Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> New Online Sources

About the author, Boyd Nation

For a long time, I felt like I was the only one out here. Not to overestimate my own importance, but for a long time this was the only continually updated Web site dedicated to the college game as a whole. Baseball America does a good job of covering the game as a part of their coverage of the game of baseball as a whole, and USA Today started a weekly column last year on their Web site, but all in all news and analysis for the game as a whole was sorely missing. I do what I can, but this is essentially a one-man shop and is likely to stay that way.

There's a reason for that paucity of online resources (probably several, but there's one that's near and dear to my heart) -- it's hard and may be impossible to actually make money covering just college baseball on the Web. Baseball America and USA Today do it by including coverage as part of a larger picture, designed to sell print copies. For a single site, though, revenue streams are hard to come by. The more astute of you have noticed that there's no sign of any revenue streams around here -- I've never bothered with advertising, although I have considered it and reserve the right to do so again in the future, because I've never found it to be of sufficient financial benefit to justify the trouble of managing it on my part or putting up with it on your part. It's possible that a single corporate sponsor might work, but nobody's beating down my door on that front, and I doubt that anyone else would have more luck on that front. Subscription models are the best current option, but I'm not willing to declare anything that I already do to be "premium content," and I really don't have the time to produce much more, especially in the context I'm already working in. I'm optimistic about micropayments in the long run, but they've been 3-5 years off for a while now, and I'm not sure they're getting closer.

Nonetheless, there are three new sites this spring that have the potential to help out the frustrated college baseball fan. One of them is aiming for a national audience, while the other two are covering two of the conferences with the largest fan bases out there.

The new national coverage site on the block is College Baseball Insider. There are no revenue streams in sight here, so it's being done as a labor of love by three guys from Virginia, at least for the time being -- I've been unable to get a response from them on long-term plans before needing to get on to "press" with this. As with all things, the design is not exactly the way I would have done it, but it's quite useable, and the content is already good and has tremendous potential for growth -- I like both the Notes and Road Trip sections.

The two new conference fan sites are Big12Baseball.com and SECBaseball.com. Both are part of the reborn Rivals network (Rivals went broke last year, but one of the surviving remnants bought the rights to the name and is back in business with a scaled-down model more dependent on subscriber fees than advertising revenue). That's good and bad -- they get a good bit of good old synergy from interacting with other Rivals sites, but they also have popup ads (the Proxomitron is your friend, lads). These two sites both definitely have a lot to contribute, though -- they're both working pretty well both as originators of content and as one-stop gatherers of all the news directly from the schools. I think both sites are in the process of building their writing staffs -- if you're interested in some resume padding as a school correspondent or something, you might drop the respective webmasters a line. Both sites are completely free for the time being, although I assume that they'll both follow the usual Rivals model of adding subscriber-only content after building sufficient readership.

Complete disclosure note: The chief cook and bottle washer at SECBaseball.com is a friend of mine; I may end up writing for them occasionally when I have SEC-specific thoughts that need a more tightly focused forum than this.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye or, on the other hand, starts where pitchers were pulled according to plan early despite pitching extremely well in close games.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> New Online Sources

About the author, Boyd Nation