“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”
-George R. R. Martin
*****
At the outset of this extremely detailed report about the Pittsburgh sports media industry, I want to establish some rules. What you are about to read is from the perspective of my individual reality.
Reality is a funny word to a person who has spent five years creating a series of novels about time travel.
As you read this article, first realize that you are reading the finished product of an article that was re-written at least four times with the same end result. It was then read through and edited multiple times, from multiple viewpoints. After it was finished, I read it through one more time.
As the late, great MF DOOM once said about music production, when you get down to the point of debating individual words, the song is ready to be published.
This article has been in the works for a long time. The process of shaping the actual article into what I felt needed to be conveyed took months. The editing process took over a month. The last week has seen two attempts to shape the final article, with several editing attempts.
Nothing I state in this article about other people is false from my viewpoint, and I have only included information of which I have correspondence to back up my views. I’m also going to state that while I’ve been public about mental health woes in the past, my only current mental health issues come from dealing with the Pittsburgh media.
Of that sentence, I’m sure there are many shared realities.
In order to properly adjust to this article, there are three things you need to accept about my independent reality:
- Every human being on Earth, regardless of title, wealth, following, knowledge, or the perception of power, is equal. None of us asked to be born into our specific existence. We are all born crying loudly. We all die crying softly. In between, our entire existence is simply finding ways to stop the crying. Because, between the tears, when the eyes dry, that’s where the beauty of life can be found. Some people happen to be born into a desert, while others exist in a rainforest. If we could carry part of the water from every rainforest into every desert, we could create an equal world where all experience wading through the water and watching their ground grow. But that is a fantasy. This reality is merely about discovering your own ecosystem, and discovering everything from the outside which may alter the weather. Call this the “We are all the same” rule, and remember throughout this article.
- I don’t want to write about sports anymore. As someone who fully understands his own ecosystem, I know that I am a writer. My ability to convey complex topics into simple words is a super power. I’m a guide for others who don’t have the brainpower to put into words what their eyes are seeing. Five years ago, I decided that prospect coverage was not what I wanted to be doing. My stated intention was to spin off my site’s tremendous amount of traffic into a network of independent sites. The goal was to create new avenues of revenue for individuals in the Pittsburgh media market, adjusting to the rapidly changing landscape online. My plan existed before COVID and the Zoom-boom. Five years later, I don’t even really want to run a sports site. I have more to teach sports than sports has to teach me, which means it is ultimately time for me to move up or move on to a new area of exploration in this existence. Call this the “Wait, I think he might have somehow masterminded all of this” rule.
- I don’t condone violence. There’s a popular theory about people who say that they are a good person. Being a good person, based solely on a track record of never having a bad public moment, does not mean that you are a good person. Good people are the ones who know their capacity to cause damage, and spend their existence avoiding conflict — not out of fear of losing everything if they might lose; but from the knowledge of what they will lose when they always win. If you see me in sheep’s clothing, know there’s a wolf under that wool. Sometimes, I can grow into a dire wolf. I am the lone wolf. This means I’m stronger than any individual in any pack. The wolves in the packs are afraid of the lone wolves, due to the displayed strength that the pack wolves are without. The lone wolf will absolutely attack a pack wolf if the pack wolf considers the pack to be a system of superiority, which by extension, infers that the pack wolf is superior to the lone wolf. The lone wolf exists equal in the forest with all of the packs, and the only time lone wolves should act is when the packs of the forest are destroying the forest. And in that time, a mere silhouette standing on a full moon will appear, reminding the pack that they are all, ultimately, just a litter of puppies trying to survive. Call this the “I’m not here to harm little puppies, even if they may have mistaken their power over me” rule.
The final thing that you need to know is that this article will center around my interactions across a five-year period with members of two “packs” — The Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Media.
My name is Tim Williams.
I’ve been running this site since 2009, eventually turning it into the Pirates Prospects that would silently shape the Pittsburgh media scene.
I am most known as a writer to the public, but I’m a niche writer who doesn’t enjoy the need to promote his work. I am fine if you don’t know who I am.
My role on this site has never been more than 30% writing, yet that 30% drives the revenue of this site.
The easiest way to describe who I actually am is to go back to my prediction five years ago.
Sitting by the fire in my back yard, I predicted that the future of the Pirates media scene would be led by Jason Mackey giving opinions from the Post-Gazette, and Alex Stumpf working as the main beat writer. There would be a wave of aspiring content creators who would attack every small niche in a struggle that I didn’t experience when I grabbed niche subjects for this site by the handful in 2009.
I am not competition to Mackey. I am competition to John Robinson Block. and the Block family that owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That’s because I can implement a level of coverage which would require the Blocks to dedicated added dollars to the Pirates beat in order to catch up. Traditionally, sports content makes the money for the real news with papers.
I leave the reporting up to Stumpf, while personally providing a check to the antitrust-exempt Major League Baseball (and all of its subsidiaries, including MLB.com, MLB Pipeline, and MiLB.com).
