The End Of The Line

When the World Series ends, that was typically our cue to begin the heavy legwork here on the site - ranking prospects, debating tools, wondering what publication X was thinking. But not this off-season. Instead, we've decided to cease further updates. RaysProspects has come to an end.

You've surely noticed the decline in posting frequency over the last year or so. With that in mind, we discussed whether we would be able to do more, and when we determined we wouldn't be able to bring you the coverage we want to, we decided to bring the site to an end rather than continuing on with sporadic updates.

This is a weird post to write for me. I had started two (Devil) Rays blogs a long time ago, and both died in a month. I just simply stopped updating. I'm confident if I had started RaysProspects on my own, it would have met a similar fate. But it was Doug who created the site and graciously brought me aboard, and he was the driving force behind the scenes throughout much of the life of the blog. I'm forever thankful for him giving me the chance to join and create something I'm truly proud of.

It was also Doug who brought Jim aboard, whose contributions to the site are more valuable than I can express here. His daily (and end-of-year) recaps, his excellent photography, and his boots-on-the-ground ability to bring us instructional league rosters and other important information. All of that helped make the site complete and I thank him for that.

Other contributors have also helped make the site what it is during their times here: Andy Leslie and Jake Larsen helped with prospect coverage, Nick Hanson provided photography and local updates from Charlotte, RZ and BurGi covered the stats side of the game.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the readers and commenters. You were the lifeblood of the site, even if we didn't see eye-to-eye all the time (one last Henry Wrigley debate for the road?). So much valuable information came from the commenters, and I know we all loved interacting with the readers. We tallied over 1.25 million page views in our five years here, a number that blows my mind. Thank you so much to everyone who stopped by to read and comment over the years.

Some final updates:
The podcast will be continuing, as will my once-per-week writing at DRaysBay. You can follow me on Twitter @KevinGengler for any updates.

Doug is also on Twitter: @DougMilhoan.

Jim's photography sites to check out: Donten Photography and his baseball galleries.

The @RaysProspects Twitter account may still be updated from time to time.

The website will remain open; we're not taking anything offline. So you'll be still able to access all of our archives.

Thank you, everybody, for five awesome years.