Time flies may be one of the oldest clichés but I'm finding that to truly be the case in 2010. It has been six months since I was given the very special opportunity to become editor-in-chief at Baseball Prospectus and it has certainly been an interesting and exciting time, and a most unique experience.
We have made a number of changes this year. We've introduced some new writers and features, greatly expanded our blogs section, dropped weekend content and strived to deliver articles earlier in the day.
I'd like to know what you think of BP just past the midpoint of 2010. I'd like to know what you like, what you don't like, what you would like to see more of, what you would like to see less of. I can't promise I'll be able to respond to each comment but I will read them all. What I can promise is that I and the rest of us here will take your feedback into great consideration as we continue to strive to make BP the type of site that baseball fans feel they absolutely must visit every day.
Thank you for reading
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Please program enhancements to the fantasy baseball projection and forecasting software using the prior year's data now. That way the software should be ready to use as soon as the projection work is done. Don't tell us software is ready to use when it isn't. Please provide more frequent updates when there problems are known. Don't continue to label software as "beta" for an extended time period -- at some point it becomes an excuse for issuing error-prone work.
(2) When I want to look up a players stats, pitchFX data, game logs, or stat leaderboards, I go to fangraphs.com 100% of the time, which just feels more user-friendly. If I want up to date minor league stats, I go to milb.com. Seems like for a site that has the analysis of statistics at its core, we should be able to find this kind of thing here quickly and efficiently. The player stat pages here are a mess compared to fangraphs, which has obviously done a lot more thinking about presentation.
(3) I'd suggest growing a Kevin Goldstein clone in the BP labs. Sure seems like there'd be room at BP for another guy with a prospect focus, judging by the response his prospecting work always gets.
(4) Finally, would it be so hard to get Nate Silver to throw us an article once in a while? Just to show us he still cares...
And #3 is also a great idea. Even to just have a "backup" to Kevin that might occasionally provide a counterpoint to Mr. Goldstein. I find Kevin's opinions on players to be overwhelmingly accurate, but a second informed opinion never hurts.
But as for "wading through" Courier New font, I disagree -- it (on the DT cards) was the most legible stat presentation BP has ever had, imo.
I'd also like to see the ability to subscribe to multiple feeds, especially when it comes to the blogs.
1) Kevin Goldstein doing a ranking series based on the "Top Under-25 Talent" portion of his offseason prospect rankings.
2) Someone, if not Nate, who will take on the old "PECOTA Takes on the Prospects" series.
3) A PECOTA Upside-based version of Nate's 50 Most Valuable Commodities in baseball.
I'm disappointed that I had to go elsewhere for my Omar Infante should not be an All-Star rants. This used to be THE place for intelligent "______ is a dumb move" articles. Someone should be on call for those things when they come up.
Plus, it is incredibly frustrating to search for content on the blogs. The regular search function doesn't do it, and the search box next to the blog doesn't seem to work well at all either.
This seems like a good job for Perotto. With him no longer being a beat writer there is no reason to keep the sterile objectivity found in the daily roundup.
Mostly - I agree with those who have asked for more day-to-day type content - loved Christina's game stories - more along that line, maybe some stuff on tactics (more game, less numbers) sort of stuff.
I know I have mentioned this in an email, some college baseball coverage, even if it is limited to once a week during the season, would be great.
Finally, more prospect coverage.
Thanks for your hard consistent great work you do.
2) Introduce ratings for articles. I.e., readers could rate them from 1 to 5 stars. This would help readers find the most interesting articles quickly, and more importantly, provide a way for BP to figure out what subscribers like and don't like.
3) Get rid of the blogs beta section. If ~70% of site content is contained in this section, it shouldn't be obscured by this designation.
4) Produce more original, cutting-edge research on how to predict player performace -- both for future season and for rest-of-season stats. E.g., more Swartz and Lindbergh; fewer five-page rants about minor transactions.
The stats research has been beefed up this year, and some of the new content is really good, but I wouldn't mind seeing more of the stats-informed analysis that CK and Jay do but that we seem to see less of now, not just with Joe no longer writing but also with many other writers and features that have disappeared over the years, like "Prospectus Triple Play." Joe's take on All-Star Game selections had gotten repetitive, but I was surprised to see no one discuss this year's selections.
