A Sad Day for Stat-Heads: Baseball Prospectus, which has grown from a bunch of statistics fanatics posting freely on the Internet into a book-publishing mini-empire now affiliated with (I believe) ESPN, is now forcing readers to pay for "premium content." They'll still have a loyal and growing base of readers for their annual books, but they've now created a market opening for someone to gather all that restless amateur talent at one location. Suggestions, anyone?
Posted by at March 3, 2003 11:49 PMHow about a collaborative baseball-stat blog? BTW, if anyone should encouraged to start one of these things, it would be Bill James.
Posted by: Steve Smith at March 4, 2003 12:21 PMone of the premier fantasy sites, www.rotowire.com (also www.rotonews.com ) went pay a bit back too. Advertising on the web just don't cut it anymore, unfortunately. Hence, the 'viewer' pays.
Posted by: Mase at March 4, 2003 01:21 PMRoss -- Why don't you start Smith's collaborative stat-blog, bastich? Since you clearly don't work for a living, might as well do something useful on company time.... No seriously, it's time the rest of the world tasted the exquisite pain of the Fat Man....
Posted by: Matt Welch at March 4, 2003 01:58 PMThe Baseball Primer is a pretty good free alternative to the Prospectus.
Posted by: Gwyn at March 4, 2003 04:13 PMA thread on Baseball Primer's Clutch Hits is full of complaints about the new Prospectus's opaque methodologies, errors, changes in data categories, idiosyncratic player selections, indifference to the need for peer review, etc., etc. Were they really ready to start charging people for this thing? Reader psychology changes fast when a credit card gets involved.
Posted by: Colby Cosh at March 7, 2003 02:14 AMColby, et al -- I've been hitting the baseballprimer.com pretty heavy lately, and I must say I do not find it lacking. (It's improved greatly since last time I spent much time there, that's for sure.) A combo of Primer, plus the still-free injury reports at the Prospectus, are meeting my needs pretty well right now, and I haven't even gone totally deep with free site....
Posted by: Matt Welch at March 7, 2003 11:38 AM