A couple of people who mentioned in another thread that they used to read Baseball Prospectus, but no longer do. I’m curious to see if that is the general sentiment. So
Did you ever read the website?
If so, When did you join?
Do you still read it?
If you stopped, why did you stop?
Who do you like to read?
Do you pay for content?
Do you read the book?
Has your opinion of BP changed over time?
For me when I first read BP it was a revelation. I got to it from a link off a Rob Neyer column, and it quickly became a must read. This was probably about a decade ago. New articles were the highlight of my day. When it was close to time they should be appearing I would often increase the article number by one in the url to try to get them a few minutes early. Once the book came each year you wouldn’t see me for days.
That excitement has lessened over time, and now it is reaching a point of almost indifference. I still get every book and subscribe to the site, but there is very little content I get excited for, and on the website I skip as much as I read. Only Kevin Goldstein feels like someone worth paying money for.
There are numerous reasons for my lessened interest. There are many other very well done stat friendly websites, so BP is no longer unique. A lack discussion of what is actually happened in the game, when a big move happens I want to hear reactions to it, and it can be days before bp has anything on it. And if a possible move doesn’t happen they might not even mention it. Joe Sheenan was tiring at the end, Adam Dunn isn’t the solution to every problem, but they badly miss Prospectus Today. PECOTA has never really recovered from the loss of Nate Silver and the injury columns after Carroll are more about the injuries than the players. I’m never found the fantasy articles to be terribly useful or interesting. In all they have had a massive loss of talent that has been replaced as much by quantity as quality. The new writers tend to be much less willing to take strong opinions, and wishy washyness doesn’t make an interesting read. They just seem like generic writers that I’m barely able to tell apart. There is no Nate Silver or Joe Posnanski who is interesting to read no matter what they are talking about.
I’ll probably always be member, but it is reaching the point where it as much a reward for past work then present endeavors.
I’m a subscriber, and have been for the past five or so years. I hear you on most of your complaints, although I think they have improved a lot over the past year, year and a half. They’ve increased the number of articles significantly. I was considering letting my membership drop this year, but towards the end of last year and this offseason, I realized that I was reading 7-8 articles a day.
There is an awful lot of good stuff you can get online for free, but even the best free sites struggle with both quantity and quality of content. BP does good consistent work and I find that I read a lot of what they have to offer.
Never subscribed to the website, used to sometimes read some of the free content (transaction analysis, if I remember right?), but probably haven’t been to the site more than a handful of times in the last two years. BBTF is my website of choice for keeping up with what’s going on in baseball, and I do read THT to some extent.
Have bought the book every year for the last ten, at least. I agree the quality has gone way down, but there isn’t anything better out there. I do wish they would stop changing (or renaming) the stats they print every bloody year. This year’s book had some absolutely bizarre misprints in the stats, which was very disappointing. If I remember right, many pitchers had more games started than games pitched.
PECOTA hasn’t been the biggest part of why I read the annual, so I’m not aware if it has gone downhill. I do remember noticing that one of their stats (base running runs, I think) was normalizing to zero for almost everyone in this year’s projections.
Sporting News Baseball preview and the Baseball America Prospect Handbook are my other two every year reads. I bought the THT annual this year, but was disappointed in it.
Yeah, I’ve got to say that the Baseball Prospectus book is getting to be disappointing. I lost track of the number of times a player was described as a “great fielder” when the stats directly above showed him with negative FRAA (in one case -13 FRAA…that’s approaching the worst of Jeter’s years). And their incessant bragging over their “hits” from previous years borders on the insulting. This year, for example, they bragged about predicting a breakout year for Jason Heyward last year. Yeah, you and every single person in organized baseball predicted that. And BP seems slow to edit its numbers when larger trends in baseball change. It’s still saying “ten runs to a win” when the decreased offensive environment of baseball makes it more like 8 or 9.
PECOTA doesn’t seem to work as well as it has in the past. But then again I always thought PECOTA was incredibly overrated. And this isn’t a new thing: in 2005’s Baseball Between The Numbers the chapter on PECOTA by far the weakest of the book, relying heavily on statistical outliers and outright fraudulent statements as its examples (like claiming Nick Esasky as an example of decline over age when his career was in fact abruptly cut short at age 30 due to incurable vertigo) and making comments which in retrospect which look absurd like “it’s hard to foresee anything but a very sad career end for Jim Thome.”
On the last few years’ worth of predictions I think you’d be just as good as the PECOTA projection if you simply took a three- or five-year average of stats and just relied on good old regression to mean (and probably lopping off a couple points here and there for older players). It doesn’t take a phalanx of stats geeks to do that, and it doesn’t make for “deadly accurate predictions”, as BP brags on its cover. And, as a result, take away the snark and the inflated sense of ego, and BP doesn’t really tell you anything that you couldn’t figure out just by casting a jaundiced eye at career stats.
Amen. As a total aside, Carroll announced a few weeks ago he’s now working on a new book, about the effect that Tommy John surgery has had on the game. It sounds like he’s trying to do a “The Blind Side” story, as he follows the progress of Chris “Disco” Hayes* through his surgery and treatment.
*Disco is a pitcher in the Royals’ system who earned his nickname because his fastball is perpetually stuck in the 70s.
I was a subscriber for about 5 years, I think. This year is the first time I’ve stopped. It’s basically for the reasons hit on above - other sources for good discussion, PECOTA seems to have dropped off a bit (although still pretty much as accurate as some of the other systems out there), and their best writers are gone.
ETA: And way too much fantasy stuff for my taste - and their fantasy tools aren’t even that good (did anybody see how highly Kila was ranked among 1B pre-season by PFBL??).
I’m (relatively) new to the SABR scene, having followed it only for the past 3 years or so, but in that time, I’ve never gotten around to subscribing to BP because there’s so much great analysis out there for free. Between Fangraphs, Beyond the Box Score (and SBNation blogs in general), and the easy availability of stats on Baseball-reference.com, I have all the cutting-edge baseball analysis I can realistically handle on a given day.
Never got around to paying for BP, having followed them in their pre-subscription model years and seen most of the proto-BP work on rec.sport.baseball.