Others are more fact checking errors - According to today's transaction report, the Giants got director Michael Mann with Chris Ray for Bengie Molina (just in the italics not the article). The Oakland A's record was wrong in another post and was quickly corrected after a snarky comment from the gallery.
Hope that helps.
I still go to baseball-reference, ESPN.com, or fangraphs for player data or game logs. I think the proofreading/editing hasn't gotten better, which was supposed to be John's strength and focus. I also think the layout needs to be changed a bit since it can be hard to find an article older than a week... which gets to be a problem when following ongoing discussions once they cycle off the main page.
Please add a threaded forum for discussions (and perhaps for some of us to post our own articles/research/etc). Also, I thought the +/- system was going to be changed so that you could see threads rated negative even if the initial comment was rated negative...
Also, something has to be done to quiet the repetitive "PECOTA sucks" comments... pull back the veil a bit so people know a bit better how it operates or something... the repetitive preseason revisions to PECOTA (in part, based on changing depth charts), cause issues for people who use it.
The presentation of the blogs is sub-standard. Laying it out like this would be more user friendly and take up less space:
Future Shock
Last update:
Author:
Title:
BP Unfiltered
Last update:
Author:
Title:
Fantasy Beat
Last update:
Author:
Title:
Transaction Action
Last update:
Author:
Title:
Also, are the blogs *still* in beta mode after all these months.
Most importantly, I really miss the day-to-day articles, like Joe's Prospectus Today, that will analyze/criticize moves and decisions based on something that happened in the last 48 hours. It was appaling that the ONLY all-star coverage we got was your "one man's ballot" article, with no detailed stat analysis either before or after the fact.
Oh, one last thing. Please keep the layout clear and uncompliucated. I don't need videos etc popping up all the time, and I'm glad y'all don't do this.
2) Directed to the authors of the annual... Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. Over the past couple years the authors have shown a strict adherence to PECOTA projections, to their detriment. The writers are more likely to defer or equivocate than to make bold predictions that might run in the face of the numbers. This was not always the case. In my opinion, what was once an informed scouting manual has become merely an interpretation of numbers.
1) The upgraded fantasy content has been stellar. In particular, the regular "value picks" posts have been extremely useful to me. Keep 'em coming
2) Make the PFM more relavant during the season. I don't know if this is relevant today -- and it's mearly a question of you marketing it more effectively -- or if there's real work to be done, but upgraded PECOTA projections + PFM that can be done to enable me to evaluate in-season roto trades would be great.
3) Expanding Goldstein's work. People who focus on prospects tend to overvalue them; people who ignore prospects tend to undervalue them. What would be fantastic is some blending of prospects and non-prospects in a way that's not done anywhere else. Immediate ideas that come to mind are expanding and periodically updating a Top 200 under 25 year-olds (prospects and players) -- essentially building off the "Top 10 under 25 year-olds" from the offseason Top 11 lists.
One more note: I suspect every one of your tens of thousands of subscribers has their favorite authors, and I'm no exception. (I particularly like Swartz and Goldstein and used to love Silver, Fox and Huckabay.) I leave it to your judgment to make sure that the most popular writers are the ones kept around. However, from a business perspective, it's important for me to say that, as much as I like lots of the writing here, I pay the premium rate for the fantasy content. And while it may be hard for professional writers to swallow, I suspect that many others agree with me. Please don't neglect the fantasy stuff; PFM upgrades and *actionable* colums/blogposts (value picks, SIERA updates, etc.) likely bring in a disproportionate percentage of your revenues.
Everyone loves the in-detail, day-to-day prospect updates. But eventually, without context, I don't know what much of it means.
The context I'm looking for here is more team-by-team --- hitting the refresh button on pre-season Top Prospects rankings. Organizational issues, strengths and weaknesses,
Who's hot, who's not. Who's stuck. Who's being fast-tracked.
Who's outperforming expectations, who's disappointing. And insights into the what scouts and front-offices are thinking.
The point is, pre-season prospect rankings really could use some in-season re-appraisals. Whether it's by-team or overall or both, I think this would be a useful and popular addition.
As of know, i always choose fangraphs or beyond the box score first because it is simpler. I come to BP when i have run out of things to read. I have been a subscriber since day 1 and a reader for a long time before that too.
