About The Bandwagon

The Bandwagon is a newsletter for baseball fans who want to fan smarter. In this space, emotional investment transcends team allegiances and curiosity reigns over preconceived notions.

I'm Zach Crizer, a baseball writer whose work has appeared at Yahoo Sports, Baseball Prospectus, Opta Analyst and MLB.com. I started this newsletter alongside Hannah Keyser, who has since stepped away to write about sports for CNN. The project began life as a video series, then a podcast, at a national media outlet. After we were laid off, we didn't stop thinking about baseball through The Bandwagon lens. That point of view is still is here, and still worth pursuing. There are 3 main tenets:

• Thinking and caring about baseball is a pastime for everyone, unbound by team loyalty or depth of preexisting knowledge.
• Access to an understanding of the analysis shaping the sport should be offered with a helping hand.
• Fandom is a cultural phenomenon to be explored and appreciated, not a club with a gatekeeper.

If any part of that sounds interesting to you, we'd love to have you aboard.

Why subscribe?

To receive one newsletter per week explaining, analyzing, contextualizing, or simply rooting for the interesting stuff in baseball (and occasionally beyond).

Most editions include one main column, plus a rapid-fire section of riffs keeping you up to date on the stories of interest across MLB and the wider world of things you could be a fan of. Want to see? Take a look at some of The Bandwagon's greatest hits:

• 'Pitch fixing' is going to be a paranoid fixation
• You just can't beat that new pitch smell
• A brief history of the early opt-out. Or, defining the 'trampoline deal'

The part where I ask for your support

This is a project by and for the passionate. It's totally free to read, but it's far from free to create. It’s undertaken on mornings, nights and weekends, in the spaces between life and my actual full-time job, on trains and planes and scribbled notes in the middle of the day.

If you enjoy the work here, please consider making a monthly or yearly pledge. Become a Fan for just $4 a month or $40 a year. Or become a Diehard supporter and help drive The Bandwagon for $8 a month or $75 a year.

You can also offer a contribution in the amount of your choosing. Maybe start with $26 as part of The Bandwagon's pledge drive for '26.

I recognize the building subscription creep, the proliferation of good writers operating (and charging) independently in this unforgiving industry. I don’t expect The Bandwagon to be your only destination for following baseball; I envision it as a guided tour to make everything else more engaging, to make the emotional investment more enriching. I've tried to make the endeavor of supporting it as simple and open as possible.

Anything you can contribute will help sustain the project and raise its ambitions.