With the Manny Ramirez news turning the baseball world upside down on Thursday, BP Idol got pushed back, including a conference call between Kevin, Christina and I. We’re putting that back together and *promise* that we’ll have an answer for you next week. For those of you that entered, please be patient. We haven’t yet informed the finalists, because we haven’t yet decided on the finalists.
(Not decided? Actually we haven’t even discussed it. The three judges are deliberately not discussing them until we start making the decision to keep from influencing each others’ opinion.)
Just for a clarification, we’ll be contacting the Top Ten with a notice, then we’ll put up an update. We won’t be contacting anyone individually to say “sorry.” However, there are a lot of good articles here, more than ten, so we may be in contact to see if you’d like to publish your piece, either here at BP or at our sister publication, Baseball Daily Digest.
So, we apologize for the delay, but are sure you understand that Job One here is always providing you the best baseball coverage in our unique way. We’ll get this going soon!
If you try to submit a short story to a magazine, decisions often aren't made for 3-6 months and you never end up knowing if your submission was actually received.
I do appreciate all the updates and thank BP for staying on top of things. I think I checked 10-15 times yesterday to see who the Top 10 ended up being.
It's certainly a reasonable request. We're definitely doing (1) and likely several more of the best.
(2) I have an issue with. I don't want to embarrass someone, especially someone who tried. I don't get the "cringe factor" of American Idol and wholly skip until they get to Hollywood. Most of my lowest scores were people that did something really off the board -- didn't follow rules or sent in something that was 150 words. Haiku.
(3) I'm not sure. I'm going to get criticized because I didn't give good scores to any deliberate humor. There were some that were good, but none up to the level of the finalists. I'm very serious in saying the finalists (at least my 10) are significantly better than anyone's expecting.
I'm definitely with Will on #2. One of the worst things about American Idol is the mocking and public humiliation of the candidates.
In general, I hope that they publish anything that they consider worth "sharing with the class". That's what it sounds like the plan is, so I'm happy with it.
That's one of the best things about Idol to those who don't care for the actual singing competition. I would assume that anyone who bothers to pay for a subscription here cares about good writing on baseball. I agree with Will that posting the "worst" submissions would be in poor taste, and frankly by begging for it you discredit your own character.
I hope they wouldn't post the ten worst articles. At the very least, putting the articles up for the public shaming of the work (and by extension, the authors) would be fairly unprofessional for a respected, if iconoclastic, publishing venture.
Now that there is an idea of the participation level, I think it would be great for future contests if everyone was able to receive feedback. The spirit of BP consists of rational analysis and distributing work for peer review, so it would help all of our skills if we had some gauge on how we did. I realize the response was too strong this time around to do this, but hopefully next time it can happen.
Would be great to just put out a collection of highlights from articles that didn't make it: good writing, bad writing, funny writing, great analytical points, interesting quotes, etc. There is no need to label them. Just put them out there and let everyone take a look.
I'm sure the runners-up will have some good nuggets of info--either interesting analysis paired with writing that didn't stand up, some decent historical anecdotes, or just ideas for pieces that don't justify a whole column but are interesting nonetheless.
Not to back you guys into a corner again, but is the plan still to release the results on a Friday to lock in the Friday-Wednesday-Friday cycle you talked about previously?
No, that will likely change. We're working out the exact specifics and the Finalists will be given the details of the next assignment when notified and after they've accepted. (Yes, there's the possibility that someone would turn it down. I've already heard from one person that didn't understand this was a 9 week process.)
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Forgiveness is divine...
...or is that Devine? I did draft him in several fantasy leagues, and I haven't forgiven him yet.