We Still Need Your Help
With just a few weeks of the postseason left, it’s hard to believe that it has been almost eight months since the major league season was postponed. I’m sure that for all of us, these past eight months have felt like a lifetime.
Since March, we’ve been asking for your support and you’ve been there every step of the way. Things looked pretty grim when I published my first update on the state of the site as we grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we’re still here and that’s entirely thanks to you. We are so grateful to have such supportive readers.
For the last fifteen years, our small staff’s dedication and love of baseball have allowed us to punch above our weight in the baseball media space despite a tight operating budget. But the revenue landscape for FanGraphs has changed considerably, and once the postseason winds down, we’ll have five baseball-less months to bridge until the start of the 2021 season. And so I’m here to ask for your help once again. Even though our traffic has rebounded to within 10% of our normal August and September levels, our revenue has not, due in large part to the continued depression of online advertising rates. This has forced us to become considerably more reliant on Memberships to make up the difference.
At the beginning of April, I set the ambitious goal of reaching 40,000 Members by next April, a number that would help make the site fully sustainable. That goal remains, and would represent just 4.8% of the unique visitors the site had this August, which Google Analytics put at 834,000. I continue to believe there are enough readers who care about FanGraphs to make this goal attainable, and I am greatly encouraged by the 18,744 Members we are currently lucky enough to have.
Despite our fiscal uncertainty and baseball’s long delay, we’ve not only adapted our coverage, projections, and playoff odds models to fit this very unusual season, we’ve also added new features to the site. This includes incorporating Statcast stats into our player pages and leaderboards, adding new game and season stat aggregation capabilities to our player pages, and launching KBO leaderboards and player pages to make that league’s season easier to analyze and follow. We introduced the RosterResource Injury Reports and adapted the RosterResource Depth Charts to help you keep track of 2020’s revised roster rules. We’ve tried to help make at-home learning a little more bearable for parents and students with FanGraphs Prep. And we’ve had a little bit of fun, with Twitch live streaming events, a FanGraphs Nintendo game, and a retooled FanGraphs Audio podcast.
If you frequent FanGraphs, I urge you to become a Member and help ensure that we can weather the next five months. All the proceeds from Memberships go directly to paying our staff a living wage, as well as stats and server costs.
You can help FanGraphs continue in the following ways:
Become a Member
You can become a Member or an Ad-Free Member. You’ll see all the same great content and have access to all of our tools. Ad-Free Members enjoy the site with faster loading times and no ads. It is the best way to experience FanGraphs.
Donate to FanGraphs
We have a simple donation form you can use to donate to FanGraphs. Please note that donations to FanGraphs are not tax-deductible. For the purposes of this year’s Membership goal, we will treat every $30 donated as one new Membership towards our goal.
Gift a Membership
You can send a coupon code for a one-year Ad-Free Membership to anyone you like. The code never expires, and no credit card or other form of payment is required when the recipient signs up. Their Membership begins when they use the coupon code.
We look forward to bringing you more terrific postseason coverage in the weeks to come before kicking off the offseason with our annual ranking of the game’s Top 50 free agents.
As always, thank you for your support and keep safe!
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Proud to support Fangraphs and the excellent work you do! Sincerely hope you get the support you need and deserve
I certainly believe strongly that one of the best things about Fangraphs is that it is free. I’m happy to support since day 1 of the membership (humblebrag). However, please, please don’t go under without trying a paywall. I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that. Perhaps you could put the fantasy stuff and some of the stats behind a paywall? Stuff that literally helps other people make money in a lot of cases. That said, good luck and everyone who can should sign up or you’ll really feel bad when Fangraphs is gone (unless you are just a dumb jerk).
I think that I would never have become a member with a true paywall, because it took me a while to get hooked and I had some cash flow problems. But a meter probably would work. If you let people have, say, 20+ free articles a month, I think that would give people a chance to read a lot of Fangraphs but also incentivize membership. I think the key is that on the 23rd of the month you’d want non-members to get annoyed.
Alternately, memberships for people who want to, say, export data or do other things like that, would be a good compromise.
I’m sure you guys have considered a wide range of options and whatnot, but in the event you haven’t considered this one, what about requiring a membership in order to export data to Excel? That’s the feature I utilize the most here, and I’m sure anyone who isn’t a member yet would most certainly pay the annual fee to be able to continue to do this.
Totally agree. Those are the people who rely on FanGraphs most (like me).
While I understand there is a barrier to entry for this, web scraping the FanGraphs leaderboards is not hard to do right now either if they made a paywall for CSV export. Yes, it adds time, but unless there were drastic security measures taken to display the data, people could always acquire these data. The issue I see is once you establish a price for exporting the data, then it could incentivize others to abuse it (e.g., scrape it and sell it for a lower price).
It’s fairly trivial to defeat scrapers. Ask WRDS.
This is a good idea. Maybe just a paywall for the more advanced features of the site? Export data to excel + customized player page views.
C’mon people. It’s $20 a year.
It’s like shopping at the local store instead of Walmart- if we don’t support the places we love, they will go out of business!!!
Member already. Just donated
I unfortunately don’t have enough money to have a membership as well, but hopefully sharing the post on Facebook can help.
I don’t visit as much as I used to – like Costanza says, it’s not you, it’s me – but that is mostly true.
Baseball has (for me) lost a bit of its luster – lesser fantasy baseball involvement than in my youth, the weirdness of a 60-game season with 30 (+/-) playoff teams, and my beloved team ain’t what they used to be. Still I still admire, appreciate, and support the work you do here.
As things change in the world around us and in the game we love, you guys continue to adopt, adapt, and improve through it all: a good slate of new (to us) writers, new website features, and so forth.
If for some reason FanGraphs were not to survive in its present form, we know it’s not for lack of trying – like Rob Deer, you went down swinging.
Word
I wish there was more merch for sale. The shop is practically bare! Compare it to Jomboy’s store. I don’t know what his merch revenue or profits are like, but at least it’s more than a logo.
rly does feel like this is the open door FG just refuses to walk through. I can respect that somewhat – I don’t love constant “buy my merch” plugs in everything I watch or read online – but I cannot imagine how (presumably) much smaller operations can run a far more robust store. Maybe there’s a philosophical disagreement. Maybe there are operational concerns. There’s definitely overhead and licensing and design and all sorts of other stuff to handle – not like you can just pop up overnight.
Right now, though, the store is hidden as the last option under “Support FanGraphs” which is a bit misleading – I’m not buying a shirt to “support FanGraphs” I’m buying a shirt to have a FanGraphs shirt. Frankly, if I didn’t know there was a store, I probably would assume there wasn’t one.
Shipping is free, and that’s great, but at $25 for a shirt and $65 for a hoodie I would advertise that more heavily. I generally assume that when I’m buying something online I’m going to have to pay shipping, so a $25 shirt is a $30+ shirt and that’s pretty pricey for a shirt with a logo on it. There are also currently 3 medium and 6 large shirts in stock for the gray men’s tee as an example; that’s pretty minimal availability for what is likely one of the better-selling items.
I’m massively oversimplifying this as an issue, and I have nowhere near the amount and level of detail I would need to have a real opinion, but given the issues mentioned with advertising and the degree to which every online creator seems to be using merchandise as a primary revenue stream (in no small part precisely because of those issues with ad reliance), it’s incredibly confusing as to why FG seems to have basically refused to do it.
We are looking to do another merch pre-order. Though it’s not particularly realistic for us to keep shirts in-stock because of the upfront costs to buy in bulk.
And we did do a collaboration with RotoWear last month.
Not to make excuses, because I agree we really should do a better job with merchandise, but currently we include the “merchandise” profits in our subscription numbers. I explain this in this post: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-fangraphs-business-update/
Currently, merchandise sales makes up 2.2% of our membership numbers. Now I’ll take a 2.2% bump in membership all day long, but that was with a month long pre-order period which I thought we pushed hard on both the site and twitter.
Anyway, after that I will admit that merchandise has not been the priority, but it’s good to see feedback like this to know that there continues to be demand for more merchandise.
Love that roto wear shirt, would happily buy more that come out in the future. Had to explain why it’s funny to my wife about five times but whatever.
2.2% with, uh, current merch. Could be 10x upside there and merch drives traffic in a population similar to the ones who already bought merch. I tried to buy something but the designs… Maybe do a competition. 5 designs… Look at woot or something. And don’t pre-order to max margin, use on-demand, be topical… fangraphs is a lifestyle not a data source or a news site.
As a sub from the first month, will try to find some people to gift a subscription or five to…
The Jomboy comparison is an interesting one, as your audiences likely overlap quite a bit. It looks like everything they do is made to order, and not produced in bulk. Their disclaimer, “Please note: Each product that comes from Jomboy Media is custom made to order. Please allow 1-3 business days for us to make the product before it can be shipped.”
