THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’ve come close to subscribing, but with all of the excellent free baseball content available from guys like Fangraphs and THT, there doesn’t really seem to be much reason to spend money on analysis that I find less convincing than a lot of free sites.

I have this internal struggle every year about renewing.  I renewed this spring for two reasons: 
1. College/MiLB coverage.  BA and Rivals are the only other options for college coverage, and BPro really picked it up over the past year or so.
2. PECOTA.  I know, I know.  It’s not that PECOTA is any better than Marcel or any other system.  But it’s easier to use BPro’s Player Forecast Manager for customizing to my fantasy league settings and running the drafts.  That’s something that I spend many hours on myself if I use any other set of projections and depth charts. 

I wouldn’t have renewed this year without the college baseball coverage.  I used to read every word religiously, but it’s just not the same quality analysis I used to enjoy.  (Neither word, “quality” nor “analysis”, seems to apply anymore.)

After 66 votes:
- two-thirds of the readers of this blog have or had a subscription at some point to BPro, which is a huge huge number; 40% of them are no longer subscribers

- two-fifths of the readers of this blog are current subscribers, and of those 25% say they won’t renew

I’m very surprised of the huge overlap in audience among the readers here, and BPro subscribers.

The level of churn (among readers of this blog) is pretty high, likely because BPro does not deliver at the sabermetric level as much as expected.

After 102:
- two-thirds of the readers of this blog have or had a subscription at some point to BPro, which is a huge huge number; 45% of them are no longer subscribers

- 36% of the readers of this blog are current subscribers, and of those 27% say they won’t renew

I’m one of the have a subscription/won’t renew people.  I mainly subscribed for PECOTA and Silver, and now that I’ve seen that PECOTA isn’t really anything special and Silver’s gone, I find myself going there maybe once a month at most.

I have never subscribed to Baseball Prospectus, and never will. Mainly because I think I can read better things for free at FanGraphs and Hardball Times, and have never fully came around on PECOTA.

BP used to be able to get away with charging people, because they were the one of the few really innovative sources on the web. Now, it’s just seems like a bad business model. Whenever someone can get better, or similar things for free, they will.

My dad said he’d get me a BP subscription for my birthday a year and a half ago, and I said not to bother. I know that sounds like I’m just ungrateful (sp?), but he was unsure if I wanted it and I didn’t want him to waste $40

I got one just to read Nate Silver’s old articles.  Some of them are really interesting.

I also let my subscription expire, but it was mostly because I’m in money-saving mode; with the Braves no longer on the radio in home city, I’ll put that money towards XM. 

You still get good content from BP that’s difficult to get elsewhere for free, at least from KG and Will Carroll.  And Sheehan is an awfully good writer (why isn’t he a BP Idol judge? maybe he thinks the entire enterprise is silly, like many here do.  But give this to BP: they sure have generated a lot of discussion/traffic).  But yeah, if sabermetrics is the reason you used to like BP, there’s no real reason to subscribe any more.

Current subscriber...will probably renew, though the BP Idol thing might push me over to the ‘will not renew’ side. Something, maybe everything, about that contest grates on the nerves.

It’s ‘only’ $3/month. I’m not subscribing for stats or advanced/innovative analysis. I’m there for Goldstein and Carroll. If one of them left, the other wouldn’t be worth the price alone. I debate my renewal and come closer to not renewing every year. I think most unsatisfied customers just wish BP to be something it is not.

I have subscribed for 2 years now, and it used to be that i visited BP everyday, but now its maybe just a couple of times a week. I think the subscription runs out next month, I have no plans to renew. Like many have said, there is better analysis and stats at Fangraphs and other places. The only thing I will remotely miss is the minor league coverage.

I once signed up for the free thing, but that offered nothing. 

It’s really a turnoff having you able to read the beginning of things and cutting you off, like ESPN Insider.  Out of principle I’ve avoided signing up, even though there is stuff I’d want to read if it were free. 

Same sentiment here as everyone else, there’s plenty of free stuff, why pay?

I read bPro a lot and have a subscription that I will certainly renew. For competitive fantasy baseball, I think it’s essential if only for knowing what the enemy is thinking. They also do the first 10 hours of fantasy prep for you by giving play time projections (that actually integrate the wisdom of the crowds well by having comments set up on the pages.)

I agree with those that have mentioned Carrol and Goldstien. I also, big thumbs up on Shawn Hoffman, who isn’t a big regular, but writes very thoughtful and provacative pieces on the business of baseball and the integration of web media. I have often disagreed with him but the articles are great. And Sheehan’s writing is always nice.

