On May 14, 2020, I began a novel project called “Nutshell Unplugged”, aimed at creating a story to give people hope against mental health battles.
At this time, I was having my own mental health breakthrough, realizing that I didn’t need to be afraid to express myself in any form. I just needed to know what I wanted and be direct.
My own individual circumstances have left me most of my life not knowing what I wanted, and with an inability to be direct. In real life, I went years without speaking. Even in this job, I would hang back in every room, every press conference, and feel in my head that no one wanted me to ever add my thoughts or opinions.
To be honest, that’s probably true from the Pirates’ standpoint. I can’t imagine the owners of the Post-Gazette want my competition either. I’m just a man, with much less funding, using the internet to harness the power of my mind and my resolve.
I’ve largely built Pirates Prospects by treating it like multiple jobs. I lived baseball. Every moment of every day for about a decade. When I took a rare vacation, I felt guilty for some reason. That was due to an insatiable work drive, and a thought that I had to be the star to ever be seen. I didn’t feel I deserved a break. Being able to take a break the last two days is a sign of how strong my mental health is these days.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen me in real life. These days, I’m 6’4″, 240, with a very noticeable head of gray hair in my age 40 season. I can never see myself in any room — where I’m historically giving zero effort to what my face looks like — but it was objectively ridiculous to go through my entire adult life thinking I was invisible or weak.
A lot of that is due to childhood trauma. I was the biggest kid and acted like a super hero on the playground. I was also a minister’s son who grew up to be a pacifist. I got beat up a lot, and lost my front tooth at one point. That one act — more a combination of playground chaos and another kid shoving me down from behind out of frustration — has led to $2000 in expenses in my adult life. Never mind the visual impact from subconsciously holding my jaw and tongue a different way to avoid breaking my tooth.
These are things I learned the last three years while taking a break from baseball and focusing on therapy and life. I was largely inside the house for most of this time. I got divorced. The timing of every move of the divorce matched my attempt to come back. She left the week before baseball returned in 2021. She told me she was filling for divorce the day I went on the road to cover games for the first time during the pandemic. She filed for divorce as I was planning the first article drop last year. The divorce was official in August, and after a late 2022 coverage trip, I shut down completely with depression, and reflected on the year.
Since that point, I’ve been thinking daily about what I want to do in my future, and how to do that. Some days, I would lay in bed all day, playing chess to get my mind focused on something other than baseball. I created a vinyl record store project, and was creating the novel series, which expanded to ten books in three years of planning. I’ve told people in the Pirates organization how I think I could help them with my knowledge. I’ve considered going into the game of baseball after this site. I’ve talked to Dejan Kovacevic about teaming up. Mostly, I’ve been studying this site, trying to see how it works, and how it could work in the future for other people.
Time has been a blur to me in these three years. I get constant alerts on my phone about baseball, from the moment I wake up until the moment I pass out. I never know the day. I sleep on a schedule that is about five hours behind the 9-5 crowd, and which can quickly devolve into an endless cycle of three to five hour naps in between work blocks in an endless stretch of what feels like one long day.
This week, I decided to pause production on this site, allowing me to get things in order before the bulk of the season commences. I’ll be doing some minor publishing, but I need to focus on my roles individually.
Those roles:
OWNER
I’m the 100% owner of “Pirates Prospects” at PiratesProspects.com. Since July 2010, I’ve been creating a business that popularized that term around the Pirates farm system.
I’ve sought outside loans over the years to keep operations going — a standard thing for any small business. When I hit burnout in 2018, and made moves from a Producer standpoint, it sent my life into a spiral. I learned that I had created a system where if I’m not always doing multiple jobs, this site doesn’t work. Essentially, I went broke trying to run this site and help other writers along the way.
This week, I’m in owner mode. That includes talking to people on this site and elsewhere about how to move forward. I’ve ensued that the money commitments for our writers can be met through the end of the year. I’ve also been looking for a way to offset some of my responsibilities into more of a group effort, or to another independent site who could benefit from this site’s revenue and traffic stream.
At this point, I believe I’ve developed a way where this site operates more like a co-op in terms of revenue share. The goal will be that everyone gets a percentage of what they produce, and the rest will go to the site. The Site Fund pays out non-writing roles, like David Hague’s photos, and someone to produce, edit, and run the site.
Under this system, I get paid as a tip from other writers, or from my own writing. I’ve created a system that is no longer feasible for me to meet my own needs. I run the site as my job, but I need to write to get paid, and I barely have time or energy. I believe I’ve found a way around that, detailed below.
PRODUCER
I’ve created the Producer role to differentiate my wants and needs on this site. The Producer role is creating the dream site, within a budget range. It’s finding a way to a goal. That goal is to provide content to Pirates fans — and this site has always catered to those outside of the city of Pittsburgh more than inside. It’s why the viewpoint is so different and expansive.
Part of this role isn’t just producing content, but developing article concepts, and establishing the tone of the site. This site echoed some of the old school, more military-esque methods of talking about player development that the old development team used.