Given that prices are the same, I assume that means margins for them are lower, but they’re able to be more flexible / topical as someone else mentioned
May be worth looking at what’s available from the supplier side?
I think the green/black/white is a good palette that you can get a lot of use out of. Design contest could definitely be interesting and help during the offseason.
I’m not on Twitter, and looks like the Instagram has gone inactive, which is where I would normally consume if not directly from the site.
I think the twitch streams are a really interesting idea and bummed that I’ve missed them so far. Especially with the pandemic still keeping our watching experience confined to our houses, I think you have the potential for a great community there. Twitch has taken off as a platform during the pandemic and could help some of the writers get some added publicity too. We love our stats here, and these numbers are staggering – https://twitchtracker.com/statistics
FANGRAPHS FACE MASKS PLEEEEEZE
I would buy one in a heartbeat
I got you, Appleman! Just gifted a couple of memberships. I don’t know what I’d do without Fangraphs.
If I ever find a job, re-subscribing will be one of my first celebratory actions.
Also, non-members are still seeing a message saying, “With the postponement of the baseball season, FanGraphs needs your support.” May want to update this, as casual users may assume that help is no longer needed.
It’s easy to forget sometimes the very real human costs that this pandemic have imposed on people. Best of luck in the job hunt – hope you find something very soon.
Thanks, dude.
You could try committing to baseball and that might help. Your competition has gotten stronger and your product has not. The coverage here continues to go downhill and all of the people that built this community have moved on. I don’t think you are paying experts to produce content that is worth a whole lot more often than not. Is this more than a blog site?
“You could try committing to baseball”
Is this a joke?
This is laughable coming from you.
Considering how much time you spend here and the content of your posts I’m pretty sure you’re a net drain on the community and overall site. I wouldn’t be surprised if you also ran an ad blocker.
I’m not going to downvote you because, if you think that the content quality isn’t what it used to be, I support your right to have an opinion and to act accordingly. (BTW, where do you spend more time now? I wouldn’t mind supporting FanGraphs AND another site.)
However, I disagree, and don’t mind at all the articles that aren’t specific to games actually played. In fact, I vow to donate $10 in return for an end-of-season OOTP update.
(Warning before you keep reading: I’m a Pirates fan otherwise devoid of hope.)
Was Ke’Bryan Hayes called up, and did he blaze through the final month? Did the rotation hold together? Did we win the division? The pennant? Does OOTP have an option for displaying the lyrics to “We Are Family” as Josh Bell hits a bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off home run in game seven of the World Series?
I pulled back from the OOTP updates for the actual playoffs, but I’m planning on recapping the season after the end of the real-life playoffs (we’re on the same league schedule, give or take the weirdness of the 16-team postseason this year). No spoilers for the playoffs, but the Pirates won the Central going away, the Brewers missed the playoffs, and Hayes put up 192 forgettable major league PA’s but didn’t make their postseason roster.
Also: thank you for your support!
I think this is unfair. I’d be the first to say that I don’t read as many of the kinds of articles I used to enjoy on FG because certain writers are gone, but those writers didn’t move elsewhere on the internet: Very skilled baseball teams (playing today) hired them! Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan were huge names in the industry, and they were able to provide you with articles that you could read and believe were similar to the sort of insights being offered to actual GMs on teams – which is exactly why they were hired to do, exactly that!
It’s unrealistic to think that a new generation of writers will appear and instantly produce that kind of content. Jeff and Dave had been doing that for (literally) over a decade, and they were fantastic at it.
The content on FG is still good, and the analysis is still good. Sure, I miss that Jeff could somehow produce 4 or 5 articles per week that involved insights into player performances with video/gif support, but the reality is that that didn’t and doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web, because Jeff was a singularly talented individual and that’s why the Rays are now paying him to find that kind of stuff for them.
As for what Dave offered, the main difference is authority. We still get the articles he worked on (like the trade value column), but without his name on them or Kiley’s, they carry a bit less insider authority than they used to. But I think they’re still of equal quality and reflect industry consensus to the same degree.
“Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan were huge names in the industry”
While I agree, were they huge names before they started working for Fangraphs? My guess is that they weren’t. Which is why I think we should give new authors a chance and let them work through growing pains. Sure, sometimes Fangraphs may be able to hire an established writer (e.g., Jay Jaffe). But I’d also love to see them become the breeding ground for future Dave Camerons and Jeff Sullivans.
By my quick calculation, a maximum of 2.2% of your unique visitors actually pay for your service. Personally, I felt guilty after visiting the site everyday for a year and signed up for an add free membership. There has to be some sort of incentive to sign up. Maybe only members can post chat questions or move to a metered paywall, maybe provide 3 free articles each month. Moving to a paywall won’t cost you any subscribers and I bet you get close to your goal.
I’d be interested in knowing if FanGraphs has considered the Defector model where you can’t comment without being a contributor. IMO, the most valuable and insightful commentors here are predominantly members, and it would eliminate a lot of the political crank complaining and meme accounts that clutter up the space.
stop the liberal echo chamber garbage and more people would actually become members! I cancelled my membership over that and won’t be renewing next year unless it stops!! This site should ONLY be baseball!! Keep politics out or as the NBA MLB and NFL have found out via tanked ratings #gowokegobroke
a/k/a, “KEEP YOUR POLITICS OUT OF MY SPORTS!!! (Unless I happen to agree with them)”
That unspoken part is always, always there whether anyone wants to admit it. “I don’t want to see people kneel or talk about black lives matter – I just want to watch sports! I came here to get away from all that!” Were you as vocal about stopping the veterans appearances before and during games, cutting out the National Anthem and “God Bless America”, and grounding the Blue Angels from their flyovers? I would suspect not.
Similarly, you often hear “I don’t need to have two guys making out pushed on me! Keep it in the bedroom!” Were you as vocal about not seeing any romantic involvement between a man and woman? Did Kevin James and Leah Remini get everyone apoplectic? Again, I suspect not.
In other words, dissenting points of view sure seem to give folks the vapors these days…
Don’t forget how badly Tebow was treated. What a double standard… Wait, ESPN, the supposed leader of the commie leftists, gives him millions of dollars to talk on TV.
Some people just want to be able to be assholes, act like assholes, talk like assholes, and never hear any different or have any consequences. Sorry, snowflakes, polite society may not be for you. But you always have a home on 4chan.
And please continue to pray for these sports leagues to actually do as badly as you hope they will. I’m sure the teams, players, etc., will be happy to hear from you while they all bathe in hundred dollar bills.
It’s easy to defend the inclusion of political commentary when the content is something with which you agree. What if Fangraphs started talking about the black abortion rates (higher in NYC than the birth rate) as part of the racial discussions that happened this year? What if it came with the frequent slogan “The right to continue living isn’t political?” as a means to castigate any opposing viewpoints as being outside the site’s Overton Window?
My assumption is that you’d consider it inappropriate or at least incongruous for a data-driven baseball research site, and you would be right. It’s absolutely an important issue as are the topics that came center-stage this year, but it’s not an issue I would look to great baseball minds as having more valuable input than any other citizen of the world. Fangraphs can do what it wants of course, but to expect that the controversial political opinions aught to be embraced and even supported by the entirety of the Fangraphs user population is both unrealistic and unfair. The push-back may be overwrought at times, but not entirely unjustified.
I don’t expect controversial opinions to be embraced by anyone not agreeing with them, but also am unsure why anyone feels the need to register their consternation about this article or that one when the premise of that article can be surmised pretty quickly – the article can be skipped entirely, or abandoned a paragraph in, or even read, in which case we may even learn about the opinions of someone who sees things a little differently than we do and our own beliefs challenged a bit.
That was entirely too long a sentence to say “stick to sports” never *just* means “stick to sports” – it means “stick to sports-related opinions I wholly agree with, otherwise I don’t want to see it.”
Also, the generation least interested in MLB, NFL, NBA, etc. is the youngest generation. That doesn’t make any sense with your contrived “reason” for lower ratings. I know about as many conservatives that stopped watching football because of the kneeling as liberals that stopped watching football because the NFL blackballed Kaepernick. Both are zero. I know a lot of people who never really watched in the first place that are loudly boycotting. I know a simple correlation would make a lot of people happier, but there is basically no evidence to back it up.
For those that don’t use it as much as in the past (me included), you could “pay it forward” for those that are just getting started – so it continues to exist OR pay now for all the times you accessed it for free. The second reason made perfect sense to me and I joined.
I’m a member who sometimes doesn’t log in while reading, so the unique visitor count may be driven up a bit if others have done what I do. That being said, it would seem pretty easy to double the membership count even if the visitor count was half the number in the article.
