Baseball Prospectus, owner of BaseballProspectus.com (BP), today announced it has made its entire archive of premium and fantasy content over one year old completely and permanently free to the public.
Hundreds of original articles from 1997 through 2010 are now available to the masses and will serve as a source of information to baseball analysts everywhere for years to come.
"It's our way of saying thank you to the Internet for making our work possible over the years," said Dave Pease, a partner at Baseball Prospectus.
For the first time, readers will be able to peruse the writings of some of Baseball Prospectus' most famous alumni including Keith Woolner (Cleveland Indians), Keith Law (ESPN), and Christina Kahrl (ESPN). Fans of the modern day staff will get their fill as well by digging into Kevin Goldstein's "Future Shock" series, Jay Jaffe's "Hit List," and Steven Goldman's "You Could Look It Up."
"Baseball Prospectus has been publishing cutting-edge baseball analysis for almost 15 years, from Voros McCracken's groundbreaking studies on the interaction of pitching and defense to Joe Sheehan's deconstruction of Jack Morris to the formative work of political analyst Nate Silver, and this material comprises not just a history of our publication but of the quest to transcend the tired received wisdom of mainstream baseball thought," said Steven Goldman, Baseball Prospectus Editor-in-Chief. "Now that we're making our archive easily available to the public, the reactionary Murray Chass types no longer have an excuse for ignorance. As Casey Stengel would have said, you can look it up."
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Any plans to release a downloadable dump of the archives? There are some text mining geeks who could have a field day with this stuff (self included).
On a related note, any specifics on what license would apply to the archived content? One of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ licenses would be pretty swell. For instance, the CC BY-NC, Attribution-NonCommercial:
"This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms."
On that note (gratuitous plug), I'm going to Chicago this Memorial Day weekend for my birthday so if any BP fans or staff want to meet up, lemme know.
http://www.ology.com/humor/picture-macho-man-randy-savage-stops-rapture
Warning: Adult Content
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/386582/pulling-a-scared-turtle
Apparently Nate Silver isn't as famous as he thinks he is! :)
I would've thrown a plug towards Dan Fox though.
There are hundreds of people who have made Baseball Prospectus successful over the years. Unfortunately, we couldn't list them all in the press release. I'll do my best to give as many shout outs here (in no particular order) to those instrumental in our development. I apologize in advance if I miss somebody. Like I said, this could be a very long list.
Clay Davenport
Rany Jazayerli
Christina Kahrl
Joe Sheehan
Gary Huckabay
Nate Silver
Keith Woolner
Kathy Woolner
Dan Fox
Keith Law
James Click
Russell Carleton
Will Carroll
Cliff Corcoran
Jonah Keri
Dayne Perry
Eric Seidman
David Laurila
Chris Schofield
Derek Zumsteg
Maury Brown
Bryan Smith
...and everyone on our current staff from Kevin Goldstein, Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe, Ben Lindbergh, Marc Normandin, John Perrotto, Dave Pease, and Colin Wyers to Rob McQuown, Larry Granillo, Dan Turkenkopf, Jason Parks, R.J Anderson, Mike Fast, Tommy Bennett, and Corey Dawkins. I haven't forgotten the fantasy guys either...Jason Collette, Craig Brown, Bill Baer, Michael Street, Michael Jong, and Mike Petriello.
Thank you all. We've really appreciated your support!
This policy is the opposite of what many newspapers do with their web sites. Charging per article, and making the transaction cumbersome, has one main result -- people deciding that they can live without reading the newspaper's older material. Result: unless there is a immediate, material need for a particular known article (e.g., reprinting the birth announcements to prove that one was born in a particular place at a particular time), the publications' archives truly down up to the moniker "morgue."
Now I'd like to request that you finally make the comments searchable. The comment section is great but it's frustrating to not know if anyone responded to your comments unless you go back and check each article. Being able to see if someone responded really facilitates discussion.
I've emailed privately over the past 18 months and been told it's in the pipeline, but it really would be nice. Thanks!