FanGraphs, Now Contributing to Fox Sports
We are pleased to announce that, beginning today, FanGraphs is going to be contributing regular original content to FoxSports.com. My first piece for Fox is up now:
When the Detroit Tigers announced that they had signed Miguel Cabrera to an eight-year contract extension that didn’t even begin for another two years, the deal was immediately met with skepticism. The Tigers tacked on an additional $248 million in guaranteed money to lock up Cabrera’s age-33 to age-40 seasons, and the history of aging, super-sized, bat-only players is littered with disappointments. Exhibit A: Albert Pujols, who has been a severe disappointment since joining the Angels and would be my choice as the owner of the worst contract in baseball right now. The Pujols disaster is why so many of us — myself included — believe the Tigers might end up regretting the Cabrera extension.
But, at the same time, we should also acknowledge that the Pujols disaster is one of the most inexplicable anomalies in baseball history. There have been hitters as good as Albert Pujols before, but they generally haven’t declined nearly to the same degree that Pujols has since joining the Angels.
We’ll be contributing several pieces per week to the FoxSports site, with writers like Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris also on tap to bring their unique perspectives. The content you find there will be similar to the content we’ve provided here over the years, and we’ll be sure to make sure to point you to the pieces we do over there so you don’t miss one of Eno’s great interviews or Jeff’s array of GIFs.
We’re excited to partner with Fox, but don’t worry, FanGraphs itself isn’t going to be changing. We’re not going anywhere; this will simply put some of our content in front of a different audience. This is just an addition to what we already have been doing, and it won’t affect what we do here.
We look forward to working with Fox going forward, and hope you’ll enjoy this new partnership as much as we will. So check out our first piece over there and get ready for a bunch more.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Those comment sections should be glorious.
Only 4 comments deep and it’s already a party over there. Great article though, Dave, and very cool for FG.
Ballsy.
Wow. Just, wow. Even the idiot commenters on Fangraphs can feel superior.
Sez u, snatchwipe!
Step aside, lightweight. I got this.
Thatz just wat ur wife said last night.
O yah at least I got a wif you is prob gay
Yes, we can.
Someone already went for the “Poo Holes” joke.
“His name say’s it all”
I can’t see the comments and this makes me sad 🙁
Just read the post–simple but excellent–and the comments–horrible!
Fox Sports just improved 100000000000000%. Approximately
I’m pretty sure the Rays’ stadium deal is still the worst contract in baseball.
Braves TV deal has to be in there somewhere, too.
I believe that’s spelt B-A-R-V-E-S!
Damn you Fangraphs, for making baseball into calculus!
Pujol$$$$$. Brilliant.
Damn you science, for explaining everything!
By a commenter who can’t do arithmetic.
Has anybody had to use Calculus to understand an article on this site?
Thumbs up for no, thumbs down for yes.
Celsius – save that crap for Canada, Obama!
I can actually understand that one. Yes, unit conversions are much easier in metric, but would you rather say my doorway is 38 inches wide or 96.52… cm wide?
For folks who were raised using standard, inches, obviously.
For folks raised on metric, centimeters, obviously.
It’s all what you’re used to.
(Obviously!)
I’m curious as to how you can promise FG won’t change. So you’re still going to write the same number of articles for FG you always do, and in addition, come up with new content for Fox?
I thought a lot of writers gave up writing for their blogs because the workloads got to be too much between FG/other projects/blogs, but now ya’ll are going to add Fox and nothing will suffer?
That sounds like quite a workload for all of you.
Speaking for myself, I’m just moving one post a week to another website. And that post will probably be the sort of post I’d put here anyway, except maybe with fewer images.
FEWER IMAGES???
NO!!!!
No. More images. People who traffic on FOX Sports need lots of pictures. And small words.
Right, which sounds totally reasonable.
Except that means a blog post of yours essentially gets moved each week from Fangraphs to Foxsports. Meaning less FG content. Which directly contradicts the “nothing will change” here at FG comment from above.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get it. I’d totally post at Fox myself in your position, since I’m sure they pay better and get a better audience than over here.
I just wouldn’t say nothing will change at FG unless nothing will change. A more honest comment might be, “you will see slightly reduced content due to our new partnership.”
Thanks Hunter for articulating what many of us were thinking.
Good for all of you, and we’d do the same.
But don’t lie and tell us nothing will change. Anything posted over there is something that would have been posted here. This is good news for the staff and for the broad baseball consuming market. It’s bad news for the small subset of people who read fangraphs but not fox sports.
Going off that, can you all post the links somewhere on FG? Similar to what you do for the HBT stories. I still want to see the articles, just don’t want to go on the rest of the Fox website.