I think the easiest improvements have been mentioned in this thread. I know I've mentioned some before.
1. The mobile experience isn't very good. I know someone from defended it, but you're wrong. Widely used WordPress mobile themes put the BP site to shame on mobile.
2. Overall the web design is stale and hindering people from finding the good content that we paid for. The RSS feeds should be full for the articles that you give away for free and contain the same amount of text that you expose on the website. I'd love to see custom feeds too so I could put Christina and Will in one and all the other people I might read in another feed. At the very least there should be a single combined feed for the entire site.
3. I hope that storm of rollover ads never returns. That was insulting.
4. The formating of the stats pages isn't very good. Why is Baseball-Reference better here? And faster! Why can't I filter by position for WARP? See also mobile formating. The team pages aren't very good. This would be a great place to make mobile apps. Partner with someone who has made a good one already.
5. BP often seems to stumble into that weird state where they pretend that no one else is doing analysis on the web. John's links to newspaper articles are welcome improvement, but could be improved further with a bit more meaty information. It would be great if someone else did it for blogs.
6. Someone proposed article ratings. I think that would pay immediate dividends to both the readers and writers of the site.
7. The glossaries aren't very good. They should be improved and incorporated with summaries and links of the great articles that have been written about different stats.
8. Why are there 3 different playoff projection reports? One should be the best. Or maybe a combination is best. Find that and post that one.
As for his "hostility": I find that the response should be a bit more timid than what he's responding to. That first comment, which I presume is what you are talking about, was there with guns blazing. So, Matt was fine to be harsher in his comments than he is, because the context warranted it.
Perhaps more of Matt's work is acceptable, you would certainly know better than 99% of BP's customers. As a reader, I was struck by how thin his analysis was and how little he considered other forces driving decisionmaking in professional baseball.
Perhaps at BPro, there's an expectation (from some? many? few?) readers that authors should be much more tempered in their responses. ESPN for example won't ever let their authors strongly challenge their readers. To me, that simply makes it a less colorful atmosphere. I would much prefer to see Rob Neyer openly challenge his readers, and even take some of them down a peg or three. You get rid of the riffraff, and you end up with a better setting.
I find it bothersome that to get to appreciate Colin and Matt's personalities, you'd have to read their comments on my site or at Primer, and not on this site. It's an (implied) editorial position I don't agree with, but again, I may be in the minority here.
IMO.
As to facts/opinions, you are right, I was stating an opinion. I operate under the assumption that BP is a business and likes to make money. If that's not their goal, then insulting your readers might be the best option.
Given that Matt contributes to your site, it's not surprising that you would so vehemently defend him here. You should at least state your bias ahead of time.
What if one of the BPro authors chose one of your comments and said: "dawhipsaw's last comment was the very worst I've ever read on this site".
Are you suggesting that the financial motive of the site should allow the readers to be far harsher than authors in terms of peer-to-peer interaction? If that's the case, then it's no wonder why ESPN authors rarely, if ever, are found in the comments section of their own articles. And it's no wonder that BPro authors are so tempered, and not often seen, here.
On the other hand, if we ignore the financial motive, and simply allow the authors the right to interact at the same level and with the same rules as the readers, then what Matt said, and the way he said it, was in-line with the original commenter.
This is really an editorial decision by BPro as to how much they want to handcuff their authors.
I would also think that to the intelligent readers of BPro that the financial motive is benign. Otherwise, you are suggesting that as customers, you are allowed to insult those who are providing you with a service, as long as you are paying for it. And the service provider has to take it because you are paying them.
Matt responded in-kind, and therefore, there is no issue.
***
As for the bias: given that I've had my own somewhat unpleasant exchanges with Matt, I don't think I'm necessarily predisposed to argue for (or against) him. In any case, he contributes to my blog as a commenter, much as yourself. I don't know that that means I'm territorial around him or other commenters at my blog. I'm territorial around him because he provides value, regardless of where I've read him.
Me personally? I'd be fine with that. But I think that would be a pretty terrible business decision by BP. There's just no upside for them.
'Are you suggesting that the financial motive of the site should allow the readers to be far harsher than authors in terms of peer-to-peer interaction? If that's the case, then it's no wonder why ESPN authors rarely, if ever, are found in the comments section of their own articles. And it's no wonder that BPro authors are so tempered, and not often seen, here.'
