KVETCH: All Star Stats is Horrible!

It is 9 am on Thursday morning. My coffee is gone and my preworkday ritual of checking my fantasy baseball teams has been disrupted because All Star Stats hasn’t updated yesterday’s stats. Instead I see this (click to expand):

This is the third day this week ASS (as we mockingly call them) has failed to do what every other stat service seems able to do; that is, update the standings before midmorning. Yesterday they didn’t update until after 11 am!

This is absurd because ASS is an expensive service. The book rate to run a league for the season is more than $500. We complained a few years ago and they cut the price by a couple hundred dollars, but we still pay a premium. (I should note that the screen capture is from the XFL, which is comped by ASS because we’re a longtime “industry” league. I can’t complain about that. It is the American Dream League that is being bled by the service thieves at All Star Stats.)

If this was the first time there were service problems, so be it, but I was just searching through my email and discovered that we were complaining about this exact same issue in 2007! There have been many days with the same problem every year! Many days. Yes, we are idiots.

What has kept us at ASS all these years is what kept us at USA Stats in the years before that company was bought by All Start stats. (Before that we were with the venerated and brilliant Heath Data Services, perhaps the game’s first stat service, which has not ever been matched, but was sold to USA Stats in the mid-90s.) That is inertia. A league full of older guys fears having to learn a new system. The discomfort zone is high, even when the company delivering the goods now is doing a terrible job of it, costing 350 percent more for fewer features and less reliability.

I can promise you, we will not be with ASS next year. Even the most frightened of our cohort is realizing that this level of indifference is degrading, insulting, cannot be tolerated by reasonable people. Not being able to get our stats for a few hours from time to time isn’t the biggest deal in the world, for sure, but why should we pay extra for this? I should note that the ASS support people write apologetically very well, what with all the practice they’ve had.

ASS is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast, neither of which has any organic connection to the fantasy baseball world. They are playing us for fools, and it is well past time we all move on.