As someone who first hopped on to this site a few years ago, I used to go the free-way. But when I realized how many articles I was reading in a given year, I felt supporting the brand and becoming a member (for only $20) was the right thing to do.
I’m in no place to ask people how to spend their money, and I’m sure it isn’t easy for David to do the same. But I would ask that if your situation is similar to what I described above, or if you’ve won money either in a fantasy league or DFS through analysis/advice or statistical research you gained from this site, consider kicking something back to help give the FG staff the support they need to produce a product we all enjoy.
I also wondered if the unique visitor count is inflated by things like – I access this site at work, at home, and on my phone (three different I.P.s) I wonder how many others access in multiple places as well?
Isn’t doing that intentionally for the specific purpose of inflating unique user counts a soft form of fraud against the advertisers?
I’ve been a long time fan of the site, but I must say that the quality of the writing has really gone down the past couple of years. I know there were several great writers who left to go work for teams and the people who have taken their place really need to step it up. The quality of analysis is just not as strong, I’m sorry. I still visit the site every day but I just look at stats and projections, the articles aren’t really worth my time any more. The average reader on the site can do as good of analysis as your writers.
I also really miss Dave, Jeff, many many others.
I really enjoy the work of the newer crop too. It’s different, and it takes some time for folks to find and hone their voices.
“The average reader on the site can do as good of analysis as your writers.” – as an average reader, this is demonstrably false.
Ben and Dan are bosses. I don’t know what you are talking about.
I mean, it can both be true that the folks who write at FG currently are good (they are) and that the people who left were titans of online baseball analysis and offered insights and, in Sullivan’s case, volume that few people can replicate, which is exactly why they now work for very successful baseball teams.
it IS true that the floor for good analysis has risen because many readers could produce, say, a simple contract vs expected war analysis themselves. That’s not what the current FG writers do, or what Cameron and Sullivan did.
Some of this reflects a change in the landscape. For 2 decades of online saber analysis, you could read stuff and know you were better informed, or later as informed ,as the people working in baseball operations with teams. This started back at BP in the early 2000s when teams just weren’t using analytics and doing things that were clearly, self-evidently wrong, and after that for a long time there was parity, and you would see things broken in the public analysis that revolutionized the industry because it was new information to teams (see: catcher framing data).
With statcast proprietary data, that’s increasingly less true, and as teams invest a lot more in their R&D and analytics departments than a website has any real hope of doing, the gap between public analysis and what teams have access to is growing and will continue to grow, and producing the kind of content that Cameron or Sullivan did that made you feel like you were seeing mostly the same information that the teams were using to make their decisions themselves is increasingly difficult or impossible: Teams are using parts of the statcast feed that aren’t publically available, and are years ahead of the public. A simple example of this is how spray vector and batted ball spin RPM were added to statcast search here in 2020 – teams have had that data since 2015, and have been using and coaching with it since the introduction of statcast. Public analysis is always going to be behind now due to this information gap, and there’s nothing writer quality or analyst quality can do to close it.
“I mean, it can both be true that the folks who write at FG currently are good (they are) and that the people who left were titans of online baseball analysis and offered insights and, in Sullivan’s case, volume that few people can replicate, which is exactly why they now work for very successful baseball teams.”
Amen. Well said.
As an academic economists who has been on the sports internet since 2006 or so, there’s nothing like what Dan does with ZiPs in quality or intent. It’s really really special. That product alone is worth your 50 bucks.
Honestly PECOTA is similar and still reasonably good (though I trust ZIPS a bit more), but suffers like everything else BP creates from their website being so incredibly difficult to navigate and use effectively.
Thank you for the kind words!
One thing that I find interesting, although I don’t think it means much of anything, is that the writers hired during the most recent batch following Jeff’s departure, (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/introducing-our-new-contributing-writers/) is that only two of them remain, Rachael and Ben. Again, it’s not the whole story because Devin Fink was an unfortunate victim of layoffs, and Sung Min Kim left to go work for a KBO team, but the two other disappeared within a few months, pre-COVID. I’m not privy to reasons why so forgive me if something has come out about why they left and I missed it. Other writers have come in outside of these, but that was supposed to be the “restocking” of the FanGraphs farm system after losing Jeff and Carson in the same offseason. I just find it interesting.
Yeah, new writers usually debut in the spring or start of the season, and that was disrupted this year, and in a way that then put a damper on staff addition.
Is there a way to opt back into ads as a paying member? I’m sure many paying members wouldn’t mind foregoing that perk to further support the site. As easy as a checkbox in member profile (I know it’s not that easy).
Don’t log in
Been an add free member for 4 years now and fully intend to keep auto-renewing. Honestly, I barely even read the articles compared to how much I use the player pages. I can’t even quantify how many hours I have used this site to rebuild “MLB the Show” every year… (fixing the horrible player rankings the game comes with) Its honestly quite cathartic just numbing my brain in baseball math and I can’t thank you enough for making it easy for me. The projections etc.. yeah, just thanks!
I do miss NotGraphs though.
Yes, bring back NotGraphs. Or at least make a “Bring Back NotGraphs” shirt and sell it.
A Banknotes Industries shirt… mmm….
Would find a ready home in the dorky wing of my closet next to the “Vandelay Industries” shirt and the “Tangiers Casino” shirt.
(Let’s face it, it’s ALL the dorky wing…)
As someone who started playing fantasy baseball in the mid 90’s , I have subscribed to quite a few different baseball sites over the years. I subscribed to 2 sites faithfully for over 10 years and 2 years ago I totally quit both of them for FG as I thought they had both gone downhill and were not worth the expense.
I am a paid member here and will stay one as long as this site is around as I enjoy the content as well as the chat sessions with all the contributors. This site has a nice community feel to it. I find it nice to recognize some of the same member names as they make comments during the chat sessions and have that interaction. Keep it going Dave. We are behind you.
Just joined on the ad free after getting a new job and promotion, y’all are invaluable and wow the ad free is really worth it especially on mobile
Maybe an idea? I love listening to the podcasts when I can. However, I find making the time to listen very difficult. There is a lot of good info etc. on most of them. Unfortunately you don’t transcribe that content to allow someone to read and possibly print.. Therefore, podcast content IMO is the most under utilized, worthy feature you have. Transcribe it, allow us to download for reading purposes ( much faster than listening) and charge a dollar or two, I think it’s a source of added revenue.
I am an ad-free member, but cancelled auto-renew because of the social justice articles this summer. Everyone should have their opinion and feel free to express their perspective, but I’m not willing to pay to read SJ commentary on my baseball sites. I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to oblivion, but I’m bothering to write this because I do appreciate the work you do and hope you can find an editorial policy that supports a revenue model where you guys can make a living.
I’m not a hopeless case, I would consider supporting the site directly, but I also have a right to vote with my wallet.
If I pay for the Wall Street journal and can live with their cranks r us editorial pages (seriously I can’t believe someone pays art laffer to write) I can swallow the occasional acid casualty legal analysis here for an order of magnitude less money
There are so many differences here. The Wall Street Journal is a newspaper, and newspapers are expected to include political editorials in addition to their politics news coverage as part of their main product. Also, the Wall Street Journal often includes opposing view types to present the issues in an ongoing discussion with disagreements. Also, the editorials in the Wall Street Journal are generally written by people who are heavily well-versed (usually professionals) in the area they’re discussing. They don’t grab opinions from soap opera stars or experts in rugby to lecture the audience on Chinese tariffs (and if they did, I wouldn’t fault you for complaining or cancelling).
Art laffer and Stephen Moore writing about economics is an embarrassment to the profession. Especially given the empirical “laffer” point is at 70% taxation! They have writers espousing the gold standard! Dow whatever it is now thousand! There’s no bigger den of discredited macro and micro policy writing than in the journal editorials. You’d have to be a complete fool to take anything written there by the regulars seriously. Let alone from the cabinet of ghouls they repeat as guests. The occasional Roland fryer piece doesn’t redeem the rest of the garbage lot
I mean Laffer was a professor of economics at multiple universities and on company boards. You disagreeing with him is not the same as him being disqualified to discuss the issues in which he specializes.
I know education and positions don’t convey intelligence (even AOC also has a degree in economics…) but there is a stronger basis there for discussion than being an expert in a totally unrelated field. That’s all my point was there.
Ladder has cratered down the academic ranks as his work becomes increasingly discredited and his lemonhood and ideological capture become revealed, he’s now at Pepperdine, whose repec ranking is what, lassen junior college? Anyone who takes him seriously is a fool. No academic does. Just because he somehow slipped through comps and tells business leaders what they want to hear means nothing, the guy couldn’t get into the quarterly southeastern Belarusian review of statistics and economics
Imagine taking your time and commenting on this post, where people are asking for support, and writing you WON’T support them because they don’t coddle your hateful and bigoted beliefs.
