Pitcher List began in my NYC apartment in November 2013, after I watched a slow-motion GIF of Matt Harvey’s fastball barely clip the outside corner. As a former college pitcher, travel baseball coach, and pitching consultant, it made me want a site dedicated to visualizing pitchers where I could grasp their ability on a different level than the spreadsheets of data found on other sites.
Pitcher GIFs then launched in February 2014 as a small WordPress site, featuring GIFs across all pitchers in the majors, showcasing each weapon in their arsenal. I was fortunate to work with a few friends to fill out the site with fantasy baseball articles and daily pitching GIFs, and we quickly found popularity on Twitter and Reddit.
Sadly, Pitcher GIFs came to an abrupt end in May 2014, but we came back as Pitcher List in 2015, introducing my weekly Top 100 Starting Pitchers List, and we haven’t stopped since. We’ve been featured on ESPN, FanGraphs, CBS, NBC, Yahoo!, BaseballHQ, MSG Networks, Bloomberg Sports, Grantland, The Ringer, and many other media outlets.
Since those early days, Pitcher List has grown tremendously. I currently work with nearly 200 incredible people (all paid!) to help create our baseball haven. Our staff ranges from developers to editors, graphic designers, and writers, all unified by our goal of creating a baseball sanctuary free of the traditional corporate process – there are no investors or “higher-ups” here. That means everything we raise at Pitcher List goes straight back into the site, fueling our next big addition to the site – I wonder if you can imagine what’s next.
Despite starting as a GIF database site, we’ve expanded into many new areas across the years. We added our sister site QB List for fantasy football, developed top-of-the-line player pages including granular pitch data, launched two dozen podcasts, and created the deepest fantasy baseball coverage found on the internet with nearly 20 pieces of original content each day in season through podcasts, livestreams, videos, and articles.
We have also made impacts in baseball analytics, inventing CSW in 2018, made popular by Alex Fast’s incredible award-winning article in 2019. CSW is now utilized by MLB organizations and can be found across stats databases across the web.
Our mission statement is simple: Let’s create the best baseball website on the internet. To do so, we must not spin hot takes but create good discussion, inclusive to all. We’re all here because we love this beautiful game and we dream to create the perfect home for its community.
Welcome to Pitcher List.
-Nick Pollack, Founder CEO