Five years ago, I anticipated the wave of content creators, while dedicating two years of my life two growing the popularity of one writer in particular.
BEHIND THE SCENES AT PIRATES PROSPECTS
“Something, something, something about old men planting trees under which they will never experience shade. The problem with that quote is that we, today, are largely a society of homeless arborists. We’re taught that it is noble to be planting trees for the future, while very few of us could construct our own homes with the full resources of a forest. I say build your own home by spitting in the dirt, turning that dirt into mud with your bare hands, and surviving the bushcraft life. Eventually, you will have built a home, and within this home, you will be secure. Yet, anyone who has ever moved into a new home knows that it takes years to really get settled and secure in your new situation. And by the time you are finally secure, you realize that without the grind of building, you’re just sitting around waiting to die. That’s the moment in your life when you start planting trees.”
-Tim Williams, 12/31/2024, 9:01 AM
In December 2021, I added a writer to this site who goes by the name Anthony Murphy.
At the time, Murphy was largely unknown to me. To this date, I’ve met the person who appears in his profile picture, and talked with him for about five minutes at a game. I saw him in 2021 as an aspiring writer who was attacking the prospect niche. I wanted to offer him an opportunity.
After former Pirates Prospects contributor John Dreker forwarded an article to me that was written by Murphy, I decided to give Murphy an opportunity to write for Pirates Prospects and its existing audience for the 2022 season.
I have since called Murphy an industry plant.
I don’t change that stance today, but this article is meant to define the term, as well as the industry.
While this article will center around the individual Anthony Murphy, I hold zero ill-will toward Anthony Murphy. If you detect any residual frustration throughout this article, know that it is directed toward the hands which put Murphy in my path, and ultimately in the position he is in today. My intention was to see more prospect voices added to this market.
As of today, Anthony Murphy is the Pirates correspondent for Baseball America. He runs a Substack newsletter called Bucs on Deck.
There are two industries, or packs, that I’m defining in this article.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are seen as the bigger entity, because they are the source of the coverage.
The Pirates don’t concern me, personally. Their organization is so unfathomably massive, and their operation is so vast that any unexpected interactions with them would likely come from individuals acting alone within the system. That happens everywhere, with every team, in every media market, with every reporter.
I do have personal concerns that I will be taking up with the Pirates at a future date, but they are nothing that you, the reader, should be concerned about. This is one of those “navigating the world when you own 100% of a website that is valued in the eight-figure range, with a plan that only you know to turn that into a nine-figure empire with the right expansions, and yet still with the ethical dilemma of whether this idea even needs to be unleashed onto this world” situations.
You know that place we all find ourselves in as we’re going through this life, just trying to find ways to stop the crying.
The other entity I’m discussing is the Pittsburgh media.
From my view, Murphy has been assisted with information from individuals inside the Pirates organization, which happens with every reporter. The more concerning trend are the assists from the media industry, which I will now begin to define, surrounding Murphy’s presence online.
MURPHY’S SPORTS BLOG
Murphy’s Sports Blog began as a hockey blog in November 2020, according to its Twitter profile. The site can still be accessed in the internet archives.
The content was targeted toward the Penguins, though there were articles about other teams. Eventually, there were a few Steelers articles.
The first baseball article linked was about the Arizona Diamondbacks, hyping up Pavin Smith as being in the thick of the NL Rookie of the Year race.
The first Pirates-themed post was on May 18, 2021. From this point forward, Murphy’s content was exclusively geared toward the Pirates and their minor league teams.
Murphy claims to have started writing in 2011, with a focus on the MLB Draft. There is no verifiable proof that could be found to confirm this history.
MY RETURN TO REPORTING
I took a lengthy break from reporting on this site from 2019-2021, which was detailed in the initial plans to expand Pirates Prospects into a network.
At the outset of this break, I was hitting burnout. Pirates Prospects had become the biggest Pirates news site on the internet. There was even a point in 2018 when this site broke news of player promotions before some of the players themselves were told by the team they were being promoted. What I had built was growing beyond the control of a single individual.
I was hired by Baseball America in early 2019 to be their Pirates contributor. My prospect reporting for the last five years has largely been for that outlet, and that was a personal choice. I didn’t want to return to the Pirates Prospects writing grind until I knew I could do this job in a healthy way.
I don’t know if I was ready in mid-May, but I’m just a normal guy. At some point, you have to just dive into the ocean and start swimming, while forgetting about Dry Land.
On May 16, 2021, I had my first interview with new Pirates minor league director John Baker. Two days later, elsewhere, Anthony Murphy shifted his focus to writing about prospects exclusively.
The story I wrote on PittsburghBaseball.com is only available in the internet archives (it also exists on local hard drives), but it details Baker’s direction forward for developing hitters. A lot of the tactics Baker suggested were implemented, though they haven’t led to results on the hitting side. I mention that for a specific reason, which I’ll get into later.
