each year, with updates no less than twice a week during the off-season, through the end of 2003. The cost for a subscription to Baseball Prospectus Premium is $39.95 per calendar year.

We'll also be launching Baseball Prospectus Radio in the next few weeks. Hosted by Will Carroll, the show will bring much of the same analysis you'll read on the web site and in the book to the airwaves. Guests will range from baseball writers, team executives and players to BP authors.

As we ready for relaunch, we'll be busy behind the scenes, working on the web site's format, setting schedules and performing a thousand other tasks we won't bore you with here. In the meantime, we welcome your questions, quibbles, comments and concerns. E-mail us at info@baseballprospectus.com and we'll answer any questions we can as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If we can't fully address your question right away, we'll do our best to answer it as we near our relaunch date.

We're grateful for your all the support and readership you've provided in the past, and we're even more excited about the future of Baseball Prospectus. We're confident you will be too.