Please, tell me what’s on the front page today that frustrates you so much? It’s playoff coverage, a tribute to Bob Gibson (does that offend you?), and a few interviews. What set you off? The article about MLB forcing players to play in Seattle with a disgustingly poor API index? Speaking about the importance of athletes using their platform for good to bring awareness to issues? What so offended you that you think you have some sort of power with your $20?
You’re angry because people aren’t tolerating your shit anymore. I cannot imagine you (or anyone) has had an easy year. All this nation has given the American people is $1200, poor covid handling to where it’s OCTOBER and there’s still 40k new cases a day, and leaders who divide and incite rage between the American people. What do you think has gone well? Do you think FanGraphs is spending your money on some cause you don’t support? It must be an immense privilege to not see what’s going on in the world around you.
Back to the point – these people work hard every day to give you free work that is tremendously respected in the industry. Teams regularly hire here and utilize their resources – it’s that invaluable. And you sit here, preferring a small business close down because you’re upset they discuss news? Your bigotry will no longer be tolerated and you cannot live with it. The pure fragility to think a baseball website is out to get you is beyond sad.
“Agree with everything I say or you are a bigot”
This is the type of attitude that pushes people away. I hope Fangraphs is paying attention to this as well. Disagreements can be constructive. Unwarranted personal attacks are not, and will hurt the traffic.
Please, by all means exchange in proper discourse with me. Answer my questions that I laid out. Tell me what FanGraphs articles have propagated some dangerous or threatening political rhetoric, as the original comment insisted. Link me articles that made you feel personally attacked. The front page is loaded with content – so again, instead of deflection – maybe have some proof?
If you’re offended by Rachel’s article on the Seattle game game with the shitty AQI – why? Do you take the side of the league or do you deny the science and data of climate change? If you’re offended by the handful of articles about racial injustice, why does that bother you? There’s ten other baseball articles churned out the same day. Why does the one article about kneeling upset you? Are you pro-racism? People can’t protest silently or loudly without white people being bothered. I don’t get it. I’m trying to humor this and ask an actual question. Where did you say, “After reading this, I am just not giving this small business the money they need when I can cherrypick articles for free?”
All I’m asking is for a quote or a link that has offended you or been otherwise filled with dangerous misinformation. Because frankly, I can’t think of one. And if issues like wanting athletes to play in dangerous conditions or kneel for 30 seconds in silent protest offends you, then you are a bigot. But, if you can find something sensible that is wrong or made you feel ostracized, I’m begging you to share it.
But, nobody ever does. People just deflect. My inclination is they, at one point, followed some of the writers online who shared their beliefs, and that turned them off to the entire website. Because I certainly don’t see much political discourse here. And even if there was political discourse, I’m not sure how anyone can ignore it given the climate we are in. How can anyone put a smile on their face and think everything is great right now?
Acid casualty legal analysis didn’t give it away? The guy’s points can be largely wrong while also, in part, correct. If anyone took this site’s attempts at legal analysis seriously, I’d be troubled,
The most recent reference you have is an article by Sheryl, who is no longer here, and hasn’t since summer 2019? If that turned you off, it turned you off. I’m not going to argue about the legal articles because, while I like Sheryl, I didn’t think it was much of a fit. However, you’re here nearly 18 months later after all of 2020 and that’s all you’re upset about as you still come here regularly?
It’s literally the only thing I find objectionable, so i bring it up. It’s a genuinely one of the few cases where someone could be harmed by reading it. Presenting fringe legal theory as generally held jurisprudence is crazy. It’d be like me treating con Mises or some other Austrian as “general consensus” when arguing about how a policy maker would handle contracts if they were GM, and oh by the way here’s some investment advice. An expert would cease reading immediately. I don’t trust even a reasonably intelligent non expert to do the same. I’d also, upon reading someone who did that, would be in the comments saying “this is real bad guys”
Fair enough. I didn’t read a lot of what Sheryl put out because it wasn’t content I was personally interested in on this platform. I’m no expert on any of the legal content. But I’ve spoken with others who did feel similarly. Or did Craig write it? Either way, fringe legal theory is dangerous territory that I’m again not very invested in.
Con Mises. Good lord. Keeping it though.
There are so many strawmans and motte-and bailey arguments in there that I wouldn’t know where to start. This thread discussion has been about the appropriateness and the effect of having political discourse in the articles, not about debating the issues themselves.
Firstly, I don’t come to this site to read or discuss politics (which is literally my main point in this thread), so I won’t do so here in the comments.
Secondly, even just the fact that you think someone disagreeing with the ideas and motivations behind the kneeling protests unequivocally makes them a racist bigot already betrays your inability to have a rational discussion with a disagreeing party. The main reason for labeling your opponent evil is to dismiss their viewpoints immediately. Once that happens, any attempt at subsequent debate becomes pointless.
There are good people who agree with the kneeling protests and there are good people who disagree with the kneeling protests. I know plenty of each. Since I do respect people who disagree with me on various issues, I think it fair to limit my discourse to having it with those who will afford me that same courtesy.
Once again, you deflect. “I don’t talk politics,” but you came here to engage with people who were discussing politics. You’ve replied to me multiple times – and I’m pretty openly political. Why engage? If you weren’t political, you’d scroll along and not be bothered. Look at the main page today. There is not a single political post. But you chose to be here and now, in the comments section engaging in the discussion.
I just gave you a chance. I spoke to you and asked questions. I wanted to know where and when you’ve felt personally attacked or victimized by FanGraphs’ political propaganda. You couldn’t and didn’t. You made general base accusations and played both sides. And because I wasn’t “friendly” or “courteous” enough, you deflect. Show me where Meg or Dave or Dan or Ben said something politically inappropriate that made you no longer want to contribute to them surviving a terrible year for the industry. It’s easier to blame me for being dense or not coddling you.
We didn’t need an extensive back and forth, I just gave you an invitation to prove it and you didn’t. That’s all, you’ve proved my point.
Because I’m not actually making political points. I’m making points about what it means to this site to include partisan political commentary. I know you know the difference.
And I made it painfully clear why I didn’t want to discuss the issues themselves with you. You cannot deploy ad hominem attacks and then claim you were attempting to open a civil dialogue.
Yeah, I do know the difference. And I acknowledged that. If you go on a lot of the staffs’ personal Twitter accounts, do you know whereabouts they lean? Yes. But that’s their personal platform and a voice that does not represent their employer. And that’s a right they are entitled to, as are you and I. So my inkling is you do not like someone’s tweets, and believe it’s something deeply bleeds into the content.
Does the official FanGraphs Twitter account post pictures of Donald Trump or Republicans and say, “Hey if you support this guy, go f*** yourself?” No. All I asked of you was to look on the front page today and tell me what’s so deeply problematic and political. And to be frank, there’s no such thing as non-partisan political commentary on news topics. Every single one of us has a personal bias, however slight or extreme it may be.
You aren’t engaging because someone is calling you on your bluff. You don’t want left-wing news? Please tell me where that news is on this website. What has been misinformation or otherwise damaging? Let’s pretend you come back with 12 articles in an hour of all the things that clearly demonstrate bias and misinformation and that you’re right and I’m wrong. Then I look like the idiot. If I jump on you and your clearly presented proof, you’ve made your point. You wouldn’t even need to respond.
Fact of the matter is, again, I just think you were upset at something one of them tweeted and blamed their employer for then standing for things they clearly don’t. And if things like racial injustice articles amidst historic and unavoidable news concerns you, I think that’s more of a you problem then a problem with a website that is reporting its context and application to baseball.
The type of content I enjoy most from the staff at Fangraphs is the type that cannot be summed up in a tweet or two. So I have never seen a political tweet from any staff member of Fangraphs. Your inkling is incorrect.
Here is one such example of site content you requested. I believe this article takes up an anti-data perspective, makes incorrect claims about the issues, and presents arguments with false and dangerous premises.
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-absence-called-for-mlb-is-disappointingly-present/
My goal is not to make you look like the idiot, as you say. I’m merely proving that this site inserts intense one-sided and homogeneous political commentary into some of its articles. And I think is irresponsible, damaging to the people of this country (especially minorities in the short term and long term), and damaging to the product this site offers.
I’m sure you disagree with me on the issues themselves, and that’s okay. Where you cannot disagree is when we say the site has a monolithic political leaning and it’s significantly to one side. There’s a reason nobody complains that this site is too conservative, and it’s not because liberal people are incapable of or unwilling to be voicing complaints.
That’s the extent of the time I’m willing to spend on this to demonstrate what I had thought had been obvious. Take it or leave it.
