From the Editor’s Desk: Unveiling the New Daily Hit List

It has been a year of great change and experimentation at Baseball Prospectus, and we’re not done yet. This week we will be unveiling several new features that we hope will increase your enjoyment of our content and statistics.

When I was sworn into office, one priority for me was to increase the “portability” of our product, taking some of the cooler information that we provide that had been scattered to different corners of our far-flung empire and uniting it under one umbrella. For example, our adjusted standings, Hit List-adjusted standings, and postseason odds all give a picture of the pennant race in action, but like Peter Parker and Spider-Man, they were never seen in public together.

The first step in changing this was to make a simple adjustment to the presentation of these reports, linking them via a navigation bar that allows you to easily shift between them. We also added the “Hit List Factor” to the adjusted standings page. The next step, one which we complete today, was to make the Hit List, our weekly power-poll equivalent, daily. This would draw together our commentary and daily standings on a more timely basis than the weekly version we’ve been doing for years; the pennant race doesn’t update weekly, so why should we wait that long?

Last week we beta-tested this new version. Today we go public. From now on until the end of the season, you will find the Prospectus Hit List every day in the main article flow. We will publish new commentary Monday through Friday, with Friday’s looking towards the weekend. Don’t hesitate to come back Saturday and Sunday, though, because although we’ll be resting our tired writers for those 48 hours, the numbers will continue to update. By the way, those numbers are fully sortable. The default ranking is by our adjusted Hit List factor, but you can change that by snapping your fingers (although it will help if you click your mouse with your other hand).

In the future, we hope to make our daily Hit List available by email subscription so that each day you can receive this directly instead of having to seek it out. Let me know if that is something you would be interested in. We will also soon be unveiling a compact stats package for which I have the same hopes, a daily bullet of info that you can easily digest and pass along.

I hope you enjoy the new daily Hit List. I look forward to receiving your feedback, either here in the comments or via email. As always, thank you for choosing to spend part of your day with Baseball Prospectus.