BP Announcement: Tech Infrastructure Updates and Related Impacts

“The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and the second best time to plant a tree is now.” —Anonymous

In the forest of sports analytics, the Baseball Prospectus grove is one of the oldest and most venerable. Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of this website, and for all the changes in the weather that the last three decades have brought, we still have more than 50 folks dedicated to bringing you the world’s best baseball analytics. We’re very proud of the models, stats, analysis, and journalism that we put out every day, but we also recognize that as we’ve aged and grown, some parts of our ecosystem have been allowed to decay beyond usefulness. Anyone who uses our site in any depth has experienced this: links are broken, tools are slow, little baseballs spin on loading pages.

Everyone in public sports analysis runs on the leanest of budgets, and we’re no exception. A major ownership change in 2018, coupled with the sudden 2019 passing of Rob McQuown—who was, among many other things, BP’s technical heart and soul—put us behind the eight ball in keeping our technical ecosystem up to date. Also, in our pursuit of new ideas, we have not always considered their fit within our product offerings, nor been realistic enough about what a small team can reliably maintain and deliver.

We dropped a hint when we announced changes to our subscription pricing late last year, but this post formally launches BP30: a cohesive internal effort to prune our branches, catch up on fire management, and restore our site and tools to full health. With an updated organizational structure and a thoughtful approach to leveraging the latest technologies, we’re excited about the pace at which we can update our existing tools and sustainably introduce new ones. We expect to turn the calendar to our 30th year in 2027 with a substantially reconstructed site that lives up to your expectations and ours.

Along this journey, we’ll be asking for your partnership. First, the bad news: at some points, we’ll have to ask for your forgiveness and understanding. Behind the scenes, the Baseball Prospectus technical ecosystem suffers from a very high level of technical debt, and in some cases we simply won’t be able to—as the cringe consulting adage goes—build the plane while flying it. We’ll experience planned outages for different features, and we’ll retire some ancient, rarely-used areas of the site.

On the other hand, this project provides an opportunity to rework our product in significant ways, and we welcome your say in that. We want to hear your feedback, and most of all, we want you to hold us to the highest standards of customer experience. We expect all areas of our site to provide a digital user experience that is reliable, modern, and delightful, and while we do ask for your patience especially through the rest of 2026, we want you to insist on that and let us know where we’re falling short. Once the remodeling is complete, we can start looking at new things to build in the coming year.

Under this column heading, we’ll provide updates on our progress at least once per month, and advertise new or upgraded features on an ad-hoc basis. While unexpected issues are inevitable, we will provide advance notification in this space of any/all upcoming outages or detours to the greatest extent possible. We’ve also set up an e-mail inbox at feedback@baseballprospectus.com as a place to collect your inputs; in the early days, we’ll ask mostly for you to use that for letting us know if things are broken, and, in time, we look forward to opening the conversation up to ideas for new tools or offerings.

This may not be the best time at which we could and should’ve begun this work, but we’re confident that in this case, second-best will work just fine to position us for the next 30 years.