Alright, so at the very least, you came with something. So, I will take it. But, I’m also going to say that I never once said this website didn’t feature political commentary. I said that it doesn’t ostracize people of different leanings. Everyone has a bias and everyone with an audience of any size has a platform. Where I take issue with your comment is that Jon made incorrect claims that were not grounded in facts or data.
It’s clear you do not align with the stance of his statement. But he’s not incorrect. Jacob Blake was shot with seven rounds to the back by police offers. That isn’t a matter for debate. Play any angle you want into context, cold hard truth is a Black man was murdered by police officers. And if you follow the trends through the course of history, there is demonstrable data that shows the police system in America is complicit in the over-incarceration, suppression, and murder of the Black community.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/data-show-deaths-from-police-violence-disproportionately-affect-people-of-color
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-data-say-about-police-shootings/
At a point its not an opinion grounded in data. And if further proof is needed, George Floyd’s entire interaction with police is on video. It’s a fundamentally broken system. Top to bottom. And while not every single officer is out committing brutal killings, they are placed in a system that is complicit in doing so. If Jacob Blake or George Floyd were white men, they would not have been shot or choked. And today, Derek Chauvin, the murder of George Floyd, was the last officer released on bail and now walks freely. Police are not held to a fair and just standard, again rooted in data and statistics
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/04/24/usa-today-revealing-misconduct-records-police-cops/3223984002/
Then next, Jon talks about baseball being largely white and conservative. That’s also matter-of-fact, not whataboutism. People get mad about Trevor Bauer online, but the truth is clubhouses are a lot more like him than not. Personal experience, I’ve spent the last three years extensively working with players and coaching staff – and I have heard some of the most reprehensible racist language I’ve ever heard in my life. But again, from a data perspective and historical context, organizations from top to bottom are largely white and largely right-leaning. That isn’t a critique, it’s real.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29369890/inside-rise-mlb-ivy-league-culture-stunning-numbers-question-next
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/27/13416798/cubs-dodgers-baseball-white-diverse
https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/28355/prospectus-feature-the-color-of-baseball-statistics/
So again, not sure what’s misleading. Jon notes he’s not surprised there was a lack of reaction from MLB, in comparison to the NBA about the issue. That’s not a profound statement, but an opinion he has mustered from the evidence that surrounds the game. It’s old, white and grounded in tradition. Not an opinion, it just is what it is.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gdqd/why-major-league-baseball-was-the-last-sports-league-to-respond-to-george-floyds-death
If further proof is needed, use your eyes to go back and see the reaction. It was poor. Some teams stood with their teammates like the Dodgers and Mookie Betts (which I’m sure his status makes it more prominent to his organization), and others let teammates sit alone like the Cubs with Jason Heyward. Jon brought that up. There was inconsistent messaging across the board. He was personally disappointed – and yeah, that’s his opinion, and you can call that left-leaning, if you so choose (I’d opt to say that’s a human behavior to be disappointed something you love won’t speak up). But, if you want to disagree about integrating politics in sports, that’s your prerogative. I’d just hope you agree that, if we want athletes to just be quiet, that we also remove the anthem to fully make it apolitical.
Again, I’m entirely unsure what is damaging. Jon urges you in the article to listen to Black athletes about how real and how prominent racial injustice is. He’s not lecturing you, he’s asking you to listen to those who have experienced it to widen your scope. White people do not experience racism, it’s literally impossible. And, again, you may disagree about integration of politics in sports, but is it damaging to listen to these people as fellow human beings? To me, “shut up and play sports” is a narrative of “please don’t make me think.” We have the privilege to have the option not to think – go back to the police data and the crime statistics. To not stand with your teammate is a shitty thing to do. And baseball didn’t stand with its Black athletes or propose a consistent message. But, I have delved fully into opinion territory. Where we won’t agree, but it’s very real, and you have the choice not to see it.
As for COVID and the climate damage stuff he mentioned, yeah it’s real. You can look that up for yourself. But all I know is 210k people and counting are dead, and the skies of the PNW are blood red. Not sure what other signs or data points you need, but they are widely available.
Either way, the point he makes is people with a platform need to use it. If you don’t, you’re complicit. That’s just a matter of fact. When sports stopped, you were forced to think. And we all need to be forced to think, because for far too long we haven’t collectively. Black Americans aren’t feigning tears for social media likes, it is genuine daily pain, knowing that your government does not like you and does not have your back. I’m sure you can relate even as a white person to a very small extent this year. I can’t even get a measly $1200 COVID relief check, but there’s thousands and thousands who fear every day they’ll be shot for absolutely no reason beyond skin color.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-end-of-denial/614194/
Was his article a bit of a call to action? Yeah. But, is he misleading us? Those men were murdered by officers, 200k+ have died of COVID, MLB is predominantly white, they did have a delayed response. And, the title basically implies going in that he will be commentating on the matter. How could we ignore it? Games, what they literally write about, were postponed. It just feels Trumpian to sing “Everything is Awesome” when Heyward is out of the lineup, when Jackie Bradley is kneeling alone, when the Dodgers decide not to play. Being upset about the article, fully knowing what it’ll likely entail, just feels to me that you’re uncomfortable being confronted about racism. I don’t understand the white fragility around these issues.
Jon didn’t condemn anyone outright, he was disappointed. Maybe it is more HardBall Times than FanGraphs, but HardBall Times is down because people won’t support this website like they should (for as trivial of reasons such as politics). But, at the very least, he was not inaccurate. And the only other defense to protests is people pointing out these riots and their displeasure. Okay, so people don’t like riots or silent unifying protest – feels like a lose-lose from white people who feel inconvenienced. The only response I ever hear is “what about ANTIFA??” deflection. I just don’t get it. Yeah, I’ve gone way off course and I’ve delved in to the extent NOBODY will read this or care (my class Zoom recordings aren’t uploading so I’ve got a free night), but it just troubles me that people are bothered by it. And more so that you could believe such blatant criticisms are in fact, rooted in data and accurate. But, people do not have the privilege you do to simply be inconvenienced. They live it every day and the very least we should do is listen.
I also liked the inclusion of a Bowman prospects baseball card content. I’d be all over some sort of baseball-card value analysis of some upcoming, vintage, or hot cards.
This would maybe be too big of a new project outside normal baseball content, but Fangraphs has such a good understanding of economics and the players themselves, that they’d already be a couple steps ahead.
As a card dork I also appreciate any card related content: looking at humorous cards of yesteryear was a favorite NotGraphs topic.
Maybe articles about hot/not cards/sets, favorite sets/cards of childhood or adolescence, new product reviews or box breaks, etc. Given any thought to any of the above?
Would anyone like to buy a 1988 Score Gregg Jeffries rookie?
I’m glad you guys at least got some kind of bump with baseball coming back. As someone who also works in/around baseball and will be without an income from the World Series through February (not with a team), it’s truly a terrifying feeling of soul-sucking, daily uncertainty.
You all do great work and this industry would not be where it is without FanGraphs. And as others have suggested, I too believe that a paywall is an alternative worth considering (which I’m sure you have). Even if it’s just key features (like exporting data to Excel), fantasy coverage and the podcasts, I believe people would pay for it.
I think there’s always a bit of immediate backlash from the loud minority of freeloaders when people initiate a paywall – but they don’t pay the bills. And as someone who has worked with teams, there are entire SQL tables for hyperlinks with your work and metrics. But again, in worst-case scenario, it may just need to happen. Even with FG being more niche than say, The Athletic, sites like have BP have made it work.
I worry for all you guys and all my friends in baseball. This whole year has just been utterly devastating. And I hope anyone who frequents this website every day and can contribute becomes a member. It’s literally the least we can do.
If you keep the far left politics out of the articles, you would add members. I dipped my membership this year when the hate of conservatives became too much.
People with far left politics might not see themselves as far left. They often believe their politics are neutral. But lately the far left has taken to treating conservatives as inherently racist, sexist, fascist, White Supremecist, homophobic, and evil. Hint: not all Republicans are hate-filled, evil bigots. Believe it or not.
When you let the politics deep into the site, you alienate half your audience.
I am not asking for conservative politics to be added. Just asking that you return the focus to baseball content.
It’s probably a lost cause, but I might suggest that conservative folks might from time to time consider that progressive people are often describing -effects- and not -motives-. A given thing can exist and have a racist -affect- and that doesn’t mean the people who support it are actively motivated by racism. This is a real problem in these discussions because academic writing around racism is focused on description of -results- and not description of -motivations-, but many individuals (especially conservative ones who haven’t been exposed to this concept in an educational context) take these assertions as descriptive of motive.
The results of policing can be racist without the individual cops being motivated by racism. The results of policies around marriage and adoption can be homophobic without the people who support them being -motivated- by homophobia. The results of employment policies can have sexist outcomes without the individual managers (or people making the HR policies) being misogynists. It’s about results, not intentions.