At the time, I didn’t know who Anthony Murphy was, nor did I know of the existence of his blog.
I do not believe it was a coincidence that Murphy isolated his focus on prospects right when I returned to reporting, though I don’t have any information on what led to the change on this date.
PITTSBURGH BASEBALL NOW
Maximus: I’ve seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal and cruel and dark, Rome is the light.
Marcus Aurelius: Yet you have never been there. You have not seen what it has become. I am dying, Maximus. When a man sees his end… he wants to know there was some purpose to his life. How will the world speak my name in years to come? Will I be known as the philosopher? The warrior? The tyrant…? Or will I be the emperor who gave Rome back her true self? There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish… it was so fragile. And I fear that it will not survive the winter.
*****
In June 2020, I approached Alan Saunders about the Pittsburgh Sports Now network. Saunders was a Major League contributor for Pirates Prospects from 2016-19, and received membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America as a member of this site.
(I’ll add that Saunders is the only BBWAA member from this outlet, as I’ve never pursued that group. The former leader of the Pittsburgh chapter, Rob Biertempfel, spent years directly stealing my work and posting it to the much larger Pittsburgh Tribune-Review without attribution, in an attempt to gatekeep me out of the local industry. The BBWAA is a completely different pack, and it exists not to allow the BBWAA members to be bastions of truth for the public against MLB. The BBWAA merely exists to provide support for the many writers who need to feel the protection of a larger entity in order to have the strength to push forward as a reporter. Saunders no longer writes here, nor about baseball. The BBWAA definitely couldn’t afford me in today’s economy. Jason Mackey runs the Pittsburgh chapter today, and I trust him to lead the pack.)
The Now network had almost zero baseball coverage in June 2020, and according to Saunders at the time, no intent to expand into the sport.
I purchased the available PittsburghBaseballNow.com for $10, with intent to develop it and send Pirates Prospects traffic to that site, where Saunders could still benefit from MLB reporting.
A key thing to note here is that Saunders lives in Pittsburgh, while I have never lived in Pittsburgh a day of my life. It was easier for him to cover the Pirates, and my life was already set up for a travel grind similar to a professional baseball scout.
I wasn’t able to coordinate on this project until July 2021, when I was approached by Saunders and Joe Steigerwald about starting Pittsburgh Baseball Now. They wanted to take advantage of the upcoming MLB draft, capitalizing on the interest of the Pirates having the first overall pick. Their idea was for me to:
- Give them my archives of over a decade at Pirates Prospects.
- Redirect all of my existing site links to their domain.
- Give them the domain I purchased.
- Write for them with the promise that they would pay me what I generated for them.
This raw deal was an immediate no from me.
I told them it would be better if they started their own site from scratch, and let it stand on its own.
We reached an agreement where I sent them traffic from my site, stating they were part of my Pittsburgh Baseball Network. This would allow them to use my site’s credentials to cover the Pirates from day one, while also having free use over our existing media archive. They offered to post a link to Pirates Prospects. The trade of a link from their forming site, compared to what I was offering their new site, was the equivalent of them betting $5 on a parlay that would change their site overnight.
Pittsburgh Baseball Now had an immediate relationship with Anthony Murphy, who was podcasting for them.
The minor league coverage on PittsburghBaseballNow.com was placed under the label “Pirates Prospects” and they began a daily “Pirates Prospect Watch,” which is the same name I’ve used for the nightly minor league report on this site since 2010. To some at a simple glance, it might appear that Pirates Prospects became Pittsburgh Baseball Now. That was their original request.
They paired this tactic by heavily attacking the Google phrase “Pirates Prospects” with their articles, which reduced my traffic. As my site has been in existence for over a decade, this had a minimal impact.
In July 2022, I learned via Twitter that Dan Kingerski purchased the Now network, including PittsburghBaseballNow.com. To that point, I only knew Kingerski as someone who would invite me to fill his radio shows by discussing the content I produced on my site.
I still own the PittsburghBaseballNow.com domain to this date. I have offered it to Kingerski, in exchange for a full audit of the Now network, to my satisfaction. Kingerski immediately responds with the condition of a non-disclosure agreement, making it clear that he doesn’t understand the industry I am in, and the industry which he is trying to financially exploit via venture capitalist methods.
As part of that July 2022 expansion, Pittsburgh Baseball Now added long-time Pirates writer John Perrotto as their beat writer. What I know, from Perrotto’s own words on social media over time, is that this site doesn’t pay him full time.
Perrotto and I have a history. He was fired from Baseball America years ago for plagiarizing my work.
I traveled to West Virginia following the trade that brought Oneil Cruz to the Pirates. In that trip, I paid $1000 to obtain exclusive interviews, which Perrotto stole for an immediate competing story in Baseball America.
This continued a long-running trend where old guard BBWAA members like Perrotto and Biertempfel would rush to replicate my content topics, often flat out stealing my work. I called it out behind the scenes after the Cruz incident, and Baseball America found many other instances of the same behavior.
