What is happening!
The new year has arrived and for the 10th anniversary of Pitcher List, I wanted to do something special. Pitcher List has become a product of its incredible community and instead of keeping our successes private, we want to share them with full transparency with those who have supported us along the way. After all, our goal is to make the best baseball experience for every baseball fan, and that is only possible if we’re working in a way that is all about creating and operating in a way that works best for you, not us.
There is a lot to go over today. Let’s begin with reflecting on 2023.
Fun Stats From 2023
20 Million Minutes spent on the website by readers
17 Million Pages viewed by readers on the website
3.6 Million Listens across our podcast network
2.6 Million Readers visited the website
327,000 Messages sent in the Pitcher List Discord
2,500 Articles published as a staff
920 Articles published by yours truly (Ho boy).
2023 Achievements
– Hosted PitchCon 2023 & raised $10,000 for The ALS Foundation (PitchCon 2024 = January 24th-28th!)
– 4x FSWA Nominations across staff, 1x Winner (Baseball Writer of the Year)
– TV Spots for SNY, MASN, ESPN, MLB Network
– CSW% discussed during Apple TV Broadcast
– Hosted three 90-minute live streams with MLB pitchers breaking down their games
- Watch Pablo López and Aaron Civale’s interviews here.
Pitcher List Additions
PL8 Launch – Read more about it here
- Introduced PLV
- Suite of new PLV stats: PLA, QP%, AP%, BP%, Q-BP%, Hitter Performance, Hit Luck
- PLV Season, Weekly, and Daily Projections
- Auction Draft Calculator
- DFS Projections
- Live Draft Assistant Tool
- Percentile Ranks & League Averages across ALL player page stats
- New Mobile Design
- Custom Article Feed to filter homepage articles
- Extra Game Log Data w/ Velocity and Usage Change Arrows
PLV APPs
- Hitter Player Profiles w/ Rolling Charts
- Decision Value, Contact Ability, Power, Swing Aggression, Pitch Hitability
- Pitcher Player Profiles w/ arsenal plots and leaderboards
- Pitch Type Cards w/ location heatmaps
- Added many features across the season (and still more to add!)
- Exclusive to PL Pro users – Currently free for a limited time
Pitcher List Lifetime Subscriptions
We just launched Lifetime Subscriptions in early January as a way to help us fund our future projects through a community that believes in our message and focus, without the influence of outside investment that focuses solely on profits.
Consider becoming a Pitcher List Hall of Famer today and help us execute our vision for a better baseball community – Head to Pitcherlist.com/lifetime
What’s Next For Pitcher List?
This is the fun stuff. I want to outline today what we’re planning for our launch of PLX in February, our early season additions, and what our focus will be moving forward.
I’ll also do something that many will tell me is a bad idea. Let me share with everyone what we’re planning on launching in 2025 and 2026 (Subject to change, of course). It’s my way of showcasing that we truly mean to be more than a fantasy baseball website. We are doing everything we can to become the leaders of the baseball media market and we hope you can help us get there.
First, let’s look at the roadmap for 2024:
PitchCon 2024: January 24th-28th
We’re hosting our fifth annual PitchCon January 24th-28th and we’re excited to add an extra day to the event as we wanted to invite more people than ever.
Our annual goal is to raise $10,000 for The ALS Foundation where 100% of all donations go straight to the cause. You’ll be able to watch live and contribute to the cause at Pitcherlist.com/PitchCon across 55 hours of baseball discussion and presentations from dozens of people across the baseball industry.
PLX Launch: February 6th
It’s the 10th anniversary of Pitcher List after I launched the initial PitcherGifs.com website back in February 2014. Here are the key features we’re excited to release this year:
- Player Page Stat Updates, including career data, PLV data, iVB, and VAA
- Improved Live Draft Assistant Tool with Market Values, expanded customization, and modern look
- 2024 Player Projections powered by PLV available in Auction Draft Calculator
- Podcast Network Expansion with a larger focus outside of fantasy
- 2024 Fantasy Baseball Rankings Released
- Faster website across the board
PL Pro Tools Expansion: April 2024
There’s a large suite of fantasy baseball tools we want to make for our PL Pro users, and we’re able to do so without increasing the cost of a subscription along the way thanks to your support. These new tools include:
- DFS Optimizer for our Daily Fantasy Projections
- SP Projected Starts tool that looks at the full month ahead instead of just 10-14 days
- MiLB Players PLV Apps that allow us to better grade prospects and compare them to MLB performance
- More tools we’ll expand upon later
Pitcher List Mobile App Beta: September 2024
We’ve wanted to launch a mobile app for more than half a decade and I’m thrilled to announce we’re planning to launch a beta at the end of the season for PL+ and PL Pro members, with our official launch coming in early 2025.