A relatively minor percentage of conservative people are evil, hate-filled bigots (ie the ones who actually call themselves neo-nazis). But conservative people should make some effort to separate description of outcomes from motivations. This is a frequent, large gap in these kinds of discussions.
A policy that impacts people of different racial backgrounds in unequal ways is inherently racist, even if it’s enacted with the best intentions. Folks need to stop taking those discussions as a personal attack or impugnment on their character. The whole point of bringing it up and talking about it is to say “This thing seems to work great for you, but it’s impacting this community you’re not a member of in a very negative way that results in a racially-discriminatory outcome. Please re-consider your support.” Conservatives often take this as accusations that they are personally motivated by animus towards the minority group; that isn’t necessarily the case, but if you refuse to listen to the group being negatively impacted, there’s a point where one starts to assume you don’t care about the negative impact, and that’s where description of motivations starts to appear.
That’s not quite right- the argument is that the “ism” is the mechanism driving the effect, generally. EG, That racist results are driven by racist policies. Which is a little frustrating, in things like policing, where that’s not empirically clear at all- endogeneity matters, clearly. The presence of a disparity is not, in the face, evidence of a bias (structural or otherwise)
No, friend, you are wrong, because when we talk about racist policies we -are talking about the result and not the intention-. Sometimes the intention is ALSO racist, but ‘racist’ is not exclusively a descriptor of motive. THAT IS NOT WHAT IT MEANS OR HOW IT IS USED.
And this point, which conservative people and white people (and theres a lot of overlap there but it aint’ universal) just constantly fail or refuse to accept is the problem. Racism is about outcomes. Sometimes it also describes a motivation, but it is about -the results-. A policy can be entirely well-meaning, it can even be INTENDED to have a positive outcome, but if it hurts a minority racial group it is racist. It can have the best intentions. Sometimes, policies specifically conceived to try and fight racism turn out to have racist outcomes. That doesn’t mean the people who designed the policies where motivated by racism – it means those people -were wrong about the outcomes-.
When a system or a policy is described as racist, it is not in any way intended to be a statement about the intentions of the individuals in that system or even the folks who created it. When progressives want to impugn peoples motives, they say “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist”.
This gets into the difference between personal and institutionalized racism. Institutionalized racism is a system with institutionalized policies or biases that result in racially unequal outcomes (say, policing). Are there probably individually racist cops? I am sure there are. Are there cops who are not individually racist? There absolutely are. But the outcomes of that whole system are disparately unequal for people of color, and therefore that system is institutionally racist. It doesn’t mean that it intends to be that way, or the folks in it want it to be that way (some probably do, some do not). It is a description of it’s consequences.
Policing is racist. Individual policemen and women may or may not be.
I’ll point out that this line is very intentionally blurred by people attacking the concept of institutional racism, who constantly go out of their way to try and portray it as a statement that all of the individuals in that institution are personally individually racist, but that is absolutely not what it is about. Again, if progressives want to accuse a group of people of being personally racist, we’ll call them white supremacists, white nationalists, or neo-nazis, because that’s what those people are. Most people are none of those things, but they still participate in and support systems and policies that have racist outcomes – mostly because they don’t know that it has racist outcomes, or don’t accept or believe the evidence that it does.
Policies and populations can have racial disparity in outcome without being racist. Like, you’re arguing that there’s no error or natural variation. at all in outcomes, which is a ridiculous position. The presence of the disparity is not, in and of itself, evidence of a bias in the data generating process.
For example, entering students to Brooklyn tech are predominately Asian, but that’s not because of systemic racism.
Sometimes, systemic racism or some other structural discrimination plays a causal role in a disparity. Black and white people have massively different wealth in this country? Why, well, some of it’s probably (definitely) racism (redlining). Some of it is choices (not having the degree to get the job- Fryer’s work on wealth gaps). Some of it is choices mediated by racism (turns out the GI bill meant a lot to education! And resulted in accumulated advantage).
Other times it doesn’t., the wage gap in women and men is definitively not based in discrimination (Goldin’s work) but in the choices people make.
Yes, outcomes that have racial disparities without racist motivations ARE RACIST.
You are continuing to adhere to the (misguided) belief that ‘racist’ describes motivations. It’s not. It’s about outcomes.
I’m tired of repeating myself, so I’m going to stop, but please just read those 3 sentences again until you understand what I am saying to you.
The wage gap in men and women may not be based in discrimination but it is -still a sexist outcome-. It may be an inadvertent one, an unpreventable one, an unintentional one, and a whole host of other things, but the word for something that negatively affects one gender more than the other is ‘sexist’. Thats. What. It. Means.
And that’s the entire purpose of my post, and my replies, which seems completely lost on you.
Stop associating -ism and -ist with motivations unless specifically applied to individual people to specifically describe their personal behaviors (“Stephen Miller is a racist.”) Full stop, end of discussion, I am done here.
I think you’re working from a definition for racism that no one is using. Structural racism causes some disparities. We use these words (structural is a causal modeling term! Born from people trying to examine causes of phenomena) to define the causes of outcomes, not the end result. What’s the policy point of describing the end result that way? If you have no insight to cause, there’s really nothing you can say about changing it.
Structural racism causes differences in outcomes.
Natural variation and choice cause others. It’s a tautology to argue that outcome equals mechanism- in essence arguing that there is no error in the model that could cause the outcome to arise by other forces. I could largely care less about individual motivation other than to say that people make largely boundedly rational decisions and the results of those decisions may appear racist (I make less money than a matched white peer) but are driven by endogeneity (I prefer not to immigrate to a better paying country for a better job). My choices, and the results, are in no way racist because of the choices I have made. To label them as such is misspecifying the cause of the effect.
This matters because identifying the mechanism is IMPORTANT. Wasting resources on equivalent outcomes with no eye to structural causes is a disaster (nothing works philosophy of recidivism, for one)
like just as a ridiculous example, I’m sure the proportion of white shinto priests doesn’t reflect the proportion of white people in the population. I wouldn’t call that a racist outcome but the product of choice.
I’ll just add, though I’m increasingly feeling like it’s a waste of time, that what you’re really doing is demonstrate that you just don’t understand what I’m saying at all. Let’s use your statement about the wage gap as an example.
You pointed to a piece of research that shows (largely correctly IMO) how the wage gap is the result of people’s choices in the situations they find themselves in, and is not the result of direct, malicious sexist preference among hiring or promoting managers, or the like.
But that is still a sexist outcomes and describes a sexist system, because -the system those decisions are made in- contains incentives that -treat different genders differently- and offer unequal outcomes based on gender. I personally worked as a hiring manager at a Fortune 100 company, so I am familiar with how large corporate hiring/firing/promotional structures work, and I will try and use that to illustrate.
Women have to choose between having kids and having a career, because taking time off due to maternity costs them both directly and indirectly, whereas men are easily able to choose to have both (as they often have less caregiving burden, and are able to return to work sooner). Even if policies provide for, say, optional maternity leave for mothers, the result is unequal because of how this plays out for the mother:
A man may miss a couple weeks and return to work. He is juggling the child at home, but he’s at work, doing his responsibilities, etc. A mother, who misses more time, may have to take a leave of absence. If she is in a management role, she will need to have an interim manager replace her. She will pass off her responsibilities; her team will be disrupted. At some point, she will return, and there will be further disruption. This may not be held against her, but it will still harm her: She will not perform as well in annual evaluations, or may have her annual evaluations entirely skipped or bypassed due to the maternity leave. This doesn’t result in a BAD determination, but may simply result in a lost year – where the man gains a year of experience, has an opportunity to add achievements to his resume, etc, the woman who missed 10 weeks’ maternity time does not receive the same credit. She has, as you mentioned, made choices – but the man didn’t have to make choices. He got to easily have both.
That is a sexist -system-. Are the people in that system sexist? They are not. Many of them may be -trying- to overcome that. Frequently, HR procedures are using what appear to be objective proxies (eg years of experience, internal metrics and measurements, etc) to determine raises and promotions specifically to avoid allegations of bias or unfair treatment – but if the system creating those metrics is, itself, unequal, then it will produce unequal outcomes.
Our system doesn’t account for women having a much greater burden when a couple chooses to procreate. She bears the career costs of their choice, and he does not. That -system- is sexist, despite the best efforts of the participants – in fact, despite systems (like objective metrics/using years of experience as proxies, etc) that are TRYING to avoid biased outcomes. Because they are using biased -measurements-, the data produced is unavoidably biased no matter what steps they take. It also illustrates the problem with depending on private corporations to fix these problems – they are systemic to the entire workforce, and will follow people from job to job.