'I would also think that to the intelligent readers of BPro that the financial motive is benign. Otherwise, you are suggesting that as customers, you are allowed to insult those who are providing you with a service, as long as you are paying for it. And the service provider has to take it because you are paying them.'
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying/suggesting. That's called big business. If you can't take criticism and turn the other cheek, then stop writing professionally, open a personal blog, and yell at all of your critics. I'm not defending the original commenter's attitude in his/her post, being rude is uncalled for virtually all of the time. But there are going to be jerks for customers in every industry, and a Hammurabi-esque response to them risks losing not only them as customers, but others witnessing the retribution as well.
By way of example, do this experiment. Go into a four star or better restaurant and order something to eat. When the waiter comes back to you and asks about your meal, tell him it was terrible and flick a piece of the food at him with your fork. See how he responds. Then repeat the same exercise at a greasy spoon. Big time business reacts differently to difficult customers.
"Also, "you can win with the lowest payroll" is laughable. The correlation is high between winning percentage and payroll, and getting higher. Simply noting some counterexamples of smart teams does not change the fact that winning with a low payroll is hard. Having good talent evaluators helps too of course. That does not change the fact that having a higher draft pick helps in addition to having money and good talent evaluators. It's like you have decided that a few examples of other ways that teams have been successful changes anything about a backwards incentive structure."
I, for one, could not agree more with what he wrote. In an unrelated note, adding an "Ignore" feature for subscribers to hide comments from particular users would be a nice addition to the site.
Eh... there have been some commentators who I regularly disagree with and dislike, yet every so often, they say something quite profound that I like. So I'm not in favor of an "ignore" feature.
But an article writer also has to act as a bit of a moderator of the comments and I have no problem with an author challenging a reader back. Tone and style can be an issue at times, but sometimes you have to yell louder to be heard better.
Also, in slight disagreement, but I've gotten a good idea of Colin's and Matt's personalities/intelligence/analysis through comments here... but the tone does seem to change a bit on Tango's blog... perhaps because they have a personal investment in what they write for here? Kind of like the difference between an academic presenting a research paper at a conference instead of chatting about it in the faculty lounge?
Excellent analogy.
I'm willing to allow them to have the 'main page' if that is your bread and butter these days. I would appreciate though a non-fantasy main page.
Whether Sheehan comes back or not I have to agree with one thing. I've been missing something for a while now at BP and that was the feeling of a personal connection with an author. I didn't even realize that was that important until I noticed it wasn't there anymore.
Someone needs to put down the calculator and start a conversation instead. I read the VORP, WARP, Davenport Translations, PECOTA translations because Daily Prospectus showed me why it mattered in a game and then I went on to learn about it after I was shown it was useful.
Show me in a game why something was done right or wrong, then show me how using SIERRA or Pitch/FX or what have you could have improved that decision process then when I go to read the statistical article I'll have a reason to do it and the necessary context to give me a reason to want to.
1. Forum. I really think this would be a positive thing for the site. If you had a message board where other could discuss articles, continue to dive further into topics, and your readers could prove to provide some pretty valuable content as well. Just look at the articles that get a lot of comments. They would be very frequently traveled sections of the forum and it's not technically challenging to support it. It would also be a great asset to contributions to the cards with lineups, playing times, rotations, and general team discussion. Game threads, prospect information, team pages, it would develop into a community and communities in a community. Ultimately any information you have can be linked to the message boards and vice versa.
I just think you are missing a large market out there and if managed properly it can be a huge asset.
2. Numbers explanations. I read all these articles on numbers, new calculations, and just isolating numbers on a specific person for comparative purposes. Numerous times I have gone to the numbers via to stat page and I feel like I am trying to learn a new command line. Some type of tutorial on how to isolate data or information pieces would be great. I know it's not the most interesting thing in the world to write about, but I would really appreciate it.
Maybe this is a feature from your folks perspective - it should, theoretically, get me to check the front page more often - but I see it as a bug.