We’ve wrestled with creating a mobile app for a long time. The resources it takes to create one is a large investment and while having an easy to read, mobile form of the PL website is obviously a positive, we weren’t able to justify the massive focus it would take without showcasing a reason for people not familiar with Pitcher List to use it.
However, what if this wasn’t just a Pitcher List app? What if it was a Baseball app powered by Pitcher List? That’s what we’re making – a Smart Baseball Feed. A better way to get all your baseball information from final scores and breaking news to player performances, articles from all places (not just Pitcher List), and more. I don’t want to spoil too much today (it’s incredibly hard not to share screenshots with you) and I’m looking forward to having a larger breakdown of the app when we near the closed beta later this year.
That’s our broad outlook for the year ahead, with plenty more additions that will appear along the way. However, we’re working on much more than that behind the curtain for 2025 and beyond, and I encourage everyone who gets excited about the following section to consider becoming a Lifetime Pitcher List Member – it’s the best way you can help us make it all come to fruition.
2025 and 2026 Roadmap
We have so much we want to do and we’re doing everything we can to make them come to light. Here are our current plans for 2025 and 2026:
Please note: These are goals and targets for us, and are not set in stone. This is an outline of what we want to do that is within our grasp and I wanted to take a moment to showcase our ambition and goals for the next few years.
Mobile App Launch: February 2025
As outlined earlier, our mobile app will be paired with PL 11, and be a free app on iOS and Android, ad-free support for PL+ and PL Pro users, and rollouts of new features throughout the years as we continue development. There’s a lot to discuss here and we’ll save that for another time. Until then, consider what you feel is missing from the baseball apps you currently use and share your feedback with us in the Discord.
Pro Dashboard Beta: Summer 2025
We want to make the PL Pro experience as premium as possible and to do that, we need to make the best home for fantasy baseball managers. We plan to start there, before expanding to create an experience that houses everything you need in the baseball world. The 1.0 version of the Pro Dashboard is slated for 2026 with the launch of PL 12, with PL Pro users gaining beta access in the summer of 2025.
Pitcher List Fantasy Platform: February 2026
Fantasy baseball fans, what is the best platform to play the sport? Some have customization, some have the user base, or a simpler interface, others have a better mobile app, better player pool, or certain functions that are unavailable everywhere else.
We believe we can make a modern fantasy platform that can tackle these problems while also serving a better experience for everyone involved. In addition, we can integrate PL Pro tools, provide the stats you care about for players inside the platform, and do so much more than what is currently capable across the current market.
In addition, we’ll be testing the platform internally with staff during Summer 2025, though we are looking into welcoming PL+ and PL Pro members for the process as well.
The Baseball Bar: Early 2026
It’s too difficult to watch a baseball game in your favorite city, and don’t even try if it’s a fall Sunday. We want to make a home for baseball that is a tribute to the sport, where every game has a TV, present our live streams with our community, and welcome so many across the industry from writers to coaches and players to host events and share their passion for the sport.
This isn’t just an idea floating in my head. I’ve fleshed it out and begun the process of making this come to fruition. There are many steps along the way before we can officially launch this, though I felt it was important to share with all of you how serious we are about this. We will do everything we can to make this happen and I can’t wait to see you all there.
Closing Thoughts
The end goal of Pitcher List is to embrace our mission statement: Baseball For All. We want to make every fan feel welcome to enjoy the sport they love without feeling like they need to be something else, while also providing the experiences every fan is looking for.
We’ve accomplished so much with our website and our next steps are to provide the same culture and enthusiasm across all other mediums.
It’s an exciting time at Pitcher List and it’s only because of the remarkable community that has supported us for years. The very least we could do in return was to share with you our goals and plans, which we hope has made you invigorated and enthusiastic about the future.
Let’s build a better baseball community together.
AGA,
-Nick Pollack
This is extremely exciting to see, Nick! Super proud of you and the work that everyone has put into this – you’ve managed to build PL from a website to a community, something which is very hard to do. That’s a testament to the kind of person you are – caring, kind, someone people want to be around, someone who is easy to believe in.
One theme of my life the past few years, when I’ve been much less intimately involved with PL, has been spending nearly all of my time offline. For that reason, I’m particularly excited about the baseball bar. I don’t own a smartphone anymore, so the app (while exciting for you) doesn’t affect my day to day at all. The baseball bar, however, feels like an amazing way to continue building on the community that makes PL so special.
When it opens, you’ll have a regular customer from me (so long as you have guinness)