The new Sox Machine wants you

James Fegan joining Sox Machine made a lot more work for me.

I already had my plan mapped out in the event James landed a beat job somewhere else. All I had to do was take Rick Hahn’s verbatim quote about missing out on Manny Machado and swap out the name and occupation. It would’ve looked something like this:

From the rawness and selfish standpoint, or my individual standpoint, trying really hard and failing is not sufficient. I will not begrudge a writer for exercising the rights they have to choose to go elsewhere. I can be disappointed, I can be frustrated. And when I say frustrated, I say frustrated for myself only. Because again, this organization from top to bottom did an excellent job of putting us in a position to convert and to make James Fegan have a very difficult decision.

For me personally, trying and falling short isn't sufficient so I'm going to take the next few hours to continue to be pretty pissed off about this.

We should be proud of the aggressiveness and creativity of our offer, which we were told was not only extremely competitive, but if the reports out there are accurate was superior to what was ultimately selected in certain ways. That said, this is free agency. The writers have worked extremely hard to get to this point and they have choices.

In the end, deals of this length are extremely complicated, with various moving pieces. We were aggressive in trying to balance the length of control, the upside, the risk and the flexibility a contract like this would provide. In the end we felt we made a very compelling offer.

This would’ve been the perfect post. It would’ve been informative. It would’ve been funny. Best of all, only a handful of people would’ve known it was actually true.

For who knows how long, Josh and I had loosely discussed adding James to Sox Machine. The conversations were always much closer to “what we’d do if we won the lottery” than “let’s plan an elaborate heist at the New York Times,” but whenever we pondered expanding or overhauling the Sox Machine model, we always came back the idea of a beat writer who combines the blogger’s curiosity with access to have their questions answered. Throw in a well-established knowledge of the White Sox, and, well, could you name anybody else?

After James revealed The Athletic’s mistake in the most Feganesque way possible last June, I was going to wait a couple days to reach out, thinking that'd be the sensitive thing to do. An internal review of timestamps shows I lasted three hours before sending him a note that we had some ideas for him at Sox Machine if he was interested.

We knew it wasn’t going to be quick because we couldn’t make a slam-dunk offer. Sox Machine does well enough for me to make a living, and Josh was on a steady track to join me as a full-time job, but obviously we weren’t there yet on that front, and not because we maintained a Scrooge McDuck-like vault of precious metals and jewels in case such an opportunity arose.

What we could offer was an well-established platform and a generous, engaged, open-hearted audience we knew appreciated his work as much as we did, a series of models and a range of projections, and the tantalizing possibility of a worker-owned outlet succeeding, because not much else in journalism does right now.

Over the few weeks since James, Josh and I started hashing out the details of this arrangement in earnest, the Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, Sports Illustrated and Sporting News all conducted significant layoffs, while The Messenger shut down entirely and Chicago Tribune employees went on a 24-hour strike.

If there’s a positive spin to all the carnage, there’s no better time to take a chance. It just requires understanding that it’s a grand experiment, and sometimes experiments don’t quite work.

We'd love to fast-forward to a year from now to learn if this is a success, or what mistakes we could've avoided with a little bit of hindsight. Because we're stuck on the same day you are, we can only talk about our modest grand plan.

Here’s the initial outlook:

James is going to cover the White Sox when they’re home. He’s also going to go on the road as much as we can afford. He’s taking a trip to spring training, and we’re mapping out plans for April and May, as a proof of concept. After that, we’ll see what our budget allows. He’d like to travel as much as possible. We’d like to read the stories he gets from the road.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be writing like I normally write, except now I can ask James, "Hey, did you notice this?" instead of finding out he indeed noticed that when our posts/articles hit the exact same topic on a given morning. Josh will be shaping the Sox Machine Podcast and the Sox Machine YouTube channel to fit our new arrangement, along with smothering the draft. I haven't had a good night's sleep since James signed the contract because of all the possibilities.

In order to lay track for this initial push, we revised our Patreon pricing structure for the first time since relaunching Sox Machine as a Patreon-supported endeavor. We wanted to make sure that we had a clear reason and clear objective for raising rates, and we believe the ability to sustain the award-winning White Sox coverage James provided at The Athletic meets the criteria. His previous work required a separate subscription, so those who paid for Sox Machine and The Athletic will come out ahead. You know what they say: 2+1 = savings!

We have some benchmarks in mind, but given that the new Sox Machine isn't even 24 hours old and we aren't yet near them, I'd simply encourage every White Sox fan thinking about supporting us to do so. Besides a welcome early surge of subscribers, our projections could also shift when we learn how how the addition of James’ content boosts site traffic and listenership, or if we can find travel sponsors for James’ road trips (and hey, if anybody is interested in the latter opportunity, don’t hesitate to email me at jim@soxmachine.com). 

The first week of coverage will be open to everybody in order to present the big idea, but in order to give Sox Machine supporters value while balancing the free-exchange spirit of blogging, we will implement a partial-paywall around the time James reports to Camelback Ranch. Game recaps, Minor Keys posts and breaking news will be open to everybody, but more substantial reporting, features and analysis will be exclusive to Patreon supporters. This strategy is also subject to change. Everything is subject to change.

Ideally, we’d be launching this project while the White Sox’s rebuild was at its peak, rather than in shambles. Then again, if the Sox didn't collapse, perhaps this opportunity never arises. If this iteration of Sox Machine happens to succeed while the White Sox are this bad, then perhaps a postseason series win means we'll be able to stockpile those gold bars after all.

But before we can think about the long haul, we have to get through this year first. We hope you’ll help us, and let us know how we can help ourselves.