TAMPA, Fla. _ About a month ago, Meg Rowley was wondering if maybe they had over-reacted just a little. The managing editor of FanGraphs and Hardball Times, Rowley and her colleagues were scheduled to do a spring training meet-and-greet with their readers in Phoenix. These are considered a fun way to get the FanGraphs community excited and ready for the upcoming season.
But, with the news about the coronavirus growing more and more concerning in early March, Rowley and the leadership at FanGraphs decided that maybe a gathering at a bar to talk baseball was not the best idea.
"It felt like we were being sort of overly cautious and we actually had a couple of commenters in the post announcing the cancellation of that event, thinking that we were being kind of reactionary," Rowley said. "Then a week later, baseball's opening day was postponed. So it's been a really strange month because things have moved so quickly. We were sort of in ramp up to opening day mode getting our positional power rankings posts ready and, taking staff predictions for what the season was going to look like and who was going to win the World Series. And not long after that we were in a position where we realized that we were going to unfortunately have to let most of our freelance contributors go and the site was in sort of rough shape."
As the spread of the vicious virus grew into a global pandemic and national crisis, everyone's concerns shifted to life and death and baseball became something of an afterthought. MLB shut down spring training and pushed back the start of the season as all professional sports went on hiatus. Instead of baseball stats, the country began to focus on the horrifying numbers of sick and dead as well as the growing unemployment and a crashing economy.
This has no doubt had awful, wide-reaching consequences across the globe, touching every aspect of what was normal everyday life. The obvious for sports fans has been the shut down of the leagues, the lack of having games as entertainment and respite from the awful realities. The ripple effects, however, go much deeper into what is a very far-reaching baseball community from high school players hoping to be drafted and ballpark workers who are now without games to work to the now hurting statistically-driven baseball writing community that has blossomed around sites like FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Reference.
All media companies are struggling amid the shutdowns with ad revenue losses and communities hit by job losses. The sports media has been hit even harder. Friday afternoon, SB Nation announced furloughs. Sports Illustrated just announced layoffs. The Athletic has cut its freelance budgets.
For baseball, the threat of losing sites like FanGraphs goes deeper than just another media outlet however. FanGraphs and BP are at many times the entry portals to the new era of Sabermetric baseball that has changed the way the game is being played, covered and thought about. Their alumni now populate the analytics departments and front offices across the game.
But like most other small businesses the contraction of an economy, the baseball economy in this case, has resulted in tough times for these sites and communities.
Baseball Prospectus' losses have been mitigated because it is a subscription-based site and it also publishes an annual. The company also does data analysis for teams. BP president Bret Sayre said that because of that business model, he has yet to have to cut pay or consider layoffs.
"Our biggest thing that we've been doing is trying to reduce as much non personnel expense as possible over the last few weeks. Our value is in our people and our creativity, and that we feel ties directly to how we do with subscriptions and all that," Sayre said. "So we have not cut any staff. We have not reduced our payroll and we are doing everything we can to avoid doing that at all. That's really been our main focus is to keep our staff together and keep our product at a high quality. Even though there are fewer people paying attention to it with everything going on with the world, we want to make sure that the quality of what you put out there is not suffering."
The statistic-site Baseball Reference has asked their users to keep visiting the site, spread the word by recommending the site and, at least for these days, stop using an ad-blocker. Like FanGraphs, they offer a subscription, but it is not necessary to use the site.
FanGraphs is mostly a traffic-based site and at a time when they would have been at the peak of their traffic, rolling out player rankings and previews to help fans with their fantasy drafts and getting ready for the season, traffic to the website all but stopped. As the calendar turned to the scheduled opening day, FanGraphs founder and CEO David Appelman was making hard decisions. He had to cut the pay of the 10 full-time staffers and let go about 20 freelancers. Appelman also shuttered the Hardball Times, the site's long-form journalism platform and put out a blunt state of the site message on March 30 titled "We're asking for help." In it, he asked readers who valued the extensive statistics and analysis the site offered to sign up for a $20 or $50 membership or to buy merchandise to help keep them afloat during the baseball shutdown.
"The support you've shown the site gives us some breathing room, but not as much as is needed," Appelman said in a post on the site updating the situation on April 8. "Our yearly expenses include employee salaries and benefits, contributor pay, stats contracts, and server costs. And even though we continue to roll out new site features and publish new content, our daily traffic is still down 60-70%, sometimes more, affecting our ad revenue."
The response was reassuring on a human level during a stressful time.
"I hope that people know that when baseball is ready to come back, FanGraphs will still be around and providing good content for them and pieces they want to read and insights that they can't get other places, and so I hope people stick with us so that we can stick with them through all this," Rowley said. "It's kind of a weird and strange time for us all."
It's also a time for change for these businesses. It's a chance to change the way they look at stories and ideas, add video and interactions.
Baseball Prospectus has always had an eye for the outside-the-box, deeper analysis, but it is even pushing them to come up with new ideas. They ran a series on every minor league baseball team that is facing contraction under a new MLB proposal. FanGraphs is exploring ideas of how to use their site to help parents with home schooling. Both sites relied on their get-togethers around the country as a way to keep the community engaged and reach out to new possible subscribers. Now, they are looking at what that would look like in a post-coronavirus world.
"It's unfortunate that it's a lack of baseball that is kind of causing us to push the boundaries of our creativity and what we're capable from an infrastructure standpoint but I mean that's what we're all faced with at this point�" Sayre said. "I think when this is all said and done, I think we're going to have come up with some really fun ideas and ways to push our business model forward and try to get people to come join and be a part of our community along the way."
