January 3, 2012

BP Unfiltered

Cot Tierney in the house

by Dave Pease

Back when we announced the new Compensation pages, Jeff Euston mentioned that Cot's would be moving--and now the move is just about complete.

http://www.mlbcontracts.blogspot.com/ now redirects to http://www.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/... please visit http://www.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/ for all of your contract needs.

Why?

The main reason for the move is tighter integration of the underlying dataset.  To be honest, our original hope was that we'd be able to swap in the Compensation pages for Cot's entirely, as Cot's is at its heart a series of blog posts and we can do much more interesting things with the data when we've got it in a proper database.  However, we've heard from a lot of people who liked Cot's the way it was.  Heck, Jeff Euston works here, and we're all in agreement that the site is well-designed, fast and easy to use.  Since Jeff didn't mind updating the Cot's data in two different places on a temporary basis, we were able to keep the Compensation pages data-fed and the Cots data updated in sync.

There's no reason to duplicate that effort permanently.  We have almost all of that data in a database backing the Compensation pages and each player's player card--here's a famous example--and coming soon to other different formats across the site.  If it is the Cot's data in the Cot's format that people want, when we get the entire Cot's schema laid out and data replicated, we can output in the "classic" Cot's format from the same data everything else is pulling from.

Moving the Cot's stuff to our servers is a late step in that process.  Jeff's in his last days of maintaining this data in this format.

Why Now?

We enacted this transition late last week, when we thought we had all the basic functionality of the Cot's pages imported and were able to offer some navigational benefit to the end user.  We've been releasing consistent changes throughout the world's many and varied New Years.  Please tell us what you think in the comments!

How to Use Our Compensation Data

We've been able to more closely integrate the Cot's pages with our Compensation pages as a result of the move.  Here's how you can get back and forth between the Cot's pages and the Compensation pages:

• use the Salaries link in any BP page header to get to the BP Compensation page
• use the Cot's Contracts button on any BP Compensation page to get to Cot's Contracts
• use the $$ Home button on any Cot's page to get to the BP Compensation page

Technical Notes and Status

We're using a meta refresh to send mlbcontracts requests to the new Cot's pages.  We were able to directly forward most of the deep links to the original Cot's hierarchy.  If you're getting forwarded to the new Cot's homepage, please leave us the URL in the comments section or email it to us.

The new Cot's page is running Wordpress.  We've got it running a pretty vanilla setup.  We're not expert at administrating Wordpress by any means.

We know the huge header is suboptimal.  The background image is intended to provoke feelings of relaxation and calm while we look at alternate layouts.  Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

Dave Pease is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @davepease
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