When George McFly knocked-out Biff Tannen outside in the parking lot at the ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ dance, it was a victory for those who have felt marginalized by the bully. In fictional film, you can create anything. A win for the revenge of the nerds. The mega athlete with the testosterone flowing in his teenage body doesn’t realize when he picked on the frail kid that one day, as Bill Gates famously said, “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”
The Washington Nationals were one of the last organizations to fully embrace analytics. Billy Beane was a first round draft pick who embraced analytics before it was en vogue. Guys like Bill James was at the forefront of the analytics evolution back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, coining “sabermetrics” and challenging traditional baseball wisdom with objective statistical analysis through his Baseball Abstract series.
In Tampa, they excelled under Andrew Friedman, a former college baseball player at Tulane, who installed one of the most advanced analytics departments in baseball. Anirudh Kilambi was hired by the Rays as an intern in 2015 while he was a student at Cal Berkeley. Friedman had just left the Rays a year before Kilambi arrived. Coincidentally, manager Blake Butera was drafted that same summer by the Rays when Kilambi was there. The pair had previously met and had contact during their shared time with Tampa. Kilambi called Butera a “great communicator.”
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We recently upgraded our comment system to improve reliability, performance, and long-term control, and we’re currently running both systems during the transition. This shift moves us away from an external service to a system we run and control directly—meaning we own the content and can continue improving it over time. We’ve also reduced the comment refresh delay from about 30 seconds to 10 seconds, making it much closer to real-time.
We understand there have been frustrations and increased feedback, and we’re actively working to improve things. What we ask is simple: use the system and give it a fair shot. If you run into issues, please submit them through the support form so we can track and fix them properly. Repeated complaints without details don’t help us solve problems—we appreciate your patience as we continue refining the experience.
If you’d like a full side-by-side comparison of the platforms and the reasons behind this decision, please refer to the chart below. This change is being made with the long-term benefit of the entire community in mind.