The End Of TPOP Is Nigh

It pains me to say that after discussions between Steve and myself, we have both decided that The Point of Pittsburgh will be shuttering its e-doors at the end of this baseball season.

For me, the site has become a grind to maintain and incorporate into my daily life. When TPOP started, I had a 7 year old and a newborn. Now five years later, there are three kids and they all have activities and little lives of their own. My job as an engineer is time-consuming, as well, so my bandwidth has become more and more limited in recent years.

If I had the time and money to invest into TPOP, I'd love to make it a multimedia experience for the audience. Podcasts, short videos, and written articles are the future for how people will be consuming content. In order to provide that, though, I'd want to properly compensate the creators of said content and that's not possible without either an investor, sponsorship, a paywall, or some combination thereof. It's just not an endeavor I could commit to.

I'm also feeling like I'm no longer on top of my game as a baseball writer and analyst. I feel like I've analyzed the team from every angle possible and there's a chance that maybe I've run out of things to say. I've always believed that bands only have so many great songs or albums in them. Maybe the same is true of baseball writers.

TPOP has always been a bulwark against the crushing onslaught of pandering to the lowest common denominator that is mainstream baseball coverage in this city. I would like to think that we've done our best to present reasoned, stat-based arguments, both positive and negative, on why the Pirates have done things. At times, it has felt like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the dike.

For a site that has typically published just one article a day, Monday through Friday, I'm proud of the imprint we've created. Our pageviews, because of only doing one article per day, do not compare to other sites. But that's not what Steve and I wanted TPOP to be when we formulated it while sitting at a Pirate game in August of 2014.

Sadly, that vision of what we wanted has strayed, too. That's another reason that I'm thinking it's time to close up shop. The City Life aspect has fallen by the wayside as I've been too tied up with family life and Steve has moved out of Pittsburgh in recent years. We've tried to bring in writers to handle that to little or no avail. I've always had an interest in the Pittsburgh food scene and we've done some things here and there, but not to the extent I envisioned. I feel like I no longer have my finger on the pulse of things in Pittsburgh like I used to.

TPOP has done some great things, though. One of our former writers, Joe Douglas, is now an analyst in the Pirates' front office and has an incredibly bright future ahead of him in baseball if he continues on his path. Our partnership with Fangraphs lead to Alex Stumpf getting a month-long residency there back in May 2017 and our work on prospect surplus value was licensed there until they decided to tackle it in-house. We've been referenced for that work and other articles in The Washington Post, SB Nation, and many other websites. We've been featured guests on 93.7 The Fan many, many times, including a myriad of in-studio on-air hours.

We have had many great writers over our nearly five years of existence. Our current cast of writers is our best grouping at any time, which makes this even more difficult. Alex Stumpf recently was brought on board as the Pirates' beat writer for DK Pittsburgh Sports, which is a regional platform deserving of his talents as an amazing young writer. He and I have always been simpatico on our views of this team and he has consistently been my go-to writer if I needed something. Jake Smail is engaging with fans on Twitter to a degree that I simply am not (as I'm a borderline misanthrope) and his articles are fantastic. Nate Werner should be in a baseball front office. Pure and simple. Please hire him, MLB. Brandon Conner is not only a sharp analytical writer, but his puns on Twitter bring me consistent laughter that is always welcomed. Michael Bradley has been ride-or-die for TPOP since the outset of the site. His pieces were always asymmetrical from the typical viewpoint, but that's why I liked them.

On the hockey side, Vince Comunale has been a steady rock for our hockey coverage. His historical articles on hockey in Pittsburgh were enlightening for me as a reader, not just an editor. Sasank Vishnubhatla, like Nate, could easily be working in an NHL front office one day. Amazingly, he's just starting his senior year of college and is so far advanced with his hockey analysis through the use of neural networks.

And of course, there's Steve DiMiceli. We connected through an online Pirates forum and eventually met up to go to a game in 2011. He is truly a friend to me. I've always enjoyed his bone-dry sense of humor and his views on the Pirates. He's a great writer that I wish would write more often about more varied subjects, but I understand how life gets in the way of life sometimes. We don't go to Pirate games or Altoona Curve games as much as we used to and that makes me sad. Perhaps my favorite non-baseball thing about Steve is his pizzas. His Christmas Pizza Party opened my eyes to the joy of making your own pizza dough and not be afraid to get weird with the toppings. Homemade dough recipes have led to pear/pesto/mozzarella pizza, my wife's favorite one that I make now. A somewhat ho-hum game in August 2014 was just background noise for us laying out what would become The Point of Pittsburgh and I'm thrilled he was my co-conspirator on this endeavor.

Most importantly, TPOP would not have lasted close to five years without you, dear reader. Our readers were loyal and die-hards regarding our output. TPOP is not for everyone's taste, which is understandable. We worked hard to curate the audience we have and tried to raise the level of discourse about baseball and other subjects. We wanted to try and change the minds of readers, in an Alonzo Mourning GIF sort of way, but we weren't going to wait around and spoon feed it to them. I honestly want to thank all of you for your support.

For me, I suppose the Levels of Pirate Fandom article earlier this season was foreshadowing for all of this. I truly feel like Saito stuck in limbo, a tired and beaten down old man. By not having the site, I hope to get kicked up a level so that I can enjoy the game and the numbers associated, but not be consumed by them.

I hope to start work on a novel that I've had in skeleton form for some time now. I intend to go the formal publishing house route with this one. I just need a new challenge at my own pace.

Thank you everyone for reading TPOP all these years.