It was 20 years ago today that fantasy sports' first player news update was written. The very first update was about Roger McDowell. A second update that day was written on Jason Bere. RotoNews.com had launched in January, but added a new system of player news with a searchable database on this date. RotoNews later morphed into RotoWire.com and the player news has remained in the same database. The original updates can still be viewed on RotoWire.com:
Since 1997, RotoNews-RotoWire has written 590,801 MLB updates and more than 1.8 million updates among 14+ sports.
Before 1997, there were some web sites and print publications that had nuggets on players for fantasy purposes. However, RotoNews' format of having a "news" and "analysis" (then called "recommends") section for each update has become a standard that even competitors follow. And RotoNews' player news system was the first that featured a searchable database.
An article from USA Today Baseball Weekly on April 16, 1997 below heralds the launch of the RotoNews player news pages (RotoNews didn't even have it's own URL at the time, that would come a few months later).
In 1997 we gathered information mostly from print sources, TV and a few online newspapers. With the invention of blogs and then Twitter, the amount of information available on players has increased dramatically. We write many more player notes per player each year as a result. Given those caveats, here are the top 20 most updated MLB players over the past 20 years. It's a mix of big stars and frequently-injured players.
- Carlos Beltran 1,179 updates
- David Ortiz 1,044
- Alex Rodriguez 1,032
- Hanley Ramirez 984
- Carl Crawford 923
- Josh Hamilton 890
- Chipper Jones 889
- Jose Reyes 885
- Coco Crisp 875
- Albert Pujols 874
- Aramis Ramirez 842
- J.D. Drew 820
- Pedro Martinez 813
- Miguel Cabrera 809
- Jake Peavy 809
- Bartolo Colon 804
- Kerry Wood 802
- Derek Jeter 791
- Ryan Howard 788
- Joe Mauer 784
RotoWire's Jeff Erickson has authored the most MLB updates with 45,282.
I've chipped in 23,352 MLB player notes since writing the first two and 66,136 overall in all sports (at least the ones we tracked).
Thanks to everyone who has read our work the past two decades on RotoNews, RotoWire or the many partners who utilize our player news (currently ESPN, FoxSports, NFL.com, CBS Sports, FanDuel, Yahoo! Sports, DraftKings, MyFantasyLeague and many more). Here's to another great 20 years.