Survey Results And Open Writer Positions

I recently asked MLBTR readers to tell me how much they liked various site features on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 means they hate it, 10 they love it).  The results are in, with over 900 responses.  Let’s discuss, in order of your enjoyment.

• Odds and Ends – Average Score: 8.01.  People seem to quite enjoy this feature and didn’t have suggestions to improve it.  It stays as is.
• Needs and Luxuries – Average Score: 7.93.  Pretty high rating, but good ideas for improvement.  Here’s my plan for this feature for ’08.  I will do the entire series in October ’08, a team per day (it’s a slow hot stove month).  Then we will revisit each team in March of ’09, assessing how or if they addressed their needs.  As for 2007, I will do the remaining teams over the next few weeks so that every club gets equal attention.
• GM Trade Profiles – 7.49.  These are cool but take a really long time to do, especially if the GM has been around a while.  Just a lot of research before I can even write about the GM.  So I will probably continue to do these sporadically.
• Mailbag – 7.08.  People don’t seem to love the mailbag, relatively speaking.  Nonetheless maybe it can become a staple if I do it more regularly.  I am thinking about doing one every Wednesday.
• Rumor Royalty – 6.46.  The most common feedback about this feature is that it can be boring, partially because I spread out the three or four questions into separate posts.  I will switch it to two posts per sportswriter after we finish the stuff in queue.  One post will announce the selection and also allow you to submit your own questions.  We’ll see how it goes with reader-generated questions – I’ll choose the best.  Then all the questions and answers for that writer will go into another post.  I still like this feature despite the lukewarm response – it’s instructive to see what a team expert thinks; these people often don’t get to put their valuable opinions in their stories.
• One other note – I received about 300 inquiries from people willing to join the MLBTR team.  It will take me weeks to comb through, I will go about it carefully.  Thanks for the interest!