Despite this, I have talked with Perrotto since that incident, though we’ve never discussed this actual incident. I suggested to him in 2021 that he should write a book about his experiences covering the Jim Leyland and Barry Bonds era Pirates. I would buy that.
Pittsburgh Baseball Now was also associated with launching the North Shore Nine podcast, before North Shore Nine separated from Now. I’ll mention North Shore Nine later, but I’ll add here that North Shore Nine also launched a version of a “Prospect Watch” in 2024, immediately after my site returned that long running feature.
Both Pittsburgh Baseball Now and North Shore Nine eventually agreed to change the name of their minor league reports to something that I hadn’t been using for years.
Kingerski attempted to obtain the PittsburghBaseballNow.com domain from me via legal methods, claiming that I was a squatter attempting to profit off their business. After submitting a plethora of evidence validating my ownership and contributions, I won the ruling and retained the domain.
At one point, I reached out to Perrotto and offered him free ownership of the domain, envisioning that he would own PittsburghBaseballNow.com in the same way I’ve owned PiratesProspects.com, and thus giving him a chance to work toward one full-time writing job. Perrotto never responded.
He was smart to do so, as this is a self-created prison.
ANTHONY MURPHY JOINS THE SITE
In late December 2021, I was ready to bring back Pirates Prospects.
By this point, I had shifted my plan from running a solo site to attempting a group site. I wanted to give opportunities to aspiring writers, following the whole “old man and the tree” quotes.
John Dreker sent me an article that Anthony Murphy had written on a site called Through the Fence.
Murphy began writing about baseball at Through the Fence on September 9, 2021. In the archives accessed through the story linked above, his first Pirates-related article was on November 20th, discussing Jack Suwinski’s protection from the Rule 5 draft. From that point forward, his articles were exclusively about the Pirates, with a theme toward the minor league system.
I added Murphy as a contributor and quickly noticed how much detailed information he was bringing to the site with his prospect reports.
Due to the depth of information Murphy was providing, and with my experience on what it would take to get that level of information, I started having concerns about Murphy very early in 2022. Either he was the biggest hidden gem in the prospect writing world, or he was essentially a mouthpiece for someone inside the Pirates organization.
What I started doing in 2022 was mentioning Anthony Murphy’s name to people who worked with the Pirates. Front office members, media relations employees, coaches, players, and so on. My goal was to see their reaction as I presented him as a promising new writer to the site who they shouldn’t know, as I didn’t know him.
I didn’t have my current, full perspective at that time, other than a Spidey-sense that something felt off.
I decided to entertain both possibilities, leaning more toward Murphy being an aspiring writer.
I told Murphy that I wanted to make him a full-time writer in 2023, and get him credentialed access to start reporting. He took over daily writing as I promoted him as the lead prospect writer on this site in the summer of 2022. This also allowed me to see what topics he would choose, without my recommendations, in a year where revenue and results didn’t matter to me.
Meanwhile, my reporting was still scarce. That changed in August 2022, when I went on a year-end trip around the system.
“YOU HAVE TO MEET HIM FIRST”
Pirates Prospects was having an incredible traffic year in 2022.
In August 2022, while entering a better mental and overall health situation than I had been in for years, I was more comfortable returning to reporting. My trip to Altoona that year featured some of my best work.
While in the PNC Park press box during that trip, I talked with Patrick Kurish, who was the Pirates Director of Baseball Communications.
My conversation with Kurish was requested by me, as the owner of a site attempting to set up some sort of communications standards between my outlet and the Pirates. This was ahead of my stated intentions to expand this site’s coverage to pre-2019 levels.
As part of this conversation, I told Kurish that I wanted to get Anthony Murphy credentials in 2023 to cover minor league teams.
Kurish stopped me, grinned awkwardly, and said “You have to meet him first, right?”
That was the end of our discussion, as Kurish cut off the conversation and walked away from a person presenting as very autistic, just looking to have a friendly talk, and who seemingly just wanted to discuss big future ideas. My intent was to see his reaction when I brought up Murphy, and his reaction stopped me in my tracks.
I emphasize “reaction” because Kurish didn’t pause and think about what I said. He reactively reminded me that I hadn’t even met Anthony Murphy, as he shut down our discussion.
There was zero good reason why Kurish should have reactively known that I hadn’t met a writer on my site.
I brought this up to Kurish and Pirates VP of communications Brian Warecki a few months ago. I didn’t receive a response to that incident, specifically, and received no response at all from Kurish.
Kurish is no longer working for the Pirates, as of three weeks ago, going closer to his hometown with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
COMPARTMENTALIZATION
After that trip in August 2022, my view on Murphy flipped to questionable.
I still didn’t know if he was actually the story he presented of an underdog, aspiring writer trying to break out of the retail world.