This is dumb and you should regret it.
Unless you were unable to navigate your web browser to the linked article, of course. In which case this is dumb and you should troubleshoot it.
Go cry about it, why don’t you.
“We’re not going anywhere; this will simply put some of our content in front of a different audience.”
So it’s not like things are going literally unchanged, and in that sense Dave could’ve been more accurate, but this is going to be minor. And for Dave, he’s basically shifting what he was doing for ESPN to Fox, so you won’t see a change with his stuff at all. You’re right, FanGraphs will be very slightly affected by this. But it won’t be easy to notice, and the company will be better for it. Partnerships like this allow the site to continue to exist.
I think the impact of shifting content over is that there’s less content available for content/community discussion, since it’s impossible to engage in a useful back and forth with the dreck in the Fox comments section.
Look at the bright side: we can follow the links and go swimming in the sewer.
Instead of writing for ESPN Insider this year, I will be writing for Fox Sports. The amount of outside content I’m providing is not changing, simply changing locations, and will no longer be behind a paywall. If you don’t have an ESPN Insider/FG+ account, you’ll actually be able to read more of my stuff than you were previously.
Jeff and Eno will write the same amount of posts as they always have; one will just be relocated to Fox, and then linked to from here. So, when they write a post for Fox, you’ll be able to see a post on FG about it; the actual difference is that you’ll have to click on one extra link in order to read the whole thing.
How about this; there will be no material difference in quality or quantity of content that you will be able to find at FanGraphs as a result of this partnership? You may, occasionally, be asked to click on a link to read one of our stories at Fox instead of reading it on FanGraphs, and as a result, we get to to continue paying great writers to provide you free content.
Yeah! Down with ESPN Insider!
An outrage and a scandal is what that is.
I’d see this as a positive because it gives Fangraphs a more mainstream outlet through which to teach people about baseball analytics.
I’ve long been opposed to the whole snobby sabermetric attitude of “We intellectuals are the only ones who will ever understand this and we are smarter than the teaming masses.” That’s a big part of why so many people reject our way of thinking to begin with: because some of us are smarty-pants jerks. Seeing as the “masses” can contemplate batting average (BIGGER NUMBER GOOD! SMALL BAD!), I’m sure that wRC+ can eventually stick since all they have to understand is that it sums up overall offensive value.
Yes, there will be plenty of fools with dumb comments. But rather than just sit over here at fangraphs and making ourselves feel superior, why don’t we try to teach this information to more people so more of those who are capable of understanding it get a chance to do so.
I agree – doubly so since, as Jeff pointed out, these items will still be linked from here. It really sounds like a win-win situation.
We’re not giving up anything. We don’t even have to monitor Fox Sports to find these posts (although as a fan of Neyer’s, I’m now looking over there occasionally – which was not the case before).
Basically, I don’t see any issue with this.
I’m certain that the FOX Sports community will not consider the FanGraphs writers to be “smarty-pants jerks” whatsoever, as long as they can make Poo Holes jokes.
Teeming.
There ya go. I learned something.
Being linked to from here is key, I think if that was in the original announcement there’d be far less hubbub then the moderate hubbub that resulted.
The comments are already upset about the use of metrics and he basically only used wRC+. This should make for interesting fan responses.
Are you still doing insider pieces on espn? Or are you basically just switching from doing a handful pieces for them to doing a handful of pieces to fox?
Mike Petriello and Paul Swydan will continue doing the pieces for ESPN Insider as they have been. I will not be contributing to ESPN this year.
But who wins the ESPN-FoxSports softball game? That Petriello has a fearsome 575/650/1030 slash line playing for the Mothership Marauders.
Who the hell WALKS in a softball game??
Have you SEEN noodle-armed Cistulli trying to get one over? Don’t go swinging at that mess just to bail him out…
Any way you can just re-post the stories here so I don’t have to support Fox and their related advertisers?
This, please.
I doubt that’ll be allowed by contract. The whole point of Fox paying Fangraphs money to provide content is that people will be forced to support Fox and related advertisers in order to view said content.
Ad blocker?
If I use ad blocker I dont see the ads but Fox still tracks me as a site visitor hence allowing them to charge more for their advertisement space. I dont want Fox to make any more money.
I was trying to think of something good to say about Fox so I could refute you, but I gave up.
“I want to take a stand against *thing*, but I don’t want it to cost me anything”
-No one who accomplished anything important, ever.
Between featuring Neyer and now Fangraphs, Fox Sports might be a website that I’ll actually visit one of these days.
PANIC PANIC SO MUCH OF THE APOCALYPSE NO NO NO NO VAMPIRES METEORS OMG OMG WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!
