Redblacks Stampeders. Featured Teams. Home Odds. Bayern Munich Dortmund. Celtic Rangers. Toggle navigation Subscribe. By Jen McCaffrey A few days after Dave Cameron moved cross-country from North Carolina to Oregon in the fall of , he wandered to a nearby dog park for a much-needed break from unpacking. It was San Diego Padres general manager A. He was calling with a job offer.
It was a cold call. Even more confounding? He was flattered, if a bit bewildered by the unexpected call, and declined the job offer. Eight months later, the Padres GM called again.
Instead, Preller had another proposal. Already a subscriber? Today, we announced a number of new contributor voices at FanGraphs and will do so at RotoGraphs soon.
And as an exclusive benefit for our Members, you can now view the site in Dark mode and Classic mode. Tuesday is the start of what is now a very important month for the site. On March 30, , we asked for your help in weathering the pandemic. As such, a significant portion of our Membership base is up for renewal in the coming weeks. Pre-orders will be open until May 1, and all orders will start shipping May Now that the season is officially over, I thought it would be a good time to give a complete update on where things stand business-wise for FanGraphs.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Our traffic has started to return to normal, but we are still seeing a significant decline in advertising rates compared to their pre-pandemic levels. Maybe you work for a team, and FanGraphs is your homepage. The offseason is when our revenue is typically at its lowest and with the lack of advertising revenue this season to propel us through, every little bit will help us bridge the gap to the season.
We are so grateful to have such supportive readers. This has forced us to become considerably more reliant on Memberships to make up the difference. With baseball scheduled to return in a couple of weeks, I wanted to give everyone an update on how FanGraphs is doing business-wise. For those of you who are returning to the site for the first time since the season was postponed, a lot has happened since you last visited. The cuts that got Rorabaugh, which Trib Total Media blamed on a plunge in ad revenue, showed just how widespread the damage from the next few months is likely to be.
Sports columnist Kevin Gorman, who joined the paper in , also lost his job. Newspaper sportswriters already knew the horrors of the ad crunch, shrinking budgets, and the stewardship of hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Now, the carnage is moving faster. When Rorabaugh broke into journalism in , his career followed a typical newspaper trajectory.
He filled in agate and box scores at the rival Pittsburgh Post-Gazette until he scored an in-house blog and started helping with Penguins reporting. He left the Post-Gazette after he was moved to a desk job; he later did a stint at The Athletic. Last fall, Rorabaugh got the call for a big job: the Penguins beat writer at the Tribune-Review.
Rorabaugh held the job for all of about seven months. He has applied for unemployment and has enough savings to get by for a while. In his Twitter goodbye , Rorabaugh hinted that he might be finished with writing hockey. A Times staffer would have filed away the event for a memoir. For a freelancer like Arnold, it was a disaster. Sportswriting has a sprawling freelance class that chips in game stories and features and bulks up the roster of newspapers already stretched thin by budget cuts.
When Arnold covers the Big Ten tournament for the Times , he makes a newspaper seem like it has a greater reach than it does. If freelancers live in a near-constant state of economic anxiety, the cancellation of games has made it worse.
When former newspaper staffers enter the freelance market, there are fewer assignments for everyone. Moreover, content farms have created a permanent freelancer class. In an economic downturn, that makes writers even easier to cut. Dave Hogg, who works out of Detroit, had gigs that almost seemed recession-proof. Those gigs evaporated when the leagues suspended play.
Harris, too, found out that all his gigs had vanished. The Advocate told Smith his freelancing was being paused for six weeks. In a nervy period in New Orleans, which has more than 2, confirmed cases of the coronavirus, Smith is able to get insurance through his wife, a college professor.
One night this month, Larry Lage, an AP sportswriter, got to thinking about such cases.
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