Photo Credit: Liumantiger/ Dreamstime.com
It’s fall of 2013. Ian Desmond is 27 and is coming off his best year ever. He had hit 24 Home Runs, stolen 24 bases, carried a nice WAR of +3.6, and had two years remaining before Free Agency. The Nats wanted to sign Desmond to a long-term deal that would cover his first five years of Free Agency. That would give the team seven years of stability at Shortstop for the tidy sum of $107 million. Desmond rejected the deal signing instead a two-year extension for $17.5 million that a) avoided arbitration, and b) essentially guaranteed that he would be leaving the team after 2015.
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.