New BHQ: Frequently Asked Questions

GM's Office

Ray Murphy

Feb 4 2024 8:00am

New BHQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Ray Murphy

Feb 4 2024

Welcome to the new home of BaseballHQ.com! We are very excited about our future on this new, modern platform. But we also know that there will inevitably be an adjustment period, both as you get oriented to navigating this new site, and as we work through the inevitable gremlins and glitches that are an unavoidable part of any project of this scope.

To help all of us with the transition, we've started this FAQ page. We'll keep this sticky on the home page gallery for as long as it's useful, and keep adding entries here as items bubble up. Feel free to use the comments here, or on our Welcome article, to ask any questions not answered here. We'll address in the comments, and/or pull the answers up into the body of this article as needed.

We're glad to have you with us on this journey! On to the questions…

How is the content on the home page organized?

Start with the three pictures in the “gallery” at the center of the home page. These will be our newest articles, and/or announcements or promotions that we “pin” to that space. With each visit to the site, start your scan with that gallery.

From the gallery, turn to the section immediately to the right. That channel of (currently five, it may adjust) articles is the next-newest content on the site, after the gallery. Between the three gallery articles and these additional five articles, this “block” of the home page should always be a quick scan of our newest content. Since we rarely if ever have more than eight new articles in a day, this should always show you the day's content in a glance.

Scrolling down the page… let's skip over the gray “This Week from BaseballHQ” block for just a moment. Below that block, you'll see another list of articles that extends to the bottom of the page. These articles are just a continuation of the content at the top of the page, working backwards chronologically. Since the top section has the newest eight articles, this lower section picks up at the ninth-oldest article and goes backward in time from there to the bottom of the page. So, if you haven't visited the site in a few days, you can start at the top of the page and just work your way down the page until you find a piece of content you remember from your last visit, at which point you know you're all caught up.

Or… for another option, let's jump back up to that gray box labeled “This Week from BaseballHQ”. Organizing our content by day of the week was a very popular feature on the old site, so we carried that concept forward. This shaded section always defaults to the current day of the week, so it's going to show today's content, which on first glance will be a duplication of the content in the section immediately above. But the convenience of those days-of-week labels allows you to quickly jump back to yesterday's content if you missed or want to revisit something. And you can use that section to work your way back through the last week's content on a bit of a binge-read if that's how you like to consume our content.

To summarize: the home page has two different organization structures in one: you can start at the top (gallery) and just work your way down through the white-backgrounded articles, working backwards in time as you go down the page. Or you can use the gray-shaded “This Week from BaseballHQ” box to navigate by day-of-week to do the same thing. Either way should give you a quick route to all of our content.

What about the top menu?

The site's home page is designed to give you a quick view of all of our content. But what if you're looking for a specific piece of content? That's where the gray-stripe top menu (News… Skills… Prospects… ) comes into play. First of all, notice that no matter how far you scroll down the home page, that top menu follows you down the page, it's always visible.

The first four items on that menu (News, Skills, Prospects, Strategy) are the article menus. The top entries themselves are not clickable, but the items beneath them are direct links. So, clicking on News/Playing Time Today brings you to a full list of all of our Playing Time Today articles, and clicking Skills/Buyers Guides brings you to all of our Buyers Guide content.

There are other ways to zero in on specific content, too. For instance, if you clicked on Skills/Buyers Guides, that page shows the full history of all three of our Buyers Guide features: Starting Pitchers, Relief Pitchers, and Batters. Across the entire site, every article is tagged with a purple “slug” that indicates its category. Those “slugs” are links themselves! Click on the slug for “Starting Pitchers” for instance, and you'll be brought to a page with the full backlog of Starting Pitcher Buyers Guides. And, at the bottom of every article, you'll find a “More from..” section that shows you other articles from the same category.

One more tip: author names are clickable too. If you're reading a Stephen Nickrand piece and want to see what else you've missed from him, just click on his name for a full index of his work.

In short, if you know what you're looking for, it's never more than a couple of clicks away.

How else can I find content?

Another major pain point on our old site was the site search tool. It was fairly limited, didn't sort results well, and generally a source of frustration. This is another weakness that becomes a strength here at the new site. The site search tool is amazing. Here, give it a shot.

For a quick example, search for “Dodgers”. The first section of the search results is “Teams and Players”, where the first hit is the Dodgers logo, which links you into their team Depth Chart page. The rest of the search results are Dodger players, linking directly to PlayerLink. (Yes, player pictures are coming soon, instead of those silhouettes.) The next section of the search results is “Articles”, where you find the Dodgers' Top 15 prospect list, our Playing Time Today report on this winter's Glasnow trade, and so on.

