The Athletic: How FanGraphs catapulted from ‘super nerd’ site to the baseball mainstream [$]

In 2005, 23-year-old David Appelman was working for AOL culling dial-up data and making graphs for the company’s executives. It wasn’t exactly exciting work and he knew quickly evolving technology would soon make dial-up obsolete. So he had an idea.

“I just thought it would be better to spend my time helping my fantasy baseball league,” he said.

Fantasy baseball was a burgeoning business at the time, but there were few resources that delved deeply into advanced stats, offering explanations on how and why they could be useful for a team. Appelman drafted a contract to buy statistical data from Baseball Info Solutions and set up feeds on a new website he called FanGraphs.com. The first post went live Aug. 15, 2005.

He planned to offer daily analysis of different players and slowly added more to the site, like batted ball data, comparison charts by age and then win probability. In short blog posts, he used graphs to explain the underlying reasons whether a player had seen success.

A few hundred views per day on the site turned into a few thousand and in 2006, Appelman quit his job at AOL.