…with writers like Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris”
Why not just sue the real Sullivan and Sarris?
Does …on tap to bring their unique perspectives…” mean that they’ll write for FoxSports?
Dick Schofield hearts italics, and batted seventh for the Angels in RBI Baseball. That is all.
There are problems with patronizing anything to do with that network which, uh, begins with the letter . . . uh, F and ends with the letter X. Can’t bring myself to actually spell it out.
Fux?
Or FAUX News, amirite?
(Matched on the right by the equally witty ‘Nobama’ and ‘Obummer’. Gentlemen and scholars one and all.)
Does this mean that no more articles will be published at ESPN?
None of any kind of ever. ESPN is dead, long live Fox Sports.
All hail our new sports overlords!
Will the stuff posted at Fox Spots by Fangraphs authors be cross posted (or linked) to Fangraphs like this post?
If not is it possible to get a RSS feed from Fox Sports for just the Fangraphs stuff? I wasn’t able to find one. I did find http://msn.foxsports.com/tag/fangraphs but no way to add it too a RSS reader.
I’m curious about this too. Will the fangraphs.com homepage at least post a link when an article on foxsports.com goes up?
We will post links to our posts over at Fox. You will be able to find them here.
Well, some of us will.
You can try using page2rss on that link; I use it for some other sites where I only want to read one tag. Sometimes it works rather oddly.
Are you also doing stuff for the new Five Thirty Eight? I saw Sullivan’s piece piece there. Or is that just another side gig?
That was one of Jeff’s better pieces. He just got to the point for once.
“My free, well-researched and written sabermetrics articles weren’t as good as I wanted them to be. There were stylistic elements I disagreed with! Boooooo, boo-hoo.”
You do understand that there are people working their asses off to bring you free awesomeness, and that some of those very people read the comments of this section and probably don’t feel great that there are so many assholes willing to impugn their work for no good reason?
“Jeff apparently can’t defend himself, so I’m going to get all butthurt and rant against a harmless criticism of his writing. Booooooo, boo-hoo.”
This is awesome news! I have always wanted to see analysis-driven articles paired with dregs-of-society comments and now I have it.
That’s pretty much what was on ESPN too – My bet is the comments will actually be a little better at FoxSports because the site receives less traffic in general, so the traffic driven to it by Fangraphs will represent a greater portion. Of course, better than the ESPN comments section is a pretty low bar.
I haven’t been to that site in ages. It’s still awful and violates every rule I learned in web design, but at least now there will be some good content. Maybe this is part of shift over there, but right now it looks like Fangraphs content is going to be a pearl in pile of horse manure.
Let’s be honest only two writers here are worth a damn. Cameron and cistulli. Zimm too
The other writers here are embarrassingly bad and amateurish
Personally, I like most of the writers here, but how could you leave Laurila off of your list? He could write for any publication on the planet.
I can’t think of a writer on here who hasn’t written anything worth reading, and I can say that the poorer stuff is pretty much the exception for any of them.
For me, this is the only website worth wasting precious work time. Which is my flaw, not anyone else’s.
While I have been learning to avoid clicking on anything written by Dave Laurila, Eno, and even Tony Blengino (his posts are interesting, but seem to often feature data that I can’t get my hands on personally without much info on how he came up with it himself) – you are super off base. Wendy Thurm’s legal column is nothing short of incredible, Paul Swydan puts up stuff worth reading, and the community research is really becoming something worth looking at. There’s a lot to like here. Don’t let a few hacks ruin the great stuff for you.
That’s not to say that I’m exactly happy that in order to support the people I like, I also am forced to support the drivel over at FOX sports, but I guess the decision isn’t really mine.
Tell me more, I’m always interested in feedback, which is why I love this medium.
I guess that was unfair – the interviews you do (which include analysis alongside the interview) are 1000% better than what other writers are doing right now. The Votto interview in particular was well done. I guess the criticism lies with not knowing what question you asked that led to a specific response. So, player quotes feel like they conform very tightly to the story you are writing without letting the reader know if that was really what happened – did the player have some great insight into their own game when confronted with some piece of information, or were they fed a leading softball question to crush?
That said, other types of pieces you write are usually pretty awesome – “How many starters does a team need?” was a good read. Chats are worth attending. So, I guess I take that back – I usually click on your posts.
Thanks for the feedback, just wanted to know what I can improve. The difficulty, of course, lies in the gap between the vocabularies used by players and sabers. I try to get at the concept and then use that to talk about the player, so I understand your frustration. Maybe when I really start nailing the interviews, you’ll get some in actual Q&A form and see what the sausage looks like.
Sullivan and Thurm are not just chopped liver.
