The Futility Infielder

Sponsored by The Futility Infielder

The Internet is a tough racket to make a buck in, kiddo. I learned it the hard way. Six years ago, I worked for a weasel whose company churned out guidebooks about websites. Real paper-and-ink books about a medium that was moving so fast it turned our product into Instant Doorstop. But you don't want to hear that story. It gets ugly fast, goes downhill from there, and puts me in a very grouchy mood.

Suffice it to say, my experience taught me one thing: it's a cold day in hell when somebody gets excited about paying for a website. But that's exactly what happened Monday when the online baseball encyclopedia, excuse me, Thee Online Baseball Encyclopedia, baseball-reference.com, announced it was selling sponsorships of individual pages. The result set off an entertaining feeding frenzy, as those of us who admire the labor-of-love website and the work put into it by its founder, Sean Forman, opened our wallets without hesitation.

Forman has come up with an ingenious plan to help offset the bandwidth costs of his site, which has served over 80 million pages in two years. For the three of you here with no interest in baseball statistics, those pages contain stats--from the most basic to the most obscure--of every major league player and team. Ever. It's a brilliant site because it's lean and clean. Everything is cross-linked, and it all loads quickly. The 1998 Yankees link to Tim Raines, which links to the 1986 National League leaderboard which links to Fernando Valenzuela, ad infinitum. A guy could spend hours there.

B-Ref is selling hyperlinked text ads on each page for $5 and up, based upon how much traffic that page receives. The most expensive player, Barry Bonds, goes for $290; the most expensive page, the league directory page, rolls for $385 a month. Babe Ruth: $240 a year. Luis Sojo: $10.

And the feeling of sponsoring the Luis Sojo page: priceless. Having supported B-Ref in the past but still feeling karmically indebted, I put my money where my mouth is upon discovering the sponsorship opportunity. As Sean graciously rewarded my past work on the site (I designed the Babe Ruth banner and button) with some matching funds, I quickly found myself with a bankroll and a lunch hour to spend it.

I sprung for eight pages in all:

• A few true-blue futility infielders: Sojo, whom I informally claimed as the 2001 Futility Infielder of the Year), Mario Mendoza (the man with the Line), and Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, the first player or ex-player ever to refer to himself as a futility infielder. Gardenhire, by dint of the Twins' success in his rookie year managing, has already clinched the 2002 Futility Infielder of the Year award, unless Fred Stanley rescues a house full of burning kittens, Mickey Klutts stumbles on a cure for cancer, or Enrique Wilson wins World Series MVP.

• A trio of my Wall of Famers: Tommy Lasorda, Pedro Guerrero, and Jay Buhner (the best ballplaying Jay ever). I've been meaning to write more of these, and I can see sponsoring a few of the less expensive ones as I expand this site.

• Two Yankee favorites: Alfonso Soriano and David Cone. One becoming a star, the other on the verge of retirement and enshrinement in the Wall, if not the Hall, of Fame.

A pretty good haul, I'd say. The only player I really wanted that I couldn't get was Jim Bouton, already taken by Don Malcolm of bigbadbaseball.com. My brain cramped as somebody else on Baseball Primer bragged about sneaking off with the 1969 Seattle Pilots: "THE ONLY ONE!" To quote the immortal (and as yet unclaimed at $10) Pilots manager Joe Schultz, "Ah, shitfuck."

Plenty of other people were just as swept away; Forman claimed over 180 pages sponsored by 140 users in the first day, including at least one who got out of hand: "I had to cut one guy off earlier," he wrote on the Primer thread. "He clearly had left his senses. I hope you don't all get your credit card bills next month and think, 'What the hell was I thinking?' Please sponsor responsibly."

Many of the sponsorships were obscure obsessions gone vanity plate (Floyd Rayford: $5); several other webloggers, like me, used theirs to flog their blogs. Baseballblog.com's Aaron Gleeman (a Twins fan) bemoaned the rising cost of sponsorships (which last 12 months) as pages grew in popularity: "I was hoping I could keep Adam Dunn for a few years. It may turn out to be a small market/large market situation. I won't be able to afford Adam Dunn and Torii Hunter when they start getting more page views, so I will have to let them go. Then Sponsorship Yankees will just grab them up for big bucks."

That's optimism for you. We should all be so lucky that B-Ref thrives enough to cover its costs and repay its founder for the work (and thought) he's put into it. Go buy yourself a player, and support a great site.