(If I can be honest, a lot of Murphy’s story reflects my own, down to having a deceased grandparent who was the only person that supported his quest for being a sports writer. I considered that perhaps I just identified someone who was truly a younger version of me. But it is odd that every time a new detail comes out, Murphy looks more and more like my clone. He’s even collecting comic books about the Joker these days. You notice that I shorthand call this site “the site” often? 26 times in this article. He shorthand calls his newsletter “the site” when asking for support from users, and uses a lot of other similar shorthand that I’ve used.
(At one point in this process, Murphy told me that my questioning of him behind the scenes made him realize that he used to seek my approval, but no longer cares. This was in response to me seeking information behind the scenes. I told him that he should never have been seeking my approval, and should apply that same attitude to everyone else in the world. I add that information because I can see how Murphy might have really followed my work, and I’m just the hero you don’t really want to meet in real life. You can’t model your house after someone actively building theirs. That said, I am also a very forgiving person, even in events where someone is clearly working against me. Thus, I’m not going to be a reliable person to say whether Murphy is actively involved with this network, as my inclination is to expect the best.)
What I couldn’t shake was the comment by Kurish, and all of the growing little signs that indicated Murphy was always more connected to the Pirates than I was, and more than any reporter should be.
From this point forward, I treated Murphy as if he was someone who was being set up to provide competition against me, and who I instead had welcomed to my site and gave a bigger opportunity than anyone else in the Pittsburgh media could provide.
The 2023 season was difficult, in part because I was spending so much time evaluating what was actually happening on this site.
I was noticing trends where certain commenters would flood the discussions of certain contributors, which made it appear that all of that person’s articles were popular from a commenting standpoint, even if the traffic showed it was just that small group of commenters visiting the article. These commenters were all long-time fixtures in the Pirates online social scene.
I was also noticing that the group of contributors writing for my site was an actual group, and I wasn’t part of that group. They just needed my site to publish their thoughts to my audience.
In early May 2023, I was beginning to hit burnout, spending 20 hours a week editing and producing their articles, on top of 20 more hours maintaining the site and monitoring the media. That left me with very little time to write my own articles, which is how I get paid.
After taking an unannounced day off from publishing, and after telling long time site contributor Wilbur Miller that the implementation of player pages on the site would be delayed, I was told by Miller that he was intending to start a new site for all of the other contributors.
I told him he should do just that, as it would have relieved a lot of what was leading to my burnout.
He did not take me up on the offer at that time.
ALL CAPS WHEN YOU SPELL MY NAME
At various times in 2022 and 2023, I reached out to Dejan Kovacevic about a partnership between our sites. I saw him as the only other independent outlet in this market, and the match at the time seemed perfect.
One idea I had was for Alex Stumpf to have a weekly guest article on Pirates Prospects covering the MLB team, with prospect coverage from myself or Anthony Murphy going to DKPittsburghSports.com.
Kovacevic wanted the same article to be published in multiple locations (meaning Stumpf’s article would run on both sites, and the Pirates Prospects article would run on both sites), while I wanted these “traded” articles to be exclusive to the other site, as part of a collaborative partnership.
The way it would have worked under my idea is that there would have been an exclusive article on Pirates Prospects from Stumpf, with a link to DKPittsburghSports for more MLB coverage.
There would have also been an exclusive article on DKPittsburghSports from a Pirates Prospects writer, with a link to go to Pirates Prospects for more coverage.
These talks largely fell apart, as Kovacevic wasn’t interested in expanding his prospect coverage. He did offer me his beat writer position at one point in 2023, but wasn’t interested in me maintaining Pirates Prospects and bringing it to his outlet to be managed by his company.
I’ll add that Pirates Prospects generates more Pirates traffic than DKPittsburghSports, but Kovacevic has sold part of his company to investors. Pirates Prospects is owned 100% by me. I have refused outside investments. Kovacevic has at least three investors who are willing to lose money short-term to maintain his position long-term. He uses the independent tag, but Kovacevic’s outlet is Foo Fighters compared to my outlet being Nirvana. I don’t say that to be insulting, but instead to be comparatively defining.
One of his investors is David Rosenblatt, who was also a subscriber to this site. At one point Rosenblatt came up with a proposal for a partnership between the sites, but that was never shared with me when I requested it from Kovacevic, who was the person who made me aware of what Rosenblatt sent him. To be told that Rosenblatt prepared an amazingly detailed offer by Kovacevic, only for Kovacevic to go cold and deny me a chance to even look at that offer when I made the request, was telling. My life study is business, which means I’d have an easier time understanding Rosenblatt’s proposal than Kovacevic discussing media.
Ultimately, in my dealings with Kovacevic, I got the feeling that he was happy to have me subjugated under him in his company. Each time he was required to treat me with the respect of an equal, things fell apart.
Kovacevic rounds out the trio of old guards who have worked to reduce my reach in the Pittsburgh media scene over the last 16 years, joining Biertempfel and Perrotto. They all carry the same trend of only having the capacity to see me as beneath them. And my greatest fear is ending up a personally insecure gatekeeper like each of these three.
