Happy Sunday, everyone, I hope yours is going great. I’m Dave Pease, and this is Prospectus Idol.
I’ll be honest with you: here at BP, we think this was our best Idol week yet. We’re excited to tell you that we’ve got almost all of your requests filled with respect to the technical aspects of the contest. Let’s take just a minute to run them down, covering the status of last week’s to-do list:
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Last comment time displayed on landing page: We ended up doing something similar and, hopefully, even better from a reader perspective. Now you’ll see an unread comment count as well as total comment count from the Prospectus Idol landing page. It’s in bold so that you can quickly scan the page and see where the new comments are. We’ve also spread this around the rest of the site. On the front page, you’ll see bolded numbers for the total of new comments, as well as a total comment count, for most things that have comments attached.
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Previous week results: They’re on the landing page. Look up at the top, where you can see the article navigation features (next/previous article, etc) on our article pages, and you’ll now be able to move back and forth among Prospectus Idol weeks of competition. You can also directly link to any of them just by grabbing the URL-for example, here’s Week One. Ah, it seems so long ago.
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Announcement of results
: They’re still going to be Unfiltered posts, but they’ll also be linked on the Prospectus Idol landing page.
I think that takes care of the most popular requests we’ve had, but please leave anything else you’d like to see addressed in the comments section of this article, and we’ll have a look.
This week, we’re also debuting our first guest judge of Prospectus Idol, the beautiful and talented Marc Normandin. Marc is an expert on the topic of this week’s competition, and we hope you find his comments useful to you in making your voting decisions.
Here are the instructions Christina Kahrl sent to our contestants this week:
Content-wise, your next theme was selected to give you an opportunity to work on something that will let the voting public and the judges draw some more direct contrasts with one another, as we and the audience get a chance to see what you’ll do within a specific form. This week, it’s your opportunity to do a Player Profile. This should have four elements:
- Background/History
- Performance Analysis
- Scouting Information
- Projecting the Future
You must select an active major, minor league, amateur, or international ballplayer; no telling us that you think that Jackie Robinson is really going to be something special. As far as length, you can go as long as 2000 words (not counting tables or charts). For a working example, take a look at the team effort on Cliff Lee.
Have a look at how our seven remaining Prospectus Idol contestants tackled this topic by clicking here to visit the Prospectus Idol page.
Thank you for reading
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We'll see if the idols can do better.
Ok, so, player profiles... I could probably write up 2000 words of praise about each finalist so far... that's how much I've enjoyed everyone. Instead (and to save space), I decided to replace the weekly quote with a name of a major league baseball player who each finalist's performance reminds me of. No, there's no Pujols, but it's a definite All-Star team of finalists. As a disclaimer, this was a very tough week with a lot of very good articles and it's a shame someone has to be ranked last. I gave thumbs up for the top five.
#1 Tim Kniker (= #1<-#2<-#1<-#3) - David Wright
There are people who are slightly more original, there are others who drill into the stats deeper, and there are others who might even be better writers, but Kniker's been consistently great in a lot of categories. Kind of like David Wright, it's the sum of his overall talent that puts him at the top of the list.
#2 Matt Swartz (= #2<-#1<-#2<-#4) - Hanley Ramirez
Often brilliant, but sometimes brilliantly flawed, he missed for me slightly this week. However, when he gets a hold of one, he knocks it way out of the park. Even when he strikes out, he's still a pleasure to read and keeps an engaging discussion going. A bit more consistency in his defense could kick him back to #1.
#3 Ken Funck (= #3<-#3<-#3<-#1) - Ichiro Suzuki
Like Ichiro, I'm never quite sure how he ends up being so unorthodox and yet so good. The irony is even with his quirky writing, he has simple, unique insights. He's nipping again at Matt's heels.
#4 Matthew Knight (+ #5<-#5<-#8<-#6) - Alfonso Soriano
To paraphrase the BP 2009 Annual, Alfonso Soriano is often a spectacle without being spectacular. Matthew's come a long way and is close to actually being spectacular. One great week could vault him into the top three, but merely good won't cut it.
#5 Brian Cartwright (- #4<-#6<-#4<-#5) - J.D. Drew
Everyone sees his talent but he's not always available/accessible. Everyone sees what he could do, and he has been good, but the consensus is he hasn't been "great". In his career, J.D. Drew has been very good without being a superstar. Though Cartwright's effort has been there, his future is now.
#6 Brian Oakchunas (+ #7<-#7<-#5<-#10) - Placido Polanco
It's close between him and Tyler. While Tyler drills deeper into topics, Brian's shown a broader topic choice and thus has a bit more potential. I wouldn't complain if either one was on my roster.
#7 Tyler Hissey (- #6<-#7<-#10<-#8) - Akinori Iwamura
Tyler knows his skills, knows his job and does it well. What you see is what you get with Tyler, and what you get is very good. However, it comes down to the difference between a star and a superstar. With his history of doing player profiles in this competition, I was hoping the practice would produce something great. Instead, it was merely very good.
Besides, that'd also be more writers that can help with the Annual.
The reason is that I can then use my web browser's Find feature to more easily move through a thread to locate "NEW COMMENT" then to cycle and skip past all the occurences of the word "new" that are in the comment bodies (but don't signify a new comment since last read) as well as the "knew", "Newport". I also don't have to fiddle as much with adding Match Case and Match Word filters.
Not a major need, but it'd be nice to have.