2021 SoxProspects Donation Drive

Dear readers,

We're asking for your help to raise $7,000 to keep SoxProspects.com up and running. We have kept the site free for almost 18 years now, and we hope to do so for the foreseeable future. As we scout dozens of games first-hand each year, travel costs pile up. Our other costs to run the site often go up on an annual basis as well, and our ad revenue only covers a portion of those costs. So we're reaching out to the community for donations to help us keep the site running. Donations help cover site costs in two primary areas: (1) first-hand coverage travel costs for scouting; and (2) general IT costs such as hardware, software, internet costs, and hosting fees.

Your donations help us travel to Ft Myers in March to cover spring training and in the fall to cover the Instructional League each year, which are vital to get “one-stop shopping” for prospects across the system at levels we can’t see regularly. They also help cover the costs of travelling to affiliate games for regular first-hand coverage. We anticipate that our total costs will exceed $15,000 in 2021. While we should cover about half of that from online advertising revenue, your donations help us ensure we can cover those costs in order to keep the site going.

In recent years, readers have made donations ranging from $5 to $100 to help defray these costs. We even had a handful of big donations over that amount, and ultimately raised about $7,500 in connection with our 2019 drive. Thanks so much to everyone who chipped in! We decided not to run the donation drive in 2020 due to COVID-19. 

While we've remained free, other prospect sites charge for content. For example, Baseball America charges $84 per year for a digital subscription. We think that site is great and absolutely worthy of a subscription, we have one! We’d like to think that our content would be worthy of comparable rates if we ever decide to go that route, but we've decided that we want to keep the site running for free for as long as we can. Donations from regular readers go a long way towards making that happen.

Ultimately, through about August 1, we are asking our readers to donate what they can to help keep SoxProspects.com free to the public. If you want to donate, first, we would like to thank you profusely – it’s truly appreciated! To donate, visit our DONATIONS PAGE. All payments are secured through PayPal, although you don’t need a PayPal account to contribute. 

Last, to any of our regular readers that are not members of the SoxProspects Forum, please sign up! We’d love to get some new members in on the discussion and some new ideas floated around during our peak season! 

As always, thanks to all of our readers for visiting the site and all of our forum members for posting!

Sincerely,

The SoxProspects.com Team

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