BUCS ON DECK
The Architect: As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly ninety-nine percent of the test subjects accepted the program provided they were given a choice – even if they were only aware of it at a near-unconscious level. While this solution worked, it was fundamentally flawed, creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that, if left unchecked, might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those who refused the program, while a minority, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.
Neo: This is about Zion.
*****
In the month leading up to the 2023 MLB draft, which is the biggest historical event on this site, I was noticing more and more that the contributors of this site weren’t working with me in my goal to grow this site.
I had come up with a weekly feature idea where each contributor would submit player observations from the games they watched the previous week. This received almost no participation from the contributors, and the Weekly Observations article concept was short-lived.
By the end of June, I was covering the Pirates, live in Miami.
I wrote a game recap after a win, complete with coverage from the clubhouse, only for Anthony Murphy to replicate that game recap with his own at-home version of the game in his daily article — which was meant to be focused on minor league topics. This diluted the coverage I was paying for, on my own site.
After that weekend, I made a change to take over the “Pirates Prospects Daily” article, which would give Murphy more time to work exclusively on player features. This also allowed me to regain control of the daily tone of the site.
When the 2023 draft came around, I made a decision that was unpopular with the contributors.
In the week leading up to the draft, I hosted a Roundtable series, which asked Anthony Murphy, John Dreker, Wilbur Miller, and Murphy’s podcast partner (and no relation to the Steelers former kicker) Jeff Reed their opinions on who the Pirates should take with the first overall pick.
These articles led the site’s draft content all week, with 4,000 words across four articles. I only served as the moderator. The end result was inconclusive, with a split between Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, and the idea of going the cheap, signability route with the first overall pick.
At the end of that week, I wrote that the Pirates couldn’t pass on the chance to draft Paul Skenes. My gift as a writer is an ability to get very direct and to the point about what really matters. I was clear in this article. I also was invited on to do an interview with 93.7 The Fan about my stance, which is a completely different form of expressing knowledge.
Traditionally, I’ve been a nervous talker. I underwent a lot of therapy from 2018-2022, and by this point, I was ready to debut my new approach on radio. If anyone was expecting a rambling, nonsensical answer that you could pick apart, that version of Tim Williams was gone. For the first time in my radio interview history, I was direct and to the point, verbally, that the Pirates couldn’t pass on Skenes.
It was clear from that point that the stance from Pirates Prospects was that Skenes should be the pick. And my history suggests I would be talking daily on my site for a decade had the Pirates gone cheap on Skenes, only for him to win Rookie of the Year the following year. Credit to them for the successful pick, and more importantly, for loosening their methods of financial control over the contract and earnings of young star players.
PiratesProspects.com was getting DDoS attacked constantly in the week leading up to the 2023 draft. It took a tremendous effort to not only keep the site online, but also to produce content.
Jeff Reed was reaching out to me often that week, picking my brain on future plans for the site. I noticed a disturbing trend where the site would get attacked after these information quests, to the point where I predicted one attack was coming after hearing from Reed. I am not saying that Reed was responsible for the attacks. What I can say is that Reed was positioning himself as someone who wanted to help me build the site, if I just shared my plans to grow the site; all while my site was getting constantly attacked by an unknown entity.
During the draft, I handled all of the coverage solo. I wanted consistency in the presentation of information, while establishing a new format that anyone could use in the future. Also, I didn’t trust anyone else to have an objective voice. Behind the scenes, I was working on a Roundtable series where the contributors would react to the draft.
After the draft, there was a more aggressive push from the contributors to know my plans going forward. If you’ve ever read Wilbur Miller’s rants on Pirates manager Derek Shelton, I had entered Shelton territory for Miller, which meant his involvement in the discussion was degrading me to everyone. I agreed when he said I was exactly like Elon Musk with his approach to Twitter. This was pre-2024, when people had somehow forgotten the real value of owning a media site.
At one point, Reed asked what they could do to help with the build up of the site toward my end goal. When I told him that I needed scouting reports on every player in the system from every contributor, to work toward a combined top 50 prospect list (one of the biggest money making articles in the prospect writing industry), he told me that work could come later.
I have never had a boss in this venture, and it felt like Reed was trying to take the throne.
The moment I told that group that my plan was to personally return to writing, serving as the only voice in Pittsburgh who could actually provide the Pirates with accountability, things blew up.
I was told that I needed those contributors more than they needed me, and that I was on the same level as them. They didn’t like that I considered myself a higher tier of media on the site, due to my track record as a credentialed reporter.
What I later found out was that they were starting a newsletter, Bucs on Deck, while actively picking my brain for the publication plans of Pirates Prospects going forward.
Bucs on Deck launched the weekend following the 2023 MLB Draft. I took offense to the initial marketing surrounding Murphy as someone who was ready to give up on writing, with no path forward, until his new venture saved him. That venture began as I was in the final stages of putting him in position to have one of the most-read features on my site, in a year where my main goal was trying to create an economic profit sharing system within the site. Essentially, I was trying to create a local Substack. Bucs on Deck formed the moment I was ready to push “Go.”
