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Hello and welcome to episode 1521 of Effectively Wild a baseball podcast from fan graphs presented by our Patreon supporters

I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined by Sam Miller of ESPN Hello Sam

Hey, and we are joined by our partner, Meg Rallyh of fan graphs. Hello Meg

Hello

You are joining us for the beginning of today's episode for a little PSA which will not be a surprise to anyone who has read

fan graphs today or followed us on Twitter and seen the plea that fan graphs put out but turns out pandemic not great for business

It is not great for business turns out when there's no baseball and no you know return date on the horizon that people decide to watch Tiger King

So

Can you just start blocking about Tiger King?

Have you considered it?

Ben, I'm not going to lie to you. There might be some Tiger King content coming to fan graphs audio in the near future

Whatever you have to do

Whatever we have to do but yeah the the drop off that we have seen in traffic since the announcement that opening day would be postponed

Has been pretty dramatic and like a lot of sports media companies we depend on site traffic to generate revenue

And so the decline in revenue and in projected revenue has been correspondingly severe

And we've taken some steps internally to try to sort of staunch the bleeding

We were very sad to essentially let go of most of our contributing writers and temporarily shutter the hardball times

All of the full-time staff who were remaining have taken a pay cut

But now we're asking for our readers to help us out the best way to support fan graphs in addition to reading the site every day

Which for the people who have sort of responded to this

With their own economic troubles. We know this is a really hard time for people and a bad time to be asking for help

...