The RotoWire Blog has been retired.

These archives exist as a way for people to continue to view the content that had been posted on the blog over the years.

Articles will no longer be posted here, but you can view new fantasy articles from our writers on the main site.

It was 20 years ago today

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:

Roger McDowell
Jason Bere

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.

  1. Carlos Beltran    1,179 updates
  2. David Ortiz    1,044
  3. Alex Rodriguez    1,032
  4. Hanley Ramirez    984
  5. Carl Crawford    923
  6. Josh Hamilton    890
  7. Chipper Jones    889
  8. Jose Reyes    885
  9. Coco Crisp    875
  10. Albert Pujols    874
  11. Aramis Ramirez    842
  12. J.D. Drew    820
  13. Pedro Martinez    813
  14. Miguel Cabrera    809
  15. Jake Peavy    809
  16. Bartolo Colon    804
  17. Kerry Wood    802
  18. Derek Jeter    791
  19. Ryan Howard    788
  20. 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.