To this day, Bucs on Deck largely uses the same format that I had planned out and shared with them when they were asking for my plans in July 2023. They even brought to life my idea of having Ten Observations every Monday morning, which they didn’t participate in when I had the idea in June 2023.
When their site launched, there were commenters who were heavily spamming my site and telling people to go to the “new” site. These were the same commenters who were inflating the perceived popularity of certain contributor articles.
Some of those commenters have gone around the internet, spamming Bucs on Deck as the new Pirates Prospects, just without me, while pushing out an opinion that I am not mentally well. The initial launch of Bucs on Deck worked to play up the public perception that I was going through a serious mental health episode.
I’ll add here that my non-baseball mental health issues ended in 2022, with my return to prospect writing helping to bring me out of that low point. I shared those issues to help anyone going through a similar issue.
My mental health issues from mid-2022 onward were entirely due to the obvious deception that was surrounding me from the Pittsburgh media. It’s very easy to appear mentally unstable when you’re just shutting up and taking what a gang of disingenuous actors is presenting to the public. The moment you defend yourself, a random Twitter account created this very month, with eight numbers at the end of the name, tries to diagnose you for showing emotion.
It’s the highest form of gaslighting to say that someone pointing out how another person did them wrong is a sign of the victim’s mental health. Especially when part of the goal is to mentally torture the victim in order to show the world the victim in an unfavorable light. Unfortunately for anyone involved in my treatment, I took a few psychology courses during this time period on how to deal with such manipulation. In 2025, I will be voluntarily recovering from this investigative time period with cPTSD therapy.
Behind the scenes in July 2023, the traffic to Pirates Prospects was still high, despite the new competition and the idea pushed out in the comments that there was a mass-exodus from one site to the other. The Bucs on Deck plan was ineffective, other than successfully pushing me further into hybernating lone wolf land.
When I started randomly stepping away over the next year, the site traffic dropped. With an inconsistent publishing schedule, and a lot of lengthy, unexplained absences, I don’t blame real readers for giving up on routinely checking in.
A lot of what I was doing after the draft was feeling out the Pittsburgh media scene.
I traveled to Pittsburgh, where I had one final discussion with Kovacevic about joining the two sites. He offered me his beat writer position, but he wasn’t interested in Pirates Prospects boosting his site’s minor league coverage. I never got back to him about the beat writer position, for a reason only I know. It had nothing to do with Kovacevic’s instinctive insistence to operate under a hierarchy.
Meanwhile, Anthony Murphy received credentials from the Greensboro Grasshoppers for his new site.
One year prior, I was told by Patrick Kurish that I needed to meet Murphy before getting him credentialed. Again, Kurish shouldn’t have known that I didn’t know Murphy.
When I inquired with the Pirates as to how Murphy obtained credentials in 2023, I was told that the minor league teams operate independently from the MLB media relations department. This is true to an extent, but I know that the MLB team has oversight and influence to the process.
That would become relevant in Greensboro nearly a year later.
DraftNation and North Shore Nine
In February 2024, I went to Spring Training to interview Bubba Chandler for a Baseball America feature. While I was there, I was approached by Pirates Director of Media Relations Dan Hart, who congratulated me on my new book.
I had no clue what he was talking about, as this site was actively offline.
Hart showed me an email from a site called DraftNation.com. A person named John Toth sent the following email. The contents from Hart are copied and pasted from the email I witnessed earlier that day sent from Toth to Hart.
The text, from Toth to Hart, with my emphasis in bold, edited to remove personal information:
“Hope you and your family are doing well. I wanted to let you know that Draft 412 is now Draft Nation and has companies based in Carolina, Indianapolis and of course Pittsburgh. I know you feared we are a blog and you can’t let blogs come into the press box. However, Draft Nation is far from a blog…we are now in charge of the Pirates Prospect book that used to be written by Tim Williams and crew. We have 5 writers involved in the new Pirates prospect guide, Myself, David Finoli, John Dreker, Wilbur Moore, and Jeff Reed. I am coming to Bradenton on March 6-16 and would love to meet you if you are around and available. I had Kevin Gorman on a podcast (Kevin and I went to ***** High School together) and he told me to reach out to you. Hope to hear from you soon, and I hope to see you in Florida.
Thanks,
JT”
The very next day, the Bucs on Deck crew was on Twitter, advertising their 2024 Pittsburgh Pirates Minor League Guide. Jeff Reed called it the Pirates Prospects Guide on Twitter, and acted like I was unreasonable and overly emotional when I insisted he change the Tweet.
John Dreker informed me that Finoli started the project, Dreker was second on board, and Dreker invited Murphy. This is the second time that Dreker has recommended Murphy for a project, after first mentioning him to me as a contributor at Pirates Prospects.