I would constantly see players screamed at in public, in front of fans and possibly family. There was always something players were developing, and an implicit sense that no one was ever enough.
The new development system treats players better. The Pirates have found more ways to reach more individuals and ultimately instill comfort and confidence in their game and their life in general. That’s been my view from limited reporting the last three years. Limited, compared to previous efforts.
I hated that this site previously took an inauthentic tone. I’m not a trained journalist or writer, but someone who does well blending ideas to create a new concept. My own reporting has been a blend of 2009-2013 Pittsburgh media, plus just seeing how everyone else in the Prospect industry talked about the game and players. I gravitated to the more critical voices that I thought were how you do this industry, rather than trusting that my own voice and heart to speak.
In my own case, as someone who never knew how to use my own voice, I never just relied upon my own knowledge and wrote. My best articles have come from such an approach.
I’ve largely been collecting a group of people who bring a conglomerate of views and expertise on this team and game, while creating a system where they can each get paid for their unique expertise. But also, a site where we can be respectful of the human beings inside this industry.
Treat others as you wish to be treated is the golden rule in all walks of life, I’ve learned.
EDITOR
I’ve never really focused on editing. It was a shortcut to do everything else on this site. For years, even before AI, automation was my best friend and limited the quality of the work on this site.
Editing all of the content we produce is nearly a full time job. I’ve talked with Wilbur Miller in the last week about helping with this role. That said, even if Wilbur helps, I still need someone with a journalism background to edit my work. I’d also like that same quality for the entire site. This is something I’m focusing on this week.
In the past, I know how members of the Pirates influenced my work. I’ll use the word influence, because it was more encouragement for certain actions and articles, and screaming behind closed doors when I wrote something that was more akin to the uninformed fan voice or the national perspective. Meanwhile, I earned a reputation in Pittsburgh as an apologist for Bob Nutting, which is fair.
As someone with a business degree, studying the business of baseball for longer than I’ve been an adult, I’ve always been able to easily see this game from a business perspective, first. That approach has been unfair to a lot of players, as I’ve written more from a perspective of why things make sense for the team. This wasn’t out of need for access, but out of fear that I didn’t know a single thing about baseball other than my unique view.
I can tell you from personal experience that the new Pirates development group has a better way of explaining the game and growing knowledge, which can only be good for player development.
I’ve been highlighting a lot of their individualized development largely because it speaks to me as someone who went through a few years of therapy to accept my own individualization, and that no one else can define me.
I’m that time, I’ve also realized a sad reality that pretty much no one knows what they’re doing. The editing on this site will largely respect that everyone is a human being, doing their best to help themselves and others.
WRITER
Most of the Producing is automated at this point. It took a lot of conversations and trial and error to get to what Pirates Prospects Daily currently is. Anthony Murphy is doing a great job with that. That’s one article in a grand matrix.
Owning and Editing could probably be my sole job after getting my personal life sorted out over the next weeks/months. However, objectively my writing brings in more people to this site than anything. I haven’t known how to handle that massive responsibility in the past.
There were some years during this site history where my articles would bring in thousands of readers. Every other outlet would flat out copy my reporting style and method for talking about development. I don’t even know if that method was a good one, as I’ve changed it since. What I didn’t know was that this was a sign I had finally created my own style. I was a Major Leaguer, and didn’t know it, because I was still perpetually worried about making it.
After being cognizant to the impacts of this individualized style, and after getting to a point where I want all media members to succeed easily, I’ve gotten to one final issue:
Finding the time to write.
I spent the last two days resting my body to be able to write free-flowing and honest like this. I’ve got my latest Baseball America article to write today. From there, I’ve got articles on here to write, and I want to give them proper respect and honor the subjects.
This batch of articles includes a career look at Andrew McCutchen’s development throughout his MLB career. He’s one of the most talented people I’ve seen in this industry. It wouldn’t be fair to write that article while being tired, with my attention drawn 50 different ways in life.
Behind the scenes, the idea has been floated to me from some of our writers for everyone on the site to start their own thing. This wouldn’t be a bad idea, as I’m largely trying to get this site off my timeline of responsibility.
For the most part, this is a passion project for most of these writers, and for different reasons. Some enjoy the team itself. Some enjoy the business of baseball. Some enjoy player development.
I’m the only one trying to make an independent media outlet, while also trying to be a professional writer beyond sports. I’m not a Pirates fan, and at this point I could leave baseball behind.
It makes me wonder what I’m even doing here some days. My motivations are to help everyone else, and I’ve been doing it in a negative way for my own physical and mental health.
I took two days to myself, and the fallout has made me realize some of the sources of stress in trying to make this work.
The biggest?
Realizing that this site can’t really exist without me, and realizing I can’t do my writing to make money while also running and editing this site.
This week, I’ll be working toward a solution, while also providing a minimal production schedule.
Thank you to everyone for being patient as I shift gears and prepare Pirates Prospects for the remainder of the 2023 season.
