LAUNCH! Introducing Pine Tar Press: A New One-Stop Hub for Mariners Fans
Live pitch tracking, advanced analytics, the best M’s writing on the web, and a creator tier for the folks already doing the work — all in one place.
For a long time, following the Mariners the way I want to follow them has meant juggling six tabs. MLB Gameday in one. Baseball Savant in another. Lookout Landing, MLB Trade Rumors, and the SoDo Mojo RSS in a third. Group chat in a fourth. Bovada open in a fifth. X scrolling beat reporters in the last one.
That’s exhausting. And it’s especially exhausting if you, like me, are mostly trying to enjoy a 7:10 first pitch on a Tuesday.
So I built something. It’s called Pine Tar Press — ptpmariners.com — and it’s officially live today.
Pine Tar Press is its own thing, separate from Mariners Wheelhouse. The Wheelhouse stays exactly what it’s always been: longform Mariners writing, deep dives, and the occasional bullpen rant. PTP is the hub — the place to actually follow the team in real time from one screen. Think of Wheelhouse as the magazine and PTP as the dashboard.
Here’s what’s in it.
Live Game Tracker
The centerpiece. When the Mariners are playing, PTP gives you a real-time pitch tracker that updates every 20 seconds — pitch speed, spin rate, pitch type, location in the strike zone, the full at-bat sequence. It pulls straight from MLB Stats API and renders it cleanly without the bloat of Gameday.
There’s also a Pitch Predictor that uses the current pitcher’s arsenal and recent tendencies to project what’s coming next, and a Matchup Edge card that surfaces the matchup advantage between the current hitter and pitcher in real time. Lineups, scores, base/out state, count, pitch predictor, matchup edge — all on one screen.
There is also a listen live button that opens up a player below the live game sections. One-click to hit play and you have Seattle Sports 710 radio coming through your phone or computer.
When there’s no game on, the section auto-flips to the next scheduled game and a countdown..
The Hub: Beat Feed + Top Stories
The home page leads with a curated feed I’m calling The Hub.
· Beat Feed on the left: posts from the actual Mariners beat — Shannon Drayer, Ryan Divish, the team account, Lookout Landing, SoDo Mojo, Oliver Boctor (Over-Slot Baseball), Marine Layer Pod, Daniel Kramer at MiLB, plus my own Wheelhouse pieces. Refreshes once a day at 9 AM Pacific and every 20 minutes during live games — and the source mix is capped so no single outlet dominates the front page.
· Featured story in the middle: whatever the latest piece of analysis is, full-bleed hero, big and obvious.
· News Wire cards below: the three latest pieces from outside outlets, one per source, always fresh.
It’s the closest I could get to “what’s actually happening in Mariners coverage right now” in one glance.
Stats Center
Live standings (AL West), team leaderboards, individual player pages, recent game results — all pulled from the MLB Stats API and refreshed automatically. No more bouncing between the MLB site and FanGraphs to answer a quick question about Cal’s wRC+ in June.
News Wire
Below the Hub, the full Mariners news firehose: ESPN, MLB.com, Lookout Landing, MLB Trade Rumors, Seattle Times (Divish and Jude), Oliver Boctor’s Medium, Words from the Wharf, the Mariners Roundtable, and Wheelhouse Originals — all mixed and sorted chronologically. One section. One scroll.
Highlights
Recent Mariners video highlights pulled in automatically. Late-inning bombs, defensive gems, Bryan Woo doing Bryan Woo things.
Subscriber Chat
A live community chat room. Free accounts get 5 messages a day so you can dip in and call the bullpen move stupid. Premium gets unlimited.
The Premium Tier — $5/month or $50/year
Most of PTP is free and always will be. The premium layer is where the analytics nerd stuff lives.
Premium ($5/mo or $50/yr) unlocks:
· Advanced Stats Suite:
o Hitter X-Ray — expected stats vs. actual, contact quality, plate discipline trends
o Pitcher Arsenal — pitch-by-pitch mix, usage shifts, and what’s working vs. what isn’t
o Matchup Edge — full hitter-vs-pitcher breakdown live during games, a full match up edge search for all MLB players at all times.
· Daily AI Best Bets — every day, the model scores live Bovada lines across the MLB slate (HRs, hits, strikeouts, totals, run lines). Sorted by value. One click straight to the bet on Bovada. Refreshes every 10 minutes. Yes, it covers the Mariners. Yes, it covers everybody else too.
· Unlimited community chat — no daily limit, full access to the room.
Pricing is intentionally cheap. $5/month or $50/year (save $10). Stripe checkout, cancel anytime, no weird gotchas.
The Creator Tier — $7/month or $70/year
This one is for the people I actually read every day.
If you weren’t included in the initial batch & if you write about the Mariners, podcast about the Mariners, post Mariners breakdowns on X, run a Mariners Substack, or otherwise contribute to the M’s coverage ecosystem — there’s a tier built for you.
Creator ($7/mo or $70/yr) gives you everything in Premium, plus:
· Your articles featured in the News Wire — your latest posts appear automatically alongside the established outlets
· Your tweets featured in the Beat Feed — same treatment as the big-name beat writers, right on the front page
· A featured slot at the top of the articles section
· A verified creator badge next to your name across the site
It costs $2 more per month than regular Premium because it comes with distribution. Independent Mariners writers don’t have a great pipeline right now — there’s the same five outlets that have always had it, and then everybody else trying to get noticed. PTP’s job is to make that ecosystem visible.
Creator tier is approval-only. Not because I want to gatekeep, but because I want the Beat Feed and News Wire to stay tight. If you’re producing Mariners content with any consistency and want in, there’s an “Apply for Creator” button on the subscribe page. I read every application personally.
Why I Built This
The honest answer is that I got tired of building this exact dashboard in my head every game day. I’d be flipping between Gameday and Twitter and Statcast and Bovada, and I kept thinking “this should be one screen.”
It’s also a love letter to the Mariners coverage scene. The independent writers and podcasters who keep this stuff alive deserve a hub that surfaces them next to the legacy outlets — not buried somewhere. The Creator tier is the structural answer to that.
And selfishly, I get to use it every day too. Live game Batter vs Hitter match up edges, yes. Bryan Woo strikeout pitch, click. Cal’s expected SLG since the All-Star break, click. What’s J-Rod’s projected K-prop on Bovada tonight, click. Pitch Predictor to see what might come next at a live game pace. All in one place.
What’s Next
Pine Tar Press is live now at ptpmariners.com. Free to sign up, $5/month or $50/year for Premium, $7/month or $70/year for Creators (with approval).
If you’ve been reading Wheelhouse, thank you — nothing about Wheelhouse changes. The longform pieces still post here. PTP is the dashboard around them.
Tell me what’s missing. I’m one person and I’m shipping fast. If there’s a feature you want, the chat is open, my DMs on X are open (@ptpmariners), and the Apply for Creator button is right there.
The big ticket on the “next” checklist beyond bugs and fixes (there will be more than one)… adding the Mariners minor league system into all this.
Let’s go win the West.
— Casey
Fantastic job!