P2Daily: This Week on Pirates

This is the half-year mark of the Tuesday article drop format on Pirates Prospects.

Those of you who were here on January 4th for the debut drop might remember a massively different Pirates Prospects.

There was no such thing as P2Daily. Nor the Daily Video Rundown. They weren’t even ideas.

The Prospect Watch was always going to return, and the Pirates Discussion would make its way over from No Quarter.

Prospect Roundtable had only run once, and was still an idea for the future.

There was also no baseball at that time, so articles were in short supply. At that point, the only focus I had was getting seven weekly articles to you, and gradually building the rest of the site coverage up.

That first week, my main concern was that I couldn’t sustain this format, much less build beyond it.

My hope was that I could find unique stories each week, and in the loftiest plan, I would be able to do some weeks where all of the stories tied together for a loose theme. Almost like a monthly magazine. My goal was one of those big themed stories per month, once things got rolling.

My fear was that I wouldn’t be able to maintain this format, and would have some weeks where there were no stories at all.

Fortunately, that fear was unfounded. The hope has gone better than expected.

This week’s article drop is going to be focused on the MLB team. However, there is a lot to go through with this one — more than any previous drop. I’ve been trying to figure out how to divide this all up between Tuesday and Friday, our normal drop days. I also want to maintain my writing routine, which was thrown off from the special coverage of the Pirates this weekend.

I modeled this format after a few non-media industries. The biggest model was the craft beer industry. Each week, we drop articles like a brewery drops their latest beers. That release schedule is always flexible, and can change if there is a beer that isn’t ready — aka, it’s not yet up to the standard of the brewer for what they envisioned.

My fear when I started this was that I would reach a Tuesday where we had no articles. Half a year and that hasn’t happened. In fact, I’m currently working on bigger features that will run in July and August at this point.

This Tuesday, I am delaying the article drop. I have an idea for how this group of articles will turn out — including ideas for each individual article. If I work to get them up today — even a few — those ideas won’t be realized, and the article you will get will be of lesser quality.

My goal from this past weekend was to see if I could go into the clubhouse and get a different story than Alex Stumpf, Mike Persak, and Rob Biertempfel. Note that I said different, and not better. My theory is that all four of us could talk to the same player, and come up with different articles that would give you a complete look at the player. In fact, that’s kind of the concept of the Prospect Roundtable.

This weekend was a trial to see what kind of different MLB coverage you get from me these days. I haven’t covered the majors like this in about three or four years, and I’m not even the same person on the other side of that window — although I do still have all of the baseball knowledge.

I’m highly encouraged by the results of the interviews. Some of them are some of the best I’ve conducted, with some incredible responses. Some of them are continuations of conversations I’ve been having for years with players — updated with the latest information.

I want to make sure the articles get the same attention as all previous weeks. I also want to make sure some of these articles get the attention that I’ve given some of my best features in the history of this site, because I think some of them will be up to that standard.

I’ll be posting articles from Anthony Murphy and Ryan Palencer today and tomorrow to hold you guys over. Then, on Thursday, I will drop the entire week of articles — both the Tuesday and Friday drops.

Then, I’m sleeping for a few days while you guys read.

TL;DR: The complete article drop this week will be on Thursday. You will have Anthony Murphy and Ryan Palencer to hold you over until then.