Earlier this spring, I was very excited by the launch of Bloomberg Sports, a new service designed to give fantasy baseball players an edge with a host of new analytics and tips. I even had a chance to see a demo of the service in March and assumed it would be a daily part of my life as I managed the several fantasy leagues I have joined.
Now it's May, and I recently realized that I have not checked in with Bloomberg Sports in weeks, except to read the columns, which are great. But in terms of actually checking the site to analyze my fantasy teams, see who's hot and who's not, etc., I usually find myself going elsewhere.
This has not been a conscious thing. It's just that as the season as gone on, I found there was less motivation to go to the site. After some analysis of the service and my own fantasy habits, I think I've narrowed down to why.
The Site Is Too Clunky - This has as much to do with my own Web surfing habits as the site itself. I tend to be a little ADD when it comes to how I use the Web. I'll check my email, jump over to Facebook, check Twitter, back to email, over to the Washington Post, to Baseball-reference.com, back to Facebook, etc. And for the most part, all of the sites I use have one thing in common, which is that they load pretty quickly. Bloomberg Sports really doesn't. And I know it seems absurd, but I don't like to have to log in and wait several seconds for everything to load. Navigation also comes off as slow to me. The site is very graphic intensive, which I realize is part of its identity and the charm of its design, but I find myself getting oddly impatient when I check it out.
It's Not Full Integrated With My Teams - I can't go on Bloomberg Sports and drop a player from my Yahoo! fantasy league. I can't go on there and offer a trade to someone in my ESPN league. I'm essentially only using Bloomberg Sports to analyze my team and players in the league. But that reason alone isn't compelling enough for me, because I know that ultimately I have to go back to Yahoo or ESPN to make any transactions.
The Fantasy Leagues I'm In Are Weird - Bloomberg Sports might work for traditional non-keeper leagues. But I play in a funky keeper league that allows us to draft players who may be several years away from cracking a major league roster. What is the value of Stephen Strasburg? And how does the answer to that question change if you know he's locked in as a 10th-round pick for the next three years? Bloomberg Sports can help with the statistical analysis and projections, but fantasy leagues have so many different rules and variables that it can only help so much.
I Don't Care Too Much About Graphical Representations of Data - Bloomberg Sports does an excellent job at creating charts and graphs to show data trends, and even has a nifty 5x5 graphic to demonstrate how well-rounded a player is. But I found myself unmoved by it all. I like numbers, and a list of numbers usually works for me just fine.
I Feel Too Inundated - Some people just can't get enough of a good thing. Others, like myself, have a limit to how much of one thing they can consume. When it comes to baseball data, there's already a lot out there. You can spend hours on ESPN.com just looking at traditional box scores and stats. And you can dig deeper by sifting through the data compiled by Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs. Heck, I could spend 24-straight hours on Hittrackeronline.com. For me, I think it's just too much. I don't need another site to check, especially if it isn't really offering me anything all that new.
So there you go. As you can see, my reasons for not using Bloomberg have as much to do with me and my tendencies as the service itself. And I may go back to using it, especially as new features are rolled out. (This new trade analyzer seems very promising.) I would never tell anyone not to use Bloomberg Sports. In fact, I might even recommend it to those who ask. But it has not been as useful to me as I thought it would be at the start of the year.
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