A good comment in response:
"This is the article I’ll have in mind when I let my membership lapse.
I don’t mean that as an attack on the author, who I commend for engaging with readers below. Nor as a disparagement of his approach to baseball – there are an infinite number of ways to enjoy the sport, and I’m glad he has found one that works for him – but it’s just not for me.
More specifically, it strikes me as undifferentiated from the overwhelming majority of sports content I can find online, and that’s not what I have come to FanGraphs for.
“Who cares where you are on the win curve?” and “Chicks dig the long ball!” are obviously perfectly valid perspectives – but they are ubiquitous. An angle that I can get from ESPN, or Yahoo Sports, or a seemingly infinite breadth of sites across the internet. Heck, I could go back and read old Mike Lupica and Dan Shaughnessy articles (or new ones, if they are still alive and writing about baseball).
I personally love baseball both on the field AND off the field; I enjoy thinking about a franchise over the long term – including things like the allocation of finite resources, player value versus player cost, etc. And from a less wonky angle, as a fan I DON’T want my team to “just go for it” every year. I appreciate that moving from 77 wins to 81 wins doesn’t increase my enjoyment of the game if it comes at the cost of a move from 84 to 89 wins next year.
For a long time, FanGraphs has been a great place to read about the sport from that analytical angle. That is clearly changing. I had been thinking that some of the recent articles were just frustrated, overwrought responses to a slow off-season. But this is different; this is an explicit choice to hire a writer whose first article, to me, turns away from what I have enjoyed most about the site.
I don’t mean for this to sound petty, and from the comments and votes below, it appears I may be in the minority. That’s good; I hope the people who work here find success and the remaining readers find enjoyment. In the same way I don’t begrudge a franchise owner who runs his/her team to maximize long-term success, I don’t begrudge Appelman if this is what he has to do to maximize ad revenue. Online content publishing is a brutally tough business, and maybe the previous content has proven too nichey and a more boilerplate approach is the answer financially. But I’ll just make one tiny vote with my wallet and look to dedicate my support elsewhere.
The internet is a hydra, and in the same way that FanGraphs’ audience may have initially sprung from what Baseball Prospectus became in the first few years post Nate Silver, I am hopeful this post-Cameron FanGraphs may ultimately open an outlet elsewhere for analytically-inclined authors to flourish.
Until then – So long, and thanks for all the fWAR."