Blue Jays Plus

Overview

Toronto had an enormous baseball audience and almost no writing that took advanced analytics seriously. Coverage was either mainstream and stats-light, or American and focused elsewhere. Blue Jays Plus was built to fill that gap: sabermetric analysis of one team, written for readers who wanted the numbers rather than the narrative.

I co-founded BlueJaysPlus.com and ran it as Managing Editor from 2013. Baseball Prospectus acquired the site and relaunched it under their masthead as Baseball Prospectus Toronto, which is the name it carried from then on.

What It Took

• A defensible niche: Competing with national outlets on breaking news was hopeless. Competing on analytical depth for a single team was winnable, and that focus is what the audience came for.

• Editorial standards: Running a contributor roster meant setting a consistent bar for how claims were supported, so a reader could trust any piece on the site regardless of byline.

• Sustained output: Audience growth in this category comes from publishing consistently over years, not from any single viral piece.

Outcome

• Grew to 500k-1M annual page views, becoming a leading source for advanced Blue Jays analysis.
• Acquired by Baseball Prospectus, the field’s most established publication, and relaunched as Baseball Prospectus Toronto.
• Published analysis in ESPN and the Baseball Prospectus Annual (2016-2017).

This is also where the analytics habit that runs through the rest of my work started: finding the measure that actually explains the outcome, and being willing to discard the one everybody quotes.