Brock Beauchamp

An hour ago, this game was sailing along. Now, not so much.

Okay, a bunch of significant changes were made to ad delivery again, they should kick in any time between now and this evening.

Well, at least this game is moving along quickly.

McCutchen setting the right tone.

K, I'm working on a big project today, will try to take another look at this.

Desktop, right? Because I don't think a mobile header ad exists, at least not for me.

It was a sight we’ve seen all too many times this season across baseball - bad weather, weak bats, fielders standing where the ball is hit - but the Brewers did what they’ve done all season; they scored just enough runs to win while they leaned on their pitching staff to hold onto that lead late. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports It was a sight we’ve seen all too many times this season across baseball - bad weather, weak bats, fielders standing where the ball is hit - but the Brewers did what they’ve done all season; they scored just enough runs to win while they leaned on their pitching staff to hold onto that lead late. It says something about modern baseball: a game with dual no-hitters going through six innings still required 3:01 to complete in front of a sparsely-attended PNC Park on a cold night in Pittsburgh. Brewers 3, Pirates 1 W: Trevor Gott (1-0) L: Wil Crowe (1-1) S: Josh Hader (10) After a wild 12-8 Brewers win the night before that saw Craig Counsell use five pitchers, he needed a quiet night from young lefty Aaron Ashby, which he received if you only look at runs scored. Ashby struggled with command but was ultimately effective, pitching 5.2 innings while only allowing a single hit and issuing five walks. Opposing Ashby, the Pirates used Dillon Peters as a two-inning opener, followed by Bryse Wilson filling the traditional starter role with a four-inning start. I feel like this isn’t something we’re seeing nearly as often this season after openers became trendy in 2020 and 2021, and I’m entirely okay with that being the case. We need baseball to look more like it was 30 years ago, not less. Through the first two-thirds of the game, the Brewer and Pirate pitching staffs tossed zeroes at each other, allowing no hits until Bryan Reynolds singled on a grounder to Willy Adames with two outs in the sixth. While it may appear the pitching staff of both teams was dialed in, watching the game gave a far different impression as the Brewers walked seven while the Pirates walked four. And the lack of hits was often the result of luck on both sides, not dominant pitching. Before Kolten Wong doubled hard to right field in the sixth for the first Brewer hit, Brewer hitters had made contact on balls with the resulting xBA (expected Batting Average): 930, .670, .550, .420, .480. The number of actual hits? Zero. Thankfully, things finally started to roll in the top of the seventh, with the Pirates holding a 1-0 lead after a shaky fifth inning from Ashby, which saw him exit with two outs in the sixth. Leading off the inning, Christian Yelich pulled a 105.9 mph ground ball past the first baseman against Pirate reliever Wil Crowe. Hunter Renfroe quickly blooped a single to right-center, with Yelich taking third. The Pirates continued their Bad News Bears routine as Tellez smashed a ground ball under the glove of first baseman Yoshi Tsutsugo for a two-base error. Tyrone Taylor kept the ground-pounding going with a liner between short and third. Unfortunately, the all-too-common offensive woes continued after this brief outburst. Omar Narvaez went down on strikes with runners on first and second with no outs. Mike Brosseau hit a relatively weak fielder’s choice, Tellez out at third. Wong, weak pop-fly to the left, inning over. The rally had ended, but the Brewers exited the top of the seventh, carrying a 2-1 lead. The Brewers were able to flip to cruise control for two innings, handing the seventh to Brad Boxberger and the eighth to Devin Williams, neither of which relinquished a hit and had clean innings. Sam Howard took the ball for the top of the ninth for the Pirates and had no feel for… anything. He faced leadoff hitter Rowdy Tellez, whom he promptly hit in the right arm. He walked Narvaez and then walked Brosseau, loading the bases. Kolten Wong was up, ready to extend the Brewers’ lead, which he did… by, you guessed it, walking in a run. It required a questionable check-swing call against Andrew McCutchen for Howard to get out of the inning finally, somehow allowing only one run. I want to say Josh Hader came in, closed the game, grabbed the save, and everyone went home four minutes later, but Hader uncharacteristically struggled with control as well. After a borderline ball four call Ke'Bryan Hayes, Hader continued to run up an excessive pitch count while striking out Dan Vogelbach, Michael Chavis, and Tsutsugo to end the game. A win is a win, but Hader is almost certainly unavailable to close the series after throwing 26 pitches to get through a single inning of work and tomorrow's early lunch-time start. The Crew goes for the sweep on the road with an 11:35 CST start time. Freddy Peralta (RHP) goes against Jose Quintana (LHP). View full article

Um... okay.

I'm pretty sure the home run equations only factor in distance, ignoring walls, conditions, wind, etc. And whether you "believe" the number or not, they're literally basing the xBA on tens of thousands of batted ball profiles and matching each ball to its closest equivalents. It's just a computer that has a big ol' database that checks similar historical results. Balls that were hit in a similar fashion fell for hits 93% of the time. I mean, it's not that different than saying you don't believe in the number seven.

