Brock Beauchamp

They're down, I haven't had time to look into why that is the case yet.

A few people have asked about traffic and I wanted to give a quick update on site activity. The site re-launched on March 26th of this year and all data goes through yesterday, June 21st. Some of these numbers might not look that impressive but keep in mind that for 11 days in early May, we lost the NSBB domain. Two of those days had zero traffic and nine more had roughly 50% normal traffic while we fought to regain control of the primary domain from an unresponsive domain registrar. Overall, things are going pretty well in my eyes. Losing those 10+ days kinda knee-capped us in the short-term but we're not in this for the short-term. We lost some really vital SEO priority, regular direct traffic, and social influence that will take time to rebuild. We're still not quite back to where we were just before the domain went FUBAR for those ten days but that will right itself over time if we just keep plugging along. Anyway, some numbers. We will be comparing the same time period (Mar 26-June 21) for 2023 and 2022. We've seen a significant uptick in users thanks to our outreach with social media, search engine optimization, and use of content aggregators. That has led to a +49.6% growth in users and a +55.4% growth in new user visits. Our registrations are lower than I'd like to see but we've seen 32 new registrations to the site compared to only 12 over the same period last year. Forum content has been really promising, especially factoring in those lost days of traffic. During that period of time we've seen 11,929 posts created in the forums compared to 10,976 posts over the same period of time last year. One of the ways this is happening is changing up how game threads are handled. I hope to return to letting users create them in the future but I need to figure out a better way to manage those before we can do that. It's wayyyyyyy easier for me to create the thread every morning than juggling who has today's thread and making sure it gets on the site in a timely fashion. Don't worry, this isn't permanent, I just need a little head space to re-evaluate how to manage it under the old "rules". Anyway, already in 2023 we've seen 30 game threads go over 50 replies. In the entire 2022 season, that happened only ten times. The new system is attracting a lot more commentary, we just need to work in the old flavor while maintaining that uptick in posting. That's about all I have right now! Thanks again to everyone who has helped me navigate all the bumps and bruises of the transition and if you ever have input on how to change or improve things, my door is always open!

Thanks to @Seth Stohs for doing this research this morning, a lot of useful info in these tweets:

Gonna wait until the draft, as that will inject 2-3 additional prospects people will want to put in the top 20. Last year I tried doing it monthly and everyone kinda agreed that was a bit too much.

It's actually pretty simple, you get additional points for different content and I try to scale it based on the difficulty of creating said content. Going roughly from memory, this is the scale (or close to it): 1 point - get a reaction from someone 2 points - create a post 5 points - create a topic 10 points - create a blog entry Then there's a bunch of random other stuff, too. If you hit a milestone like 1,000 posts in the MiLB forum, you might get 50 points or something like that.

I am incapable of recalling people who played for two specific teams. It's just something my brain refuses to do for some reason.

I tend to agree with this, though the reality of the NL Central is that it's not going to take much to win the division and only the division winner will make the postseason.

Huh. So this team could leave London with a .500 record.

Plenty of time to see how things play out. Here are his 2023 numbers going into today: ERA: 2.86 xERA: 4.53 FIP: 3.35 xFIP: 4.96

I really didn't expect this team to leave this series in third place but they're well on their way to doing just that.

Mancini looked like he was doing at least 17 feet per second in that home stretch.

Hey, no pornographic language on the forums.

Wrist injuries are some of the most terrifying in baseball. A guy can miss two months in the blink of an eye and they often take a ridiculously long time to fully heal and get back up to speed.

Shuffling starters around a bit to start Steele and Stroman against the Cards. Nice.

Oh yeah, that's rather ill-timed for the Cubs. A couple of days off right as they're rolling, then a couple of games on a different continent.

The Cubs are in third place, only three games under .500, and looking to sweep the Pirates again in a very early Wednesday start. Hendricks hasn't been missing bats - even by his standards - but he has been effective. Opposing him for the Pirates is the 54-year-old Dick Mountain.

Stroman sure is pitching for a paycheck this winter.

They were tied to some additional permissions we were using during the transition. Now, they effectively mean nothing at least between verified/old-timey. Provisional members still exist and must have their content approved before it appears.

The Cubs are 8-2 over their last ten, are 0.5 GB their opponent today for third place in the NLC, and 4.5 games ahead of the Cardinals. This is a pretty nice run and they put Stro on the mound again tonight.

The Pirates appear to be turning back into a pumpkin and are falling down the standings. It would require a Cubs sweep to take third place from them but given how Pittsburgh has played, a sweep is very possible.

Yeah. Thankfully I happen to have Peacock right now because we're watching Poker Face.

The Brewers are going to live and die on pitching and defense. I wouldn't necessarily say their lineup "stinks" but it's not good. It has also underperformed enormously. That could continue, it could change. Willy Adames has an OPS+ of 80. Maybe he'll bounce back but maybe he's now Javy Baez. *shrugs*

The Brewers have kinda lucked into their first place spot and outplayed their pythag by quite a bit while their roster was injured. I don't know what to expect next, though. Wade Miley just returned to the rotation, Brandon Woodruff is throwing from flat ground. If the Brewers "get right", I'm not sure anyone in the division can catch them but an injury-plagued team "getting right" often never happens. One more setback from Woodruff and the wheels could come off in a hurry, especially if their offense continues to sputter.

It's another streaming non-Marquee game, this time on Peacock. The Cubs have a chance for back-to-back sweeps with a win today and have climbed right back into the NLC, only 3.0 GB of the Brewers.