Back when newspapers were king, in the pre-internet, pre-ESPNews era, one of my favorite parts of daily sports news consumption was the transaction section. Sports sections contained, and still do, a concise guide to signings, hirings, firings and trades, all organized neatly by sport and league. I credit my excellent eyesight to hours and years of sharpening my reading skills on that sans-serif agate type, there on the sports section's back page.
This, to me, represented the absolute root, the nerve center of the sporting world. Just as the stock and bond grids were to the financial section, those block paragraphs (team name in all caps, followed by an em-dash and a succinct description of the action taken) represented the heart of what was really going on. Most of the stories on the preceding pages were just longer versions of what was found there, colored with interviews and other flowery details.
No, this was a 100 percent bullshit-free zone: no points, goals, wins or losses either. Just the wheelings and dealings that served as the foundations of future victories and defeats.
Transactions didn't enter the 21st century gracefully. Even today on the web, they're usually found in the same solid grey blocks as in the old days, with no cross-referencing or hyper-anything. It was only within the past three years that the Pro Sports Transactions site sprung up, first with NBA data, then with the other three major American leagues. I've spent more time on that site than I care to admit.
But something was still missing. Much of the romance of the transaction section is contained in the thick college grid, the descriptions of the movements in lesser and minor leagues, all those obscure and possibly fictional team names. And what happens when a hanger-on or has-been falls off the major league map? A comprehensive transaction grid holds the true key.
So I've started a brand-new website called Transactionist. The basis of the site is three years' worth of pro, college, minor-league and independent-league transactions, a database totaling over 36,000 entries so far. It's all indexed and searchable, updated hourly, and has hundreds of drilled-down rabbit holes to fall into.
Not only can you get a rundown of all the moves made by, say, the Minnesota Twins, you can also similarly follow those of the Atlantic League's Long Island Ducks. Or marvel at the complexity of NASCAR's tribunal system. Or flash back to two years ago. Besides, a cross-referenced transactions database is the only way possible to record the sprawling history of the new American Basketball Association, for what it's worth.
I've also built in some community features, for kicks. With a basic username-password account, anybody can give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to any transaction, or even make a snide comment about it. It remains to be seen if those features will catch fire, but in an age where a lot of fans get more worked up about hirings and firings than the actual games, I figure it's only a matter of time.
But my favorite part of the new site, and the real research-related reason why I built it, is the custom RSS transaction feeds for entire sports, leagues or teams. I've been hosting an RSS feed (in the block format) for about a year now with over 1,000 subscribers. But now, if you like the American-style football, you can subscribe to the entire sport, just the Arena Football League, or just the Tampa Bay Storm. There's an orange icon on each page, and it will play nice with your newsreader of choice. Each transaction is its own feed item now.
So I hope you find a use for Transactionist, if for no other good reason than to follow the Calgary Vipers' (Northern League) shameless attention-grabbing techniques. They were the ones who traded a dude for some bats, and earlier picked up this guy, presumably for no reason other than his name.
