The philosophy of The Baseball Cube has evolved multiple times over the years as the site searches for its identity within the baseball community. Balancing competing interests such as revenue, usability, content, timeliness, and site performance can be challenging. Below is our philosophy as of late 2021, relating to the various identified categories of importance for a website of this nature:

Content: It needs to be rich in content. TBC collects as much historical content as possible based on the availability of datasets from the Internet or offline publications. The objective is to update the current content annually in a timely manner and to seek out new datasets/content. In recent years, the aim has been to gather more unique datasets that no other site offers and to include this in our paid PREMIUM section.

Design: It needs to be clean. The site needs to be clean and easy to use. Think of it as Feng Shui for baseball. While the site may never be stunning because I am a data guy, not an interior designer, it must be both desktop and mobile-friendly, which is a more recent philosophy. The site is not aiming to be eye-catching but rather clean and usable. We prefer to impress you with the content rather than the design.

Performance: It needs to be fast. In 2024, we revamped our architecture to accelerate page loading. The objective was to reduce the initial content load while deferring secondary content to load after the initial page load is complete. The outcome is faster-loading pages with more content on each page. Faster loads and less clicking for you is a win-win!

TBC pages are not intended for data dumps. Each grid contains "some" information on a topic. To access full datasets, you can visit our Data Store where you can choose from standard data extracts on a topic or customize your own.

Organization: It needs to be organized and easy to find. There is a lot of baseball data on this site. It may not all be listed in the navigation menus. It is a challenge to organize baseball history but I have tried. Within each section, there are sub-sections that may have additional unlisted sections. An example of this would be a Team Draft class or Prospect List. Draft Picks by Round/year. Affiliate history for a team. Sometimes you may need to dig and follow links to find pages that are not listed on the main menus. The menus are designed to be clean and NOT overwhelming. Be sure to check the "Other Topic" section for content that was not easy to classify.

Profitability: It needs to make money. Of course, the elephant in the room. The site needs to be profitable. As altruistic as we expect web site owners to be, we are mostly trying to make some money off of our "hobby". I am passionate about this site and have found various forms of revenue to both pay for the cost of the server AND to pay for the time I put into the site. I have definitely reached my 10,000 hours (maybe a couple of times). If you conside the world's default state to be chaos, to created order of baseball data takes planning, architecture, coding, storage and data collection. It includes creating processes, fixing bugs, researching new datasets and answering emails. The site is funded by advertising, the Data Store and the PREMIUM service which gives you access to additional features not available to the general public. Additionally, you can Support the site through donations.

Maintainability: It needs to be easy to maintain. A lot of work has gone into making data movement easy and quick. Data updates are quick and code maintenance has become easier over time as well. This is mostly on my end but it is still a pertinent philosophical element.

Responsive + Flexible: I need to listen to the baseball world. Believe it or not, the TBC Player Tracker was created after a fan of the site emailed me with a simple suggestion. The Data Store was born while I was brainstorming while jogging. Many datasets and projects were in response to user suggestions and random thoughts doing random things. The architecture is never set and is in a constant state of flux whether in design or content. Though I aim at site stability, it is still a constantly moving living thing.