June 5, 2023 at 8:50 AM
2023 SoxProspects.com Donation Drive
Hello to our readers and listeners!
Happy Opening Day for the Red Sox Rookie Ball teams! Now that the minor league season is fully underway, we're asking for your help to raise $9,000 to keep SoxProspects.com running on all cylinders. We have kept the site free for almost 20 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 to ask for donations to help us keep the site going. 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, which is 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 $20,000 in 2023. While we should cover some of that from other sources, 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 $250 to help defray these costs. We ultimately raised about $9,000 in connection with our 2022 drive. Thanks so much to everyone who chipped in!
While we've remained free, other prospect sites charge for content. For example, Baseball America charges about $100 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 decided 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