The other thing about BP is that their writers always treat their readers with respect. I’ve gotten really turned off of some of the writers at other places who basically presume stupidity in their readers, to the point that they even make jokes about how their readers are illustrations of just how dumb people typically are. It makes me think a lot less of their opinions as a whole, even though I know that their misanthropy is likely compartmentalized from their sabermetricity.

I’ve never been a subscriber and see no reason to with everything Fangraphs is adding. I use the baserunning tool at BPro but that’s about it. Between RSS feeds on The Hardball Times, Fangraphs, Beyond the Boxscore, Stat Speak, the Book Blog and a ton of other sabermetric sites—both team specific and non-team specific—there’s no need for me to pay for baseball content, in my opinion.

I wrote something pretty akin to the PFM for my fantasy league in SQL. I should polish it up, turn it over to studes and let him charge $10 a year for it.

I still subscribe.  It was a wobbly rewewal this year and I suspect it will have to be a wobblier still one next year.

Reasons for staying:

60% intertia
39% Goldstein
1% other

The recent “ESPN Insiderization” of so much content has been disappointing for me, but presumably great for thier bottom line.

Colin, you need to find a site that will give you the proper support for all these nifty projects you want to work on.  Maybe Fangraphs, although I don’t know how protective David is of controlling all the tech stuff himself.  Maybe THT, although I’m not sure how their back-end systems work.  Maybe some third party that’s ready to roll out a lot of functional-if-not-pretty tools.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is PFM?

PFM = BPro’s “Player Forecast Manager”.  It lets you select your fantasy league’s settings (auction/draft, categories, roster spots at each position, etc.) and gives you customized rankings based on Pecota’s forecasts.  They used to have a downloadable Excel spreadsheet, but now it’s entirely web-based tool.  I find it pretty slow actually. 

I wasn’t aware of this until recently, but there are a bunch of PFM-like draft tools out there.  Google ‘fantasy baseball draft software’ and you can browse the options.  I’m not sure if there are any good ones that are free or cheap.  I like the idea though.  I’d buy it if I could input my own projections (rather than being forced to used Pecota, for example).

Oh, thanks.  I don’t really play fantasy, besides being in the BtB ball on a budget league, so I never used BPro for fantasy reasons.

I’ll chip in at the risk of parroting the other replies. Had it a few years ago, liked it (or, didn’t dislike it and read it fairly regularly), but when it came time to renew I didn’t bother and I didn’t miss it, and I wouldn’t renew again.

The only subscription I’ve stayed with for a long time is MLB-TV (some playoff games in 2003 and then the full subscription beginning in 2004). MLB-TV is around $100/year, and I think I saw the figure $40 quoted for BP, which relative to MLB-TV seems WAY overpriced on a number of dimensions. The sheer quantity of content available on MLB-TV (archived video and audio, condensed games, highlights going back a few years) dwarfs BP. Then consider the cost of the infrastructure—filming games, digitizing, hiring people to make the condensed games, setting up a TV studio with a host to do highlights. There’s no comparison really vs BP—a website without much infrastructure (other than web hosting costs) that publishes a relatively amount of content.

Also, sometimes I think sites like BP are basing their prices using the following logic: if the Baseball Abstract was worth $20 in the mid-80s, then surely a website with similar content (debatable, but let’s pretend) should be worth $30-40/year now. Well, the problem is that 25 years ago there was the Abstract and Elias and that’s it. Now with the ease of publishing ideas on the internet there are many more worthy sites trying to split that same amount of disposal income. A vast increase in the supply of sabermetric writing drives the price WAY down.

Lastly, how can you pay $40/year for BP when a yearly subscription to Sports Illustrated is also ~$40. I haven’t read SI in years, but ... it’s a physical tangible object with printing costs and presumably large fees for high-quality photography and journalism. I don’t know what the costs are for magazine publishing, but if SI is $40 with printing/distribution costs, then the value of the content has to be below $40/year per subscriber. Maybe it’s $25.

I’m supportive of any attempts to monetize internet content, but ... there’s an argument (which I don’t necessarily agree with) that a lot of online content is more of a hobby than a business. On one hand I think—well, there’s a lot of good content being generated so people should get paid. On the other hand, my grandfather used to spend hours in his basement building miniature ships, which took a lot of skill but he never expected to get paid and never hoped to be “discovered” by a large shipbuilding firm. It was just something he liked doing, and I suspect that a lot of online sabermetric work falls into the same category.

After 216:
- 60% of the readers of this blog have or had a subscription at some point to BPro, which is a huge huge number; 42% of them are no longer subscribers

- 35% of the readers of this blog are current subscribers, and of those 33% say they won’t renew