Welcome to Pitcher List 6.0

Phew. It’s been a long journey to get here and there’s still so much left to do. What you’re seeing today is another major step in the direction we want to go at Pitcher List. We want to be the place you turn to for everything baseball, where you can find a wide array of articles by our incredible writing team, listen to dozens of podcasts and be your new, go-to place to look up your favorite players. It’s the dream I’ve had since Pitcher List made its debut in 2015 and I hope 6.0 is a showcase of what’s to come for years ahead.

There’s a lot to cover today, but first I want to acknowledge the hard-working team that helped craft much of what you’re seeing today: Our development team led by Jeff Nyveen, with Brett Goldhammer, Rafi Kam, Ben Birney, and Riley Schoonover, and our Database Engineers David Fenko, Will Gladstone, Brandon Lundberg, and Steve Paulo. They’ve worked tirelessly crafting these player pages and they deserve plenty of applause for it.

Let me outline here what you can find today on the 6.0 website and a glimpse of what we’re building for the 2021 season and beyond. First, you can watch this release video:

 

 

2021 Fantasy Rankings

Instead of revealing them through the full month of February, all of our rankings are now live on the site.

We’ve implemented a way to jump between articles in a series easily, so you can move between our Shortstop rankings and the Top 200 pitchers with ease at the top of each rankings article.

In addition, head here for our full 2021 Draft Kit that we’ll continue to add through the pre-season. Scott Chu did an incredible job writing up all our positional rankings and the inimitable Rick Graham broke down his top relievers for both saves and holds.

 

New PL+ Tiers

Despite 2020 throwing all of us a curveball, we’ve been thrilled about the response to PL+ and we’re excited to add more in 2021 – Pitcherlist.com/plus

For PL+, you’re still getting a completely ad-free website and access to our 700+ member Discord, where we have podcast and article notifications, helpful news updates, lineup cards, open discussion with our entire staff and community and so much more. It’s the best place there is.

We’ve also created a new account page that includes player alerts, a place to create your own article feed based on the players you want to follow.

All of this and more with the same PL+ cost.

With 6.0, we’ve added two new tiers: PL DFS and PL VIP. We’re creating our own daily ranking system – PL Bot – and being a DFS member will give you access to our projected ranks as well as a Fantasy Optimizer for DraftKings and FanDuel. You’ll also get access to our DFS channel inside Discord to exchange plays and ideas with our staff and DFS community.

With PL VIP, you get everything from PL DFS and one of the most requested additions: a 1-on-1 fantasy coach for the entire 2021 season. We’ll assign you a coach from our talented staff based on your needs and form a relationship that’s more than just simple sit/start fantasy advice. You’ll also receive a PL VIP shirt courtesy of us, a special Discord flair, and access behind the velvet rope to our VIP channel inside Discord.

Help support what we do here at Pitcher List and consider joining PL+ today. We hope there is a tier for you.

PitchCon

We announced last week that PitchCon was arriving tomorrow, and we’ve elected to condense the event to four days, beginning this Thursday at 11:00am EST.

Full details of the event can be found inside this post, with many prizes to win just for filling out a Google Form and being a viewer of the event. We’re all thrilled to talk baseball with everyone while supporting a fantastic cause in Feeding America and I hope to see you there.

 

Homepage

We’ve changed how our homepage looks for a few reasons. First, with our incredibly vast writing staff, we have more content than ever at Pitcher List, with up to twenty different posts going live on the site in-season. To accommodate, we’ve changed our featured section so more than one article can get the attention it deserves.

We’ve also added an extra header bar to help your site navigation and improved our search. You can’t have a player database without a good search, you know.

 

Podcasts

With such a large community of smart and enthusiastic baseball fans, we elected to move from just one podcast feed to a proper network.

Introducing the Pitcher List Podcast Network.

We currently have 21 feeds to choose from, including independent RSS feeds of On The Corner and The First Pitch Podcast to 15 brand new shows from our staff. Jump to our Podcasts page to see the full list of shows ranging from stories of Baseball History to keeper league focuses and helping you manage your waiver wire. I guarantee you’ll fall in love with many of them.

Player Pages

Yeah, so this is a lot. I selfishly wanted to showcase granular pitch data in a new way to help me craft my daily SP Roundups and I began working with Riley last summer to design a page that would be the greatest pitcher page you could imagine. The development team worked black magic to make this work and it’s truly a remarkable feat. What you’ll see on these pages are:

• Easily accessible strike zone plots and pitch details from each pitched game
  • SP Roundups blurbs will be found here the day after I write them.
• Filters for every game and every pitch type
• GIFs and blurbs for each pitch
• A Quirks section that pulls from the data to generate layman analysis and quickly understand a player
• Tables for understanding a pitcher’s approach with each pitch and overall
• Tooltips for every stat

It’s a lot and we hope this makes your process of learning about each pitcher easier than ever. Please don’t hesitate to leave us suggestions for new additions moving forward, such as rolling charts, count heatmaps, and more.

A few things I want to note:

• Baseball data is a hard thing to get correct. There are so many data points, in-play oddities, and subjective descriptions that it’s nigh impossible to stay consistent across data providers. We’re currently partnered with Inside Edge for our player page data and have been impressed with their deep range of data. We are also looking into utilizing other data sources to help improve the pages as best we can and please have patience with us as we continue to improve.
• Fastballs are currently combining Four-Seamers and Two-Seamers, not as a choice of our own. We’re working on a solution for this and will keep you updated.
• We want to add filters to each table and continue to expand what is featured on these pages
• No Statcast data is being used. We would love to do so and with your support, we hope to afford it in the near future.
• We’re already working on expanding our Hitter pages to include their game logs by Opening Day

Give it a spin! Here’s Aaron Nola’s page to get you started. We hope you’ll have as much as we do jumping between pitchers and seeing their pitches, locations, and stats.

 

Leaderboard

What good is a player page if you can’t see how he stands up to the rest of the league? It was important for us to create a leaderboard that was accessible and encouraged users to interact with it, instead of staring at a wall of filters and turning away.

In short, we created a CSW leaderboard and so much more.

You can sort by pitch type and quickly grasp which curveball had the best CSW across the last three weeks. Or learn whose slider had the most called strikes. It’s easy to get lost in here.

We’re going to keep adding functionality and building on top of it, always keeping the simple “Create a filter” to make the process smooth and straightforward. We’ll keep you posted here.

At the moment, you can only add filters that are accessible in the current tab (there is just so much data to sift through!). It’s in our roadmap to add the ability to cross filter between tabs and expand the way you can compare players across the leagues.

There’s a lot we want to do with this leaderboard and we’re excited to have a strong foundation to build on.

Thank You

Today is only possible because of all of your support for what we do. From listening to our podcasts, sharing our posts, and getting a PL+ subscription, you’re helping an independent baseball site create new experiences and content unlike anywhere else. I personally can’t take in how exceptional it is for us to be able to continue doing what we do and truly, thank you for being a part of it. Today’s new site was made for you and we all hope you enjoy it.

There’s still much more we want to do behind the scenes and if you’d like to be a part of it, you can apply here,

Thanks for making Pitcher List what it is today and we can’t wait for what’s ahead.

-Nick Pollack