Other helpful searches: obviously, search a full or partial player name to find a Playerlink page. You can search by article topic ("PT Today"), or author ("Bloomfield"), or whatever else you can think of.

In fact, the search works so well that we embedded it into PlayerLink. The old “News” tab was where we (mostly manually) pasted references to players that appeared in articles. Now, we've replaced the “News” tab with a new “Content” tab, which just runs a site search on the player's name, right inside of Playerlink.

OK, that covers content. What's new with the site's tools?

Glad you asked! Let's run through the key tools:

PlayerLink is really the perfect representation of our approach to building this new site: it should look immediately familiar, the header and the tab structure are the same as what we've had for the last decade-plus. But at the same time it's looks much more current, and (massively important) is very usable on your phone! Check out how even the wide tables scroll with a drag of your finger! That's a huge win in our book.

The story is pretty much the same with the Custom Draft Guide: the underlying logic/formulas are brought over directly from the old site, so in terms of valuation theory we aren't reinventing the wheel here. But the look and feel is brand new, and particularly the amount of native sorting and filtering you can do directly in the table of results is a great leap forward. Oh, and again… mobile friendly!

A note of caution about the Custom Draft Guide: that “lift and shift” of the Custom Draft Guide was one of the most complicated parts of this entire project. And it's likely an area that will require the most continued attention in the coming days. If you're running the CDG for a fairly standard 4x4 or 5x5 league, you can feel pretty confident in the outputs right from the get-go here. But if you're in a league that uses, shall we say, more esoteric scoring categories, we haven't tested those as thoroughly as we would like yet, so treat the results with some caution or skepticism. We do realize that with draft season coming at us quickly, the CDG needs to be bulletproof very soon. Our tech team is aware of this, and they'll get it there.

So that covers the existing tools. I see a name I don't recognize, though. What is “LeagueSync”?

Ed note: we made a last-second decision to hold back LeagueSync for launch… it just needs a little more attention before we release it. It's coming very soon, though… days, not weeks, away.

LeagueSync is the next-generation MACK Engine. MACK had deteriorated to the point where it had been barely usable in recent years, so this is not a case where we've just brought the existing tool over and put a new skin on it. LeagueSync is actually a ready-built product that our programmers had already built for other sites that they manage, but they have hooked it up to our data and (importantly) projections. It automatically syncs your rosters in from your league web site, and allows you to analyze your team and league natively on our site. Welcome to the future!

The future comes with some caveats, so let's get those out of the way: the universe of league web sites this tool supports is not perfect. Today, it supports RTSports, the NFBC, ESPN and Yahoo!. We're aware that many of you play on Fantrax, CBS, OnRoto, and Scoresheet, just to name some other common platforms. Right now, those sites are not supported. Unlike the rest of this new site which is custom-built for us, LeagueSync is a product that a number of other sites use, so we're just one more user of that tool, meaning we can't just dictate what new sites are added and when. We have requested—and will continue to request—those additional sites be added; it's just not in our exclusive control. (It also requires cooperation from the league sites, which may or may not be easy to secure.) We'll keep you posted on this moving forward.

I took a look at the Historical Stats and Projections tables. Those look pretty complicated.

As mentioned above, one of our biggest challenges in getting mobile-friendly comes in how to render our voluminous stats and data in an accessible way. This site comes with a robust table-rendering tool, which we're making use of in several places already, and will undoubtedly lean on heavily going forward.

You can see it in action in a couple of places. Check out the 2024 Projections page for one example. You have toggle links at the very top to swap between hitter and pitcher tables. You can search by player name; filter the table by team, league, or position. And there's that button at the upper right to export to a CSV, and that button will honor your filters. So if you want an AL-only file, just set the filter to AL and then click the CSV button.

If you go to the Historical Stats section, you can see an even more complicated table. This one is so big that we broke it into multiple tables. Changing the “Stat Type” setting will show an entirely different set of stats. You still have the same filters, and the CSV download will give you the entire table (all of the “Stat Types”) in one file. Also notice the “sliders” up top, which are another handy way to filter and tinker with the data set.

How does the article comment system work?

As with the old site, we do have an integrated article comments system. There is one requirement to be able to comment: you need to have a username set on your account. Everyone who we migrated from the old site should have one already. But if you can't comment, click on the “Welcome, ” at the extreme upper-right corner of the page. That's your profile page, and you can set (or change) your username there. Once you do that, you should be able to comment on articles.

To-do's

There will be any number of other items that come up, we'll add to this page with updates in the coming days and weeks. We'll keep this article “pinned” on the home-page gallery for now; check back regularly for updates!