You may recall that last month, I sought out experts on MLB salary arbitration.  My goal is to be trained on the traditional method of projecting a player’s arbitration salary.  Many qualified people wrote in offering their expertise, and I was fortunate to be able to hire two of them for my project.

While I’ve identified my arbitration teachers, I now have a better understanding of the stats I’ll need at my fingertips for each player.  Not only do I need a bunch of different stats collected from various sources, but I’ll need to create different multiyear slices of these stats.  The result will be a very robust spreadsheet, referred to as my “grid” in industry parlance.

I’ve got solid enough skills in Microsoft Excel, but I’ll need more than that to assemble the spreadsheet I’m envisioning.  I need an absolute Excel wizard.  This will be well beyond some basic VLOOKUPs.  If you’re a master in Excel and a big fan of baseball statistics, please drop me a line at mlbarbitration@gmail.com explaining your qualifications.  I’m looking for someone who can work with me to create my spreadsheet over the next few months as a paid project.  You do not need to be an expert in arbitration – I’ll explain how I want the spreadsheet to look and function.

Would you like to get a notification on your phone every time MLBTR publishes an important story?  It’s something we’ve offered for years for free and it’s easy to set up.

First, download our free five-star Trade Rumors app for iPhone/iPad or Android.  When you open it for the first time, it will ask you if you want to receive notifications.  I recommend choosing notifications for Top Stories, which is just the right amount for me.

But perhaps you’ve had the app for a while, you didn’t set up notifications initially, and you’d like to do so now.  The screen shots below will show you how to do that.  (Side note: if you’re reading this post in the app, the screen shots won’t actually be visible.  I know that’s odd.  But for now if you’re an app user and you want to view this post, go here in a web browser like Safari or Chrome).

Go to the home screen of the app.  It looks like this:

Go to the feed for which you want to set up notifications.  Maybe that’s an entire sport, maybe it’s a team, or maybe it’s a player.  In this case, we’ll set up notifications for the MLB Trade Rumors feed.  Just go to the slider icon to the right of the feed name, which I’ve circled in this screen shot:

After you tap that, you’ll see a pop-up with some choices:

The “Show on homescreen” option does not affect notifications.  It simply lets you decide whether that feed should show All Stories, or be limited to Top Stories, when you browse in the app.

The “New story notifications” section is what we’re looking for here.  Simply choose “Top Stories” or “All Stories,” and hit Done.

Generally, if you’ve got a sport-level feed (MLB, NBA, NFL, or NHL), All Stories would be too many notifications (15+ per day), and I’d recommend Top Stories.  If you’re curious, a Top Story is anything to which we’ve assigned the Newsstand category tag.  For a team or player-level feed, getting notifications for All Stories probably will not blow up your phone.

If you’ve followed this process but have not been receiving notifications you think you should have gotten, please go to the Settings icon in the upper right, scroll down to “Feature Requests or Help,” and send us a message about the issue.

Many of you are regular users of our Trade Rumors iOS app, and in fact you may be reading this post through it.  We launched the Trade Rumors app more than five years ago as a mobile-friendly way to read our articles and set up custom notifications.  While we’ve addressed bugs and added a few features along the way, the app is due for a refresh.

If you’re a current user of the Trade Rumors iOS app and you’ve identified a bug or something that doesn’t seem to work correctly, please go to the Settings icon in the upper right, scroll down to “Feature Requests or Help,” and let us know about the issue.  Over the next few months I aim to address any outstanding bugs we can identify.

If you have a feature request or other feedback about the app, we’d love to hear it.  Current app users can use that same “Feature Requests or Help” option.  Plus any MLBTR reader, whether you currently use the app or not, is welcome to email us about it at traderumorsapp@gmail.com or leave feedback in the comments of this post.  If certain feature requests come up repeatedly, we’ll look into adding those to the Trade Rumors app.  For example, adding a Dark Mode option seems to make sense.  Especially since the original MLBTR website color scheme was basically Dark Mode!

If you’re not using our free Trade Rumors app yet, download it today!