Obviously, but that was the fifth consecutive ball with a .400+ xBA that didn't land for a hit, the most unlikely a .930 xBA ball from Adames that wasn't a hit.

Are you kidding me? Every damned ball, right at somebody. A .480 xBA on that ball from Tellez.

The other day, the Red Sox were pretty close to beating the Rays while being no-hit (tenth, zombie runner on second, no outs). I so badly wanted to see a team be no-hit and win.

The xBA on these balls is absurd and have resulted in... zero hits.

But they played the AL Pirates in Camden, where fly balls now go to die. It’s a rough ballpark for offense now, despite it being occupied by the AL Pirates’ pitching staff.

Was Ashby always the intended starter today? Did I lose track of the rotation order?

By the way, I expect to roll out an official dark mode for the site within the next few weeks.

Thanks for the feedback. I’m starting to believe an ad free option might be the best route forward here. I have a site meeting tomorrow and this will be the focus of it.

One thing I'd like to touch on a bit more: the point of this blog post is to illustrate with numbers how, whether you use the other site features or not, you benefit from them because the forum is no longer losing traffic. And all the people operating those portions of the site would not do so without a monthly check for their efforts.

I’ll use a base of 1,000 page views a month or about 30 page views a day. That’s $15 of revenue a month for us.

Out of curiosity, what would you pay monthly for an ad-free version of the site? I don't know that we're anywhere near offering this (but we do offer it on Twins Daily), I'm just curious.

Both teams or the Brewers? I mean, I might take the over either way.

If the lineup continues to be this bad, sure. They're currently 28th in baseball with a wRC+ of 75. Looking up and down this lineup, this is not a 28th place squad. They're not great by any means but they're also not terrible.

I know some of you have been frustrated with the ad experience and I'm frustrated, too. My vow is that I will attempt to address everyone's concerns to the best of my ability, as it's literally my job to provide all of you with a quality experience on Brewer Fanatic. The following is not an excuse for a bad experience; I simply want all of us to understand and operate with the same knowledge base. I will continue to refine and tweak the ad experience until all (or really "most") of us can reach a happy middle ground. I'm going to pull back the veil a little bit and show some numbers that explain what was happening not only on BrewerFan.net, but across the internet to almost all independent forum sites. The reality is that Reddit and Facebook are killing independent communities by the truckload and BrewerFan.net was no exception. Here is the user traffic from April of 2017 through the day the site was relaunched as Brewer Fanatic. As you can see, traffic was accelerating toward terminal velocity and this graph is actually the norm today in the wake of the assault from social media giants. From the outside, forums often look like they're stable until they're suddenly not and a quick death usually follows. Even during the Brewers 2021 postseason run, BrewerFan.net attracted only ~60% of the users it attracted through 2017, 2018, and 2019. I haven't been exaggerating when I said BrewerFan.net wouldn't make it another 3-4 years at the rate it was atrophying. There are the numbers and you can see I wasn't exaggerating. I've talked to several forum owners over the past year and this kind of graph is alarmingly common. It saddens me to no end to see all these great communities withering away but it's the reality of the situation. Now let's compare that user graph to the same time frame on Twins Daily. You probably see where I'm going with this. What makes Twins Daily different - and where Brewer Fanatic is now - is that we pay our creators. By protecting the forums with high-quality content on a daily basis, people don't naturally drift to Facebook or Reddit and instead, we keep attracting more users. The forums get bigger, we have more volunteers to create great daily content like the game threads and debate forums; the Twins Daily community is exceptionally vibrant. None of that would exist without all those paid roles wrapping the forums in a protective envelope. Which is why we need to run ads and why ad blockers genuinely hurt a community. The people running this site don't pocket advertising money, we consistently reinvest it back into our writers, video creators, and even our moderators. You'll notice a big jump in Twins Daily's traffic starting in 2019. I'll give you one guess when we finally "figured out" how to implement advertising well and started paying our content creators much more money than we could afford before that point. And it's working for Brewer Fanatic, just as it worked on Twins Daily. In April of 2022, Brewer Fanatic is attracting 50% more people than BrewerFan.net did in April of 2021. Again, none of this is an excuse for all of you to have a bad, jumpy experience on the site. I'm going to keep working diligently to improve the experience and I use the site, too. If something frustrates you, it's probably frustrating me as well. I'm here and I will always listen to your suggestions because without users, a community is an empty shell. But I hope you now realize why keeping things as-is on BrewerFan.net wasn't really an option, either. If this community is going to persist, it needs a stable, robust revenue source and ads are really the only way to achieve that goal.

Trust me, I share your frustration. And I'm also primarily testing in macOS and Chrome so I'm at a loss here and it's pissing me off, to be perfectly frank about it. But I'm going to keep plugging away at it. If we have to throw money at it, we'll take that route. I'm earnestly trying to strike a balance with this situation and the fact I can't reach that equilibrium is frustrating the hell out of me.