In this case, we dont even KNOW how to completely fix it – no country has entirely figured it out. But we do know some things help, and one of those things is legally mandatory paid family leave for -both parents-. So men no longer get an unfair leg up by allowing their wives to bear all the caregiving responsibilities, and women no longer suffer the consequences of biology, with the enormous added social benefit that -its better for the babies- to have both parents around when they are very young, and produces happier parents AND happier children. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it mitigates it, because it imposes the same burden for having children on everyone, no longer makes it a ‘choice’, which is often reverse-held against people (you cant ‘Punish them’ for choosing to take time off, but you can always reward the person who was willing to go above and beyond, and they are in direct competition with each other).
So, yes, the wage gap is the result of sexism – sexism in our fundamental structure of employment, nationwide. It is – wait for it – systemic. It is not individualized. It is not about motivation. It is about result – and the only way to fix it is to intentionally try to remedy the inequality, which in this case is the result of human biology (in that women bear greater physical cost for childbirth than men).
When people are talking about systemic racism, they are talking about this kind of stuff. They are not talking about personal motivations or decisions or leadership or anything like that, they are talking about basic structural concepts that create unequal outcomes in our society for people based on their gender or skin color or a whole host of other elements.
The only party that currently benefits, btw, from our current system of handling family leave / wage gap is .. wait for it: the employer. The employer gets extra work from men and a minimum amount of time lost. Both male and female parents, and their children, lose out on gain, and that gain accrues to the employer. We prioritize ‘choice’ without accounting for the fact that those choices do not exist in a vacuum, and that in many cases what people decide is individually beneficial is not beneficial to our entire society, or even necessarily their family unit (some tragedy of the commons stuff there). That’s exactly why we have government and regulation – to address situations where personal incentives for individuals and corporations are highly out of alignment with what’s actually beneficial to our society and citizens.
I just think you fundamentally misunderstand the term “structural” with how it’s used in academia and where the terms like structural racism come from. It’s precisely causal mechanism term.
dukewinslow: There’s a large literature on both structural racism / sexism and disparate impacts that crosses disciplinary boundaries. the term “structural” in economics is pretty narrowly defined, but it isn’t in other academic contexts. If you prefer, you can think of it as a systems theory.
Yeah, a lot of the problem around this discussion comes from applying colloquial understanding of terms (eg personal intention) or mis-applying terms from other disciplines (as you mention re: economics and structure). This is it’s own field of study (in social sciences, sociology) and it has it’s own language, and in fact the terms ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ are very specifically defined:
Something that produces unequal outcomes for groups of people with certain statuses or traits, when the groups receiving the worse outcomes are traditionally or typically the minority or less-powerful group, to the advantage of majority or more-powerful groups.
This is also where the concept that you can’t have racism against white people comes from. You CAN have racially motivated discrimination against white people, but ‘racism’ requires the target group to be less powerful than the groups around it, and white people are the power group in their societies. So they can experience discrimination, but not racism.
see:
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/oacs/wp-content/uploads/sites/140/Key-Terms-Racism.pdf
Racism
“The systemic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively
little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and
Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power
(Whites). This subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms
and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.” (p. 88-89)
it’s simple logic to point out that structural forces can cause disparities, but disparities are not necessarily caused by the identified structural force (e.g. racism). if you grant that you cannot perfectly measure the factors determining human behavior. Look, if you think disparities in a dependent variable are a result of a single structural force and can be remedied by policy conditioned solely on the level of the DV….. good luck. I give you “nothing works.”
Human Behavior is essentially multiply determined (do you agree?). Forget, for the moment, alternative endogenous causes for outcomes, like preferences and shinto priesthood- you clearly don’t believe choice plays a role in generating the data that show a difference in distributions\(which, by the way, what science is for- the identification of causes for effects by ruling out alternative causes). It’s simple statistics that there are random errors in any distribution because you cannot measure every input on a decision or outcome. Under MJ’s argument, any disparity is essentially structurally racist and caused by some racism, completely obviating any agency on the part of actors or the possibility of error (measurement, random, or otherwise). If, under the upstream formulation, all disparities are structurally explained by structural racism, that leaves no role for random chance (I MEAN COME ON ITS A BASEBALL SITE). I have yet to read an empirical paper without some error function or classification error. Clearly, people do not measure behavior, outcome, and cause perfectly.
Additionally, I have never heard a formulation of “structural” of any field that did not imply the structural force being a causal mechanism. Disparate outcomes that are structurally racist are the result of a structurally racist cause (the force). The outcome itself is not the structural variable unless it is also causing some downstream effect. I’d love a cite where someone has the outcome as the structural variable alone and not the cause (e.g, someone saying that incarceration rates are the structural racism caused by a number of factors but definitely not racism hoo boy… not the structurally racist carceral state putting certain people in prison disproportionately, resulting in a massive disparity in race).
so two issues: the first that a disparity can’t arise by random chance or by agent choice (which is ludicrous, again). Second, a completely ideosyncratic definition of “structural racism” that I haven’t heard and few share. I’m happy to be wrong, but the first point is just a statistical reality, the second is just how people talk about cause across the social sciences.
Yeah, this is a huge deal in public health, sociology, and to a lesser extent, urban and legal studies, so if you haven’t come across it that means you just don’t work in those areas. Try “Structural Racism and Health Inequities” by Gee and Ford. Amada Armenta has a paper on “Crimmigation” that is also in that vein. There’s some literature on environmental hazards in that area too…
In health the structural part is the independent variable, the result is the dependent variable (like the doctor matching paper in PNAS) Not sure what I’m missing here.
Like, I think structural forces create outcomes. I don’t think the independent variable can be “free” of the structure it produces, if you’re measuring structure as outcome.
In social institutions and processes, the structures dictate the choices and their consequences for individuals. You can analyze the results of those choices and the incentives people have and, if you find the incentivized behavior to be socially undesirable, change the incentives and offer different choices.
You treat our systems and institutions and social structures like unchanging monoliths that can only exist in a single way and where no other options exist. But many other nations do things differently than we do and have different structural incentives leading to different choices made by their members.
If we change the incentives that encourage racist outcomes in law enforcement, we can change the outcomes. If we change the incentives and choices faced by men and women who want children, we’ll change outcomes. The institutions are not unchangeable monoliths. We have just chosen to never change them and the people who benefit from them have encouraged the mindset that they are ideal and any change will reduce, destroy or inhibit freedom in some ways. They are very focused on the idea of individuals surrendering power to the state while quietly sweeping under the rug that the powers government doesn’t use are often not retained by individuals but devolve to their employers, usually corporations and their executives. In the name of choice we have privatized health insurance, but most people have little to no choices and can pick only between their employers offerings. In the name of choice we do not dictate much about family leave at the governmental level, leaving the choice to employers – as though the balance of power in at will employment were remotely equal and not heavily biased towards the employer.
These things are choices we made politically and that can be changed.
I think that things can, and should be done to change structures that produce unhealthy disparities. Also that change is possible- which isn’t actually a universal view.
I know, as a function of data generating processes and random variables, that not all disparities, healthy and otherwise, are the product of structures that the policymaker can change. Can you see the distinction?
To add: Certain topics in sports are inherently political, and there’s no way to not take a side. What you’ve perceived in the past as ‘not taking a side’ has actually been ‘taking your side’, ie in discussions around owners/players in labor disputes, and other such topics. Publications are going to have a voice – there is no politically neutral voice on these kinds of concepts unless you are exclusively presenting facts in a chart (and perhaps not even then). We all read content from outlets with editorial voices that differ from our own political viewpoints.
No argument there. But my suggestion is Fangraphs would attract more members if they toned down the left wing stance. Some of the regular writers are so over the top, it drives potential paying members away.
I might be wrong. But if I am right, the palpable left wing bitterness on the site is costing Fangraphs money.
I just wonder about the world where you think the left-wing opinions you see on FG represent palpable left-wing bitterness, and can only imagine you must never encounter actual progressive political views anywhere else in your life, because, to be honest with you, man, what you see on FG is neither particularly brash, particularly controversial or particularly angry. If your political views filter tells you that what you see on FG is harsh, left wing rhetoric, I suggest you go find and read some actual harsh, left wing rhetoric, cause that’s not what’s here.
“not all Republicans are hate-filled, evil bigots” – I believe this to be true.
However Republicans should also acknowledge there IS a strain of white supremacy, hateful diminishment or fear of the “other” (be it persons of color, foreigners, LGBT, etc.) within the party that has been allowed to fester and grow within the last four years, and is regularly espoused by its current leader. I would not say that it is true of 100% of the party, but prominent voices within the party would be wise to call out and move beyond such hateful language when it is espoused. One can believe in free markets and personal responsibility without bringing all that scaremongering baggage along.