Sullivan, IMHO, has already surpassed Bill Simmons as the sports writer able to meld info and humor with an unforgettable personal style [caution to Jeff – please don’t let your strength turn into schtick.]
And Wendy Thurm is simply the best bargain source of nuts-and-bolts info on the operational/legal side of the game. I really have gained an appreciation for how involved all the non-baseball portion of being a MLB GM must be.
Any chance you guys could also contribute to the Fox Sports TV commentary? Or is Joe Buck just a lost cause at this point?
SULLIVAN AND CAMERON REPLACE BUCK AND WHAT’S HIS NAME
–Fox Baseball Viewership Triples Overnight
I just don’t understand why you’re leaving me like this. I mean, was it something I said? I’m sorry, I’ll stop running around with other baseball sites, I promise. I can change, just give me one more chance, don’t leave me for those fox comments!
It wasn’t you, it was them.
I noticed Steve Busby of the Rangers broadcast quote stats from FanGraphs the other night. Just a coincidence, or a good sign that advanced stats from here are penetrating a broadcast / stat guy for the broadcast team passed a note and sourced FanGraphs? Or are you actively supplying statistical info to Fox Sports broadcasts?
David Cone when he has been on YES for the Yankees likes to use B-R and Fangraphs stats. He combines that with talking about actually pitching (grips, sequence, recognizing hitters’ patterns).
He almost makes having Michael Kay tolerable. Almost…
Yeah, I was watching the Angels and Mariners on ESPN on opening day, and while I don’t think the announcers themselves were particularly SABR-savvy, they had nice things to say about the sabermetric field in general. They talked about how it was all about figuring out baseball and not just a bunch stats or something. Coming from people who aren’t part of this community, tt was nice to hear.
Is it too much to ask for a Dave Cameron v. Ken Rosenthal debate show on FS1?
I’m certain that at least 50,000 Blue Jays fans would round up $2/yr each for you to go replace Buck Martinez on SportsNet. If we got that for you would you please go? Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan instead of Greg Zaun and Buck?
Save us, we’re getting killed here, I really want to enjoy watching Jays baseball, but if I have to hear any more about how big and strong players are, or how Adam Lind should play every position every day, I’m going to.. I’m going to.. uh.. I’m going to not enjoy it as much as I should!
I for one would would absolutely love it if Fangraphs and Fox could further this pairing into the broadcast booth.
Cistulli replaces Reynolds and Verducci as the color commentator.
Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome!! Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
If you really want to contribute something to Fox, baseball, and society at large, get them to fire Chip Caray. Forever.
Maybe I’m overly idealistic and naïve, but I’m saddened that my beloved FanGraphs is now associated with a network that aggressively supports racists, sexists, and homophobes. I hope all other options–like banner ads, like making this a pay-site–were considered.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/baseball/
You’ll be at home here.
You’re right of course. The other side are collectively paragons of virtue, each and every one. 100% of nefarious and vile people are aligned with that nefarious and vile Fox.
*Rolls eyes*
Did I state or imply that the other side are paragons of virtue? Did I state or imply that all evil people are associated with Fox? No to both. But feel free to grossly misrepresent my comment some more, as it obviously makes you feel good about yourself.
Done and done! It’s jsut such a ridiculous leap, like Fox Sports is just teeming with all these horrible “racists, sexists, and homophobes” because they’re under the FOX corporate umbrella. If only they could be like their more informed, always rational, altruistic folks associated with those angelic organizations like ABC/ESPN, CNN, NBC/MSNBC, etc.
ANY organization of ANY size has plenty of racists, sexists, and homophobes, and other types of horrid mouth-breathing types. And also a fair share of decent, moral, upstanding people… (Even *gasp* FOX!)
Sorry everyone. Please forgive me for questioning a network that considers global warming a liberal conspiracy.
Harold Reynolds works for MLB. So this is pretty much moot.
I’d just like to say, congratulations to the Fangraphs team. When you first started the site, I’m sure you didn’t realize how much this could become. Now you’re at the point where you’re forging partnerships with the biggest mainstream sports networks to provide their content on a regular basis. Your site is strong, respected, and successfully spreading the goals and tools of sabermetrics to an ever increasing segment of the public.
For me personally, this announcement is very minor (trivial, even), and I know you’ve contributed to ESPN Insider for years. Still, there’s value in it, and symbolically, it feels good. In addition to the financing to provide free content, the increased presence of Fangraphs and other sabermetric outlets changes the lexicon of baseball analysis. Please keep showing the world that it’s more worthwhile (and fun!) to learn about baseball, than it is to pretend you already know everything there is to know.
Adapt or die.