I'll also second the stat pages. It seems like making the statistical data more presentable, more flexible, would be among the easier, and most user-friendly, things that could be done. There are few things more frustrating that wanting to find out who has the most WXRL in their career since 1979, and not being able to figure out a way to make the stats page tell me that. Or wanting to look up the adjusted standings of July 1, 2008, and not being able to find them.
And if you need beta testers for new features, you have a lot of long-time, loyal subscribers who I bet would be happy to help out (maybe even for free).
The newspaper highlights feature seems like a glorified search function not worthy of BP.
Love Will Carroll and Kevin Goldstein.
Don't power down, Christina.
Anyway, I've going to give dawhipsaw a +1 just to keep it visible. dawhipsaw makes reasonable enough points, and just because we disagree doesn't mean we should hide it. Readers here are way too into the rating on the "niceties" of the post, rather than on the merits. dawhipsaw makes worthy comments. That there are several of us that are responding to it should count for something.
I've done sports content as a business for 15 years. By any standard I'm one of a small number of people to do it successfully outside the mainstream, I've played most of the roles one can play and holy god I'm sick of listening to you act as if you've had 1% of the success the people you criticize have had. How about you grant that I might know what I'm talking about, given that sports content has been my career, without me having to make a business case to someone with no standing to ask for one?
Fangraphs, as far as I can tell, is financed by a rich grandpa. Primer/BTF/Newsstand/Brand of the Day isn't a business in any real sense of the word, it's r.s.b ported to the Web and stripped of its spark. That you would make these comparisons shows just how little you understand of Prospectus, how little you've ever understood.
Stick to being an academic, Thomas. Stick to your sycophant-laden fora and your above-it-all mien. Stop jumping in here and cheap-shotting a business that you've never comprehended on your best day.
That's been on of my biggest disappointments with the BP comment system. It's particularly priceless comming in response to Sheehan throwing out the "sycophant-laden fora" comment. There may be no better descriptor of this comment system.
I have always said Sheehan was arguably the best writer at BP...
I didn't realize that my success level was required to offer my opinion. Joe, why is BPro asking for opinions of the rest of us little people then?
In any case, I made no insulting or disparaging remark.
"Stop jumping in here and cheap-shotting a business that you've never comprehended on your best day."
First, don't tell me what to do. Secondly, exactly what did I cheap-shot?
You read whatever you wanted to read into what I said, and decided to use that as a launching pad to tell me whatever you wanted to tell me. And, for some reason, rather than send me an email, you needed to tell everyone else this.
I hope BPro leaves your post here.
***
Just before Joe posted this, I put a link on my blog to Joe's newsletter. Joe is one of the best writers around, and I stand by my position to support him, and I will certainly leave that link there.
Joe is speaking for himself, not BP. Thanks, everyone, for your comments and suggestions, and for reading.
-j
Tango, why don't you listen to Joe and stop being a know-it-all. Keep your fancy numbers and reasoned advice and intelligent opinions to yourself, you thirty-syllable word!
Two days ago, I subscribed to Joe's newsletter and am probably going to let my BP subscription lapse after 8(?) years. Because IMO, he's what's missing from BP these days.
But that post was utterly obnoxious and really out of line. I'll think for a while whether I ask Joe for my money back.
You know how much of your position is luck? An absolute ton. There are a whole crap load of people out there who could do what you do, you just happened to be right place right time. So, should I grant you know what you're talking about? No, not really. You made some money from your newsletter, since you already had a profile from BP. You got to BP because, like I said, right place right time. So, where's the evidence for this skill in sports content marketing? You write about baseball pretty well - don't presume there's more.
The thought of "let's see what this guy said that was so bad" gets me to click on them, and I'm sure I'm not alone. It seems that having them "hidden" calls more attention to them than they'd receive otherwise.
David Laurila has completely converted me to appreciating baseball interviews. I used to find them universally vapid, but his work has been routinely excellent. I'd like to hear more, both from major and minor leaguers, if more of that level of quality is possible.
For me the biggest negative is that I often feel overwhelmed by numbers and underwhelmed by personality. I have graduate statistical training, but articles about small fractions of value are better when accompanied by application and opinionated analysis.
I love the chats, every single one by every single author. The mix of personality, research, and opinion is a lot closer to what I appreciated in the BP articles of yesteryear.
