Feud with Baseball Prospectus

From Wiki Gonzalez

Q. Is there a feud with Baseball Prospectus?

A. No.

Or sort of, depending on whom you believe.

The original Baseball Primer article concerning this is located here (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/main/article/legal_letter/).

A month after BTF was first launched as Baseball Primer, attorneys for Baseball Prospectus sent the founders a nasty letter demanding they change the name. The problem, it seems, was that if you had previously been to both sites, and started typing www.baseballpr. . . into your web browser, Primer would pop up as an auto-complete in the split second before you typed in the "o" to get to Prospectus. In essence, Primer was accused of poaching people who wanted to visit Prospectus.

However the history of the Baseball Primer name indicates that the site really was intended to be a primer for baseball fans. Because it evolved into being a general baseball site, it perhaps led to a misconception as to the choice of the "Primer" name.

One very early BTF contributor, Don Malcolm, happened to be a well-known critic of Baseball Prospectus dating back to his work on the Big Bad Baseball Annual. In fact, BTF co-founders Jim Furtado and Sean Forman had split with the BBBA largely over its constant criticism of Baseball Prospectus.

Don left BTF in 2002 after writing several articles for Primer that mixed baseball talk with swipes at Prospectus, commingled with diatribes on American politics. Since Don left, the alleged feud seems to have dried up. The paucity of Prospectus articles linked to (most content being for subscribers only) has also contributed to the lack of feuding.

Nowadays, some Primates (as opposed to BTF moderators) continue to take advantage of every opportunity to criticize Prospectus authors, regardless of whether said criticism is legitimate. They claim that Prospectus arrogantly thinks of itself (or projects an attitude) as the sole distributor of intelligent baseball information on the Internet.