I’m excited. I’m excited to officially introduce myself to you as Minor League Editor (I’m Craig, by the way, the pleasure is all mine). I’m excited to (re)introduce you to the BP Prospect Team as a whole. And I’m excited to tell you about our plans for covering prospects going forward.
It’s not a secret but a point of pride that there has been a loss of institutional knowledge on our team over the past few seasons. Still, this presents us with challenges, as our coverage has had to adjust to our personnel. We cannot ignore when we lose a staff member, be it Kevin Goldstein or Jason Parks and Cole or Al Skorupa or Ezra Wise and on down the line. Rather, it is our responsibility to reevaluate our strengths and weaknesses, and subsequently develop an approach that works best with our current staff.
This means relying on a team of people for coverage of minor league prospects, draft prospects, player development, industry reporting, and more. The benefits of such an arrangement is that we’re able to get eyes on as many players as possible and provide more content for you the reader. The downside is that consistency is harder to achieve. When creating lists with multiple voices in the room, they aren’t always weighed evenly. This means that the things each evaluator emphasizes can impact the final product in different ways. This also means that lists like the Top 101 can and will be in a different order than the Top 10s that we release throughout the offseason. We know that inconsistencies can be frustrating for the reader, but the positives of expanding our reach in terms of in-person evaluations, high-quality writing, and breadth of topics covered seems a worthy payoff as long as we can hold ourselves accountable for providing exposition when those inconsistencies do arise.
With the above in mind, we also acknowledge that with the departures we’ve had, as well as other various circumstances, we’ve not always been able to provide the geographic coverage that our readers expect of us and that we aspire to provide. To that end, we’re looking for contributors who will be responsible for attending games and providing our staff with video footage as well notes for internal use. It is from these contributors that we plan and hope to find the next staff writers for the prospect team; the next author to produce scouting articles like Jeff Paternostro, the next author to cover player development like Brendan Gawlowski, the next author to provide industry coverage like Chris Crawford, or prospect breakdowns like Adam McInturff. The list goes on. As farm systems replenish talent, so too must we.
We know that the many-headed monster of a coverage team can sometimes prove inaccessible to our readers. It’s not always clear who to turn to with a question, who made what decision, and most importantly who to hold accountable. Each of our authors is of course responsible for what they write and say, but I will also be accountable for what is written and published in regards to minor league coverage on Baseball Prospectus. I will also be responsible for making sure that the product rises to the standards that have been set by those before me. This is a high bar to meet, but I’m excited to get started. I’m excited about adding talent. I’m excited to provide continuing coverage of all of the minor leagues from the entire team, from the Minor League Update, to the Monday Morning Ten Pack, to Notes From the Field, to our Mid-Season Top 50, to much, much more. Mostly, I’m excited to have you along for the ride.
Cheers,
Craig
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now