I can't read Christina any more unless she's writing about a specific team/transaction I care about. Too much convoluted construction, too much assumption of reader awareness. I'm smart, I follow baseball closely, and I read authors who disrespect their readers, but it's just too much. I'm sad when I skip her articles because they used to be among my favorite.
There are still things which bring me to BP regularly. Love the chats for the reasons above. Kevin and Will are great, and when life gets too crazy even to catch an occasional inning on TV, Jay's "Hit List" is my only baseball must-read. I don't always have the patience for Christina's pieces but I do skim for transactions that interest me and even when I'm not reading, I'm glad she's there. Once in a while BP Radio has something great, often when you didn't expect it to be. And of course there are the PECOTA cards.
Russell Carleton was far and away the most promising addition in these six months, but he didn't stick for some reason.
On the downside...
There are too many dry and detailed articles about teasing data toward conclusions of relatively little interest. There's far too much fantasy content. And the whole site is poorly designed and a nuisance to navigate, especially since the introduction of the Beta Blogs column/page.
John P.'s "Paper Trail" looked like a brilliant feature when it started: a digest of links to five or six non-BP articles of particular interest. But it quickly became a laundry list of 25 or 30 articles, most of them just pedestrian local reporting, an unmanageable mass, a minor chore just to scan for that which might be worth checking out. It was a perfect microcosm of BP 2010.
Look, the site misses Joe badly, even more than I'd expected; as someone said above, Daily Prospectus was the hub around which the rest seemed to rotate. I know all things must pass, but if I had to sum up my disappointment with the site since, it would be that you guys have tried to replace quality with quantity, and for me, at least, more has been less.
"too many dry and detailed articles about teasing data toward conclusions of relatively little interest."
"far too much fantasy content."
"poorly designed and a nuisance to navigate"
"John P.'s "Paper Trail" looked like a brilliant feature"
(but now, IMO, is a poorly-laid-out Buster Olney blog, aka "an unmanageable mass"
"the site misses Joe badly"
Bingo.
1) I use Opera Mini on my BlackBerry. I won't visit BP from there because the site loads so poorly. Please improve/construct the mobile version of BP.
2) Still waiting for the website redesign promised in January.
3) If I want a player's 2010 stats, I type "Player Fangraphs" into google. Fangraphs lets you customize your own "dashboard" so you always get the stats you're looking for on each player.
4) I used to read everything posted on BP. These days I read:
- Anything by Goldstein, Carroll and Lindbergh
- Most chat transcripts
- The "MLB Rumors and Rumblings" of every "On the Beat"
5) I like reading the above because they analyze *current events* in the MLB world. So much of BP these days is backwards-looking (TA, Hit List) or theoretical (you know what I mean). I said it in January and I'll say it again... I would pay extra in my Premium subscription just for baseball articles by Sheehan, Rany, Silver, Huckabay, Law.
Rany just wrote 5,000 words for his free blog on the Royals' potential trade deadline moves. Law produces high-quality content for ESPN. Silver is an elite political wonk. Huckabay... I have no idea.
At least now I know that Sheehan's been writing a newsletter all year. Sign me up.
Yes, for more of this award-winning commentary and insightful analysis, be sure to check out Joe's newsletter!
1. Allow blog posts to be selected by date range, say a week at a time. If they are older than ones on the main blog page on the right, there's no way to get them by date. For example, I should be able to select the blog posts for the 4th week of June.
2. Allow search of reader comments. I comment on here from time to time, and I have no idea if anyone responds. There's no way to find my comments and check.
I can think of a plethora of major league managers and GMs who could have said something similar to this to Joe Sheehan after many of his columns in the past.
Seriously, Joe, how dare you criticize, for example, Dusty Baker (in past columns) when you haven't had 1% of the success as a major league manager that he's had? How about you grant that he knew what he was doing, given that managing has been his career?
Do you get what I'm saying here? Do you see the irony?
One thing I do miss, though, is the Top 50 roundtable discussions the old crew used to do. Is there a way to bring something like that back? When it comes to prospects, nuance and dialogue is really crucial.
Indeed, as a general rule, I'd love to see more roundtable discussions. We got a small taste of that with the CK/KG collaboration on the Cliff Lee trade. There's a lot of smart people who write for the site and I'd love to hear their disparate opinions on prospects, the trades of the day, etc.