As an example, “BUILD A WALL!” was pretty transparently a scaremongering tactic looking to create a problem out of one that had largely diminished on its on through a variety of factors. Other prominent leaders could have said “eh, that’s probably about the 200th largest problem facing the country at any given time, let’s find some bigger fish to fry” rather than meekly going along.
“Meekly going along” with shredding norms in civil and political discourse, xenophobia, and anti-science has proven to be a rather terrible political strategy but it seems the only card in the deck of late. I think there are some bright minds within the party – they can find other cards to play!
I’ve deleted this and re-written it a few times. I think I finally have what I want to say.
When FG writers go after Schilling for heinous comments, or the owners for misrepresenting their finances, or describing the spread of COVID-19…these should not be anti-conservative or liberal positions.
I worry a lot about how people identify themselves, and that when they see articles going after bigotry, deceptive accounting practices, and anti-science propaganda that they think that is “anti-conservative”. I really don’t think this is how conservatives want to be identified, but when people feel attacked on an emotional level because of these conversations it worries me that it is happening despite everyone’s intentions.
FG does have some biases. One writer, in particular, has a tendency to editorialize a lot when it comes to labor issues that often goes beyond the data. It leans just a little bit liberal. But the stuff that really brings out the concerns usually isn’t that.
I’d argue that the problem is that the modern conservative movement has in fact adopted a couple of those things as signifiers of identity. To get way off topic, there’s a great Atlantic article from a couple years ago by Michael Gerson, an evangelical who was GW Bush’s chief speechwriter, where he walks through the history of the evangelical Christian movement and shows how and where it decided to align itself in more or less direct opposition to modern science. Since that movement is so central to modern social conservatism, that same alignment has crept in across the boundry from hardcore evangelicals to the conservative culture writ large. It’s the same as the war on higher education: They’re convinced that colleges are democrat factories indoctrinating kids into liberalism and left politics.
And that’s how you end up with a party selecting a secretary of education who was once quoted 15 years ago saying that they believe the problem with America is that the secular public school has replaced the church as the center of the community, and that the only way to restore America’s greatness is to abolish it and re-center the community around shared religious faith.
Yes, that one has been explicitly adopted by some conservative communities (you could say the same about the other ones too, but less so). What I’m more frustrated and baffled by is that conservatives who presumably do not count themselves among them explicitly are identifying attacks on anti-science propaganda as attacks on “their group” and reacting negatively to it. There seems to be a complex bit of polarization happening here.
I studied political science, so while this is a bit outside the scope of FG, I will just say this:
Majorities rarely behave like ‘identity groups’ politically because it’s very hard to have a cohesive identity profile when you are the majority of citizens that isn’t simply an identity that applies to all citizens (ie Americans, etc).
But we are trending towards white people in general, and specifically white conservative-leaning people (rural, non-college, etc) not being a majority. What happens when groups move from majority to plurality or minority status is that they take on a more coherent image and start to identify with a specific group. What you see are the beginnings of white conservative identity politics, representing a certain cultural/demographic overlap that is primarily rural, primarily non-college educated, and primarily religious, and so as it’s identity it takes elements from each of those components, and the things it takes on as identity are assumed by others who were not part of the original component group.
That’s also why they are so reactionary in certain ways: they recognize they already have or are losing (depending on the voting preferences of the white people not inside their identity group, the college educated/urban/secular white group) their majority status, and this causes people to feel threatened to a certain degree, and is why it’s so easy to stir up racial and religious animousity directed at ‘other’ groups (they took our jobs, china, etc etc): they feel very threatened by by this loss of majoritarian status. That’s also why there’s so many movements and inclinations to try and dismiss people from outside their identity group as ‘not real Americans’ or ‘not legal’ or the like; it denies that they’re really losing majority status, and portrays the other groups as illegitimate.
You see this kind of thing across identity groups in political environments, much as you also see, say, the college educated/secular/white portion of the Democratic coalition start to adopt language, concepts and concerns from the other minority groups that make up their own identity group (ie wokeness, allyship, support for BLM, etc). It’s all about being part of your group, and adopting the things that are common in your group you may not originally have shared. People come to share them, and do so sincerely, because collective action and identity is powerful (which is why democracies and unions, for example, work in the first place)
You kind of have a situation where conservatives both pooh-pooh the idea if identity politics while strongly engaging in them themselves because they are a natural political state for a minority group that feels it needs to protect it’s own interests, and that is what they are. And it’s often a major shock to accept that, since they’re very used to being a strong majority of Americans, and that’s why there’s so much ‘stealing our country, stealing our jobs’ type rhetoric. They are so used to the idea that the default American is like them that that no longer being true is completely terrifying.
I will also add…because it doesn’t really fit with what I wrote up above: I really, really don’t think you want to find out what “far left” political positions actually are. I’m pretty freaking happy that Labour Militant has no real analogue in US politics.
The thing is that a certain class of folks in the United States that have a significant overlap with the Republican party (and have back to McCarthy) have engaged in a systemic and long-term educational campaign to teach Americans that the ultimate goal of any left movement is complete state-owned communism, and that any individual policy or idea is actually just a slippery slope/poison pill intended to create such a scenario. Anything left of laissez-faire capitalism is a stealth vehicle for repressive communism. And since that was how we educated folks for a couple generations during the Cold War, it has a deep resonance in those demographics, and they are incapable of distinguishing between actual far left and what frankly represents the center or center left in international politics. They more or less believe that every single one of those parties and policies is just a stealth vehicle for the Comintern and Castro/Stalin/Leninist communism and execution of the wealthy.
Glad this is off the main page now. Just came to say authors need to avoid the slightest bit of politics because of the fury it sets off in comments. Doesn’t matter what stance they take. Just look at this FG call for help being turned into a war ground over politics. Us as commenters will look for meaning where there may not be any, so don’t even open that door for us because we will clearly kick it in.
I really do wish we could take dinner table rules to the articles – no politics, no religion, even if it’s relevant. This comment section is a mess.
Aside from that, I have lots of gripes about the state of the site but have voiced them all before. What I have not voiced is my appreciation for the renewed focus on Rotographs, so thank you Dave and FG and kudos on the effort and improved fantasy content and volume. Hope it continues into the offseason.
What about allowing members to sponsor individual player pages?(get some small badge/ or line of acknowledgment on the page in exchange for a donation). Baseball Reference used to do some form of this and based the price on page hits.
That would be fun. I might donate $5 to have my username listed as sponsor of Albert Belle’s page for a month. Or some rando like Mickey Tettleton.
I might donate significantly more to sponsor Juan Soto’s page after he wins NL MVP next year.
I’ve debated whether or not to respond here, and decided to do so as the comments section is the only real line of throughput to management.
I want Fangraphs to survive and thrive. Like others, though, I’ve canceled my membership.
For me, the commentary in this thread re: politics misses the mark. I’m speaking only for me here, and not trying to speak for anyone else, but my concern is not with political bias as it is an anti-capitalism, anti-management, pro-labor-at-all-costs bias that does not at all feel objective or truth-seeking when it comes to the economic climate of the sport. Fortunately, those discussions have taken a backseat to actual baseball… but they will rear their ugly head again this winter.
I find Fangraph’s take on the business side of the sport to be rooted in emotion and pro-player sentiment rather than objective bias or reason, which is disappointing on a site based in groundbreaking analytical work. I don’t expect Fangraphs to express bias in the other direction (pro-management at all costs) – that would be no better than the current take. What is missing is objectivity and fair presentation of both sides of the economic argument. (I have been accused of being pro-owner, or that least original of ad hominems, a “bootlicker” – both miss the mark greatly. I’m looking for objectivity, and objectivity means that both sides to an argument sometimes have good points to consider and evaluate, even if they don’t ultimately sway you to their side of the debate.)
An author’s political views don’t concern me unless those political views begin to bias or inform the baseball content. I don’t find that to be the case at Fangraphs outside of the default anti-owner, pro-labor view that I suppose can be identified with one side of the political aisle. But I don’t find there to be overtly political takes embedded in the work.
I believe it to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for authors in any field to ignore the social climate of the moment, especially in sports, and especially in baseball where some players (Dom Smith, Ian Desmond, to name two) have taken passionate stands… you can’t cover the sport without covering the social moment. Besides, I am in the camp that finds the vast, vast majority of current social unrest to be a human rights issue rather than a political issue. Your mileage may vary.
But an author and/or editor’s repeatedly unobjective takes on the business of the sport is a huge, huge turnoff and was enough for me to cancel my membership, especially at a time when the business of the sport took center stage over the spring and will take center stage again once the World Series is complete.
Again, I considered saying nothing… some will wish I had taken that path… but I’m posting because I care, and I love Fangraphs, and I think this issue (rather than one of “politics”) is costing you subscribers. And so I therefore submit this comment for your consideration, David, with dissent of the most respectful kind intended.