A Letter From The New Baseball America Owners

Baseball America has been under new ownership for a few months now, but today represents one of the most noticeable changes you will have seen so far: a new design for BaseballAmerica.com. It’s the first in a series of improvements you can come to expect from us now at Baseball America.

But before we get to that, a little about how we got to this point.

Simply put, it is time that Baseball America is owned by diehard baseball fans that live and breathe this great game. What was founded and cultivated over the 35 years before our ownership is a premier product. Having the best baseball journalists in the world, it’s the new ownership’s job to maintain this gem, build off of it, and grow it.

Make no mistake, this is as much a passion project as it is a business venture.

I was a Mets fan out of the womb. My father, growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was naturally a Dodgers fan. From as early as I can remember, he told me stories about Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang, the Redding Rifle (Carl Furillo), Ebbets Field, Jackie Robinson and his dislike for the Yankees. My father passed his love of baseball on to me.

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, my first baseball memory came in 1973. I was eight, and the Mets lost the World Series to the Athletics in seven games. I remember when that last game ended, my older brother, who was 10, was so upset that he broke a piece of furniture. My mom wasn’t happy, but she understood.

That was my first experience of the lows and highs of this great game. Acquiring Baseball America is the ultimate high.

We are Minor League Baseball owners (of the Omaha Storm Chasers, Richmond Flying Squirrels, and soon to be Montgomery Biscuits), and as such, we consider ourselves custodians of the game. We control only the things that happen outside the lines, but what we love most is what happens between the lines.

With owning Baseball America, it is not only incumbent upon us to sell subscriptions, but also to shape the conversation, to promote the game to a younger generation while keeping an older generation satisfied, and to be the best possible voice for our national pastime. These goals stem not from some financial decision, but from our love and passion for the game.

We may own Baseball America in name now, but BA has been and will continue to belong to the community of baseball fans. We work for you: the reader, fan, player, fantasy player, high school or college coach, general manager, owner—everyone who is passionate about this game we all love.

As someone in the industry who helps shape the way the game is viewed, I continually come face to face with a dichotomy: Is baseball a business, a form of entertainment, or is it a game that can rise to the level of religious experience?

The upstarts may look at the game as entertainment. Longtime fans may view it as a passion. At Baseball America, we realize that passion is why we love the game, but running it as a successful form of entertainment is how we will perpetuate the game.

We want to bring baseball into the future while respecting the past. Covering emerging trends from what styles players are wearing, to the World Baseball Classic, to debating new rule changes, it will be our job to stay ahead of the curve.

One of the ways we’ll do that is with our digital platform, which will continue to grow and play a vital part in our effort to reach future generations of fans.

All of the changes you’ll see on the site today are designed to improve your experience as a user and put the content that you most want to see where you can more easily find it. We’ve made the homepage cleaner and more engaging, with a more organized approach to highlighting the breadth of our content. And we’ve invested in top quality photography, elevating our game to match our best in breed writers.

Atop the right rail, you’ll find headlines highlighting the most important stories of the day, followed by Top 10 boxes that promote our most popular player and team rankings content. In the center well, we’ve grouped the content more intuitively to highlight exactly what we cover section by section—so, for example, if you’re looking for the most recent international stories from our vaunted expert Ben Badler, now you’ll know exactly where to go.

The site changes foreshadow the changes we will be making in our magazine redesign this summer, accentuating our specific coverage areas, and providing a more seamless user experience to help you find what you want, when you want it.

Most importantly, we will continue to have the same great writers that you have relied upon for years, the national icons and Baseball America’s own experts. We will be providing even more of the breadth and depth of baseball coverage that you have come to expect from Baseball America—more experts, more voices from the baseball world and more great photography.

We appreciate all you, the readers, have done to bring Baseball America to this point, and we look forward to seeing where this bright future leads us.

— Gary Green, Chairman & CEO