When I asked who joined after Murphy, Dreker asked why I was questioning how the project came together. He told me if the Pirates needed details, he would answer their questions. The communications with the Bucs on Deck writers quickly broke down to claims of my mental health, all from a simple request to not so deliberately use my intellectual property.
The DraftNation book was written by David Finoli (who also publishes all of John Dreker’s books), John Dreker, Wilbur Miller, Emmet Mahon, Jeff Reed, John Toth, and Anthony Murphy. I had no prior knowledge of Mahon, Toth, or Finoli, outside of hearing Finoli’s name from Dreker in the past. I don’t know much about any of them today.
So, what is DraftNation, formerly Draft 412?
It’s a site owned by Finoli, who publishes books each year about the history of the Pirates. It presents itself as a national draft outlet for all sports, but the Pittsburgh ties are undeniable.
John Perrotto has since joined that site as a regular contributor.
Rob King, a long time fixture in the Pittsburgh television scene, and a broadcaster on the official Pirates broadcast, hosts a DraftNation podcast.
I don’t need to go into detail why it’s alarming to me that so many prominent Pittsburgh media figures are putting their name on a site that is focused on the draft, one year after I returned with my voice of accountability ahead of such an important draft.
From my view, there was a rush to establish a new online national authority on draft opinions, generating out of Pittsburgh. King hosted MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo on July 1st and July 8th this year, which from the perspective of an independent outlet like mine, is difficult competition to go up against. It’s also the type of challenge which could entice someone like me to step up his game.
There was also the previously mentioned push to establish Bucs on Deck as the new authority on prospect discussion.
That continued this year with the help of the North Shore Nine podcast, which began having Murphy on as a weekly expert on Pirates minor leaguers, starting on March 31st, 2024. I decided to ask about how that arrangement came about during an impromptu Q&A with Jim Rosati of North Side Notch on Sunday afternoon.
Thank you to Jim (@northsidenotch) for this impromptu live Q&A this morning. I appreciate the authenticity of his responses.
To be clear, I have never claimed the Pirates pay NS9 nor any other outlet.
This thread was illuminating regarding the structure and intent behind NS9. https://t.co/HUe75crg6G
— Tim Williams (@TimWilliamsP2) December 29, 2024
In the conversation I had with Rosati, he mentioned that he first floated the idea of the weekly show to Murphy in early January. He didn’t discuss the idea again until mid-March.
Man – I’d have to dig, it was early January when I floated it out but we didn’t really discuss it again until mid-March.
— Jim Rosati 🏴☠️ (@northsidenotch) December 29, 2024
I’ve asked multiple times for the exact dates. My final request was on Monday morning, to which Rosati was condescending, and refused to provide the dates. He later blocked me, while immediately playing up the public routine that I am a person going through a mental health episode, rather than a reporter who is asking him questions at the end of a five-year investigation.
Anyone in the Pittsburgh market who goes online and tells the world that they should view me from the lens of broken mental health is likely the very source of my actual mental health problems. They also know what they are doing. Gang stalking is a term that will be popular in the years to come, but I don’t want to personally go forth and proceed to discuss that territory.
The timings Rosati provided match my movements, following a trend. In early January, I was only talking with John Dreker about my future plans for this site. I also mentioned something specific to him with the intent of seeing where the information ended up. I saw that bit of information almost immediately from Wilbur Miller, announcing to the Bucs on Deck comment section the latest evidence that my personal life was falling apart.
That bit of information coincided with PiratesProspects.com going offline, unannounced.
For the first two months of the year, I was living out of my car, with my sites on hard drives, rotating between many secret parking locations (due to police in Florida treating homelessness as an eternal sin), playing a lot of online chess, watching my ankles slowly build with fluids, and wondering if I wanted to return to this Pittsburgh media scene. I was living out of my car in part due to a sensory study I was completing, which took precedent over anything involving the Pirates or Pittsburgh media.
When I decided to return to Spring Training in late February 2024 as a credentialed reporter for a Baseball America feature, DraftNation launched the next day with a competitor version of my Prospect Guide.
During that same trip, I met with MLB.com’s Alex Stumpf for lunch, explaining all of the concerns I had with the Pittsburgh media. I was told by Stumpf the equivalent that I should assume the best from every situation. The only problem with this advice is that I existed for years assuming the best from every situation, including for most of these years. I had specific concerns that stemmed from being ripped out of that approach, so “assume the best” couldn’t unring the bell.
At the end of that meeting with Stumpf, I told him that none of this matters.
He took that as nihilism.
What he didn’t understand was that I meant that you could line the entirety of the Pittsburgh media up against me, with the backing of the support of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I would still be standing at the end of the day.
Pirates Prospects returned on March 15, 2024.
On that same day, MLB was running a new initiative to broadcast a minor league Spring Training game.
They were featuring the “Pirates Prospects” against the Baltimore Orioles minor league system, who for some reason didn’t get the similar “Orioles Prospects” terminology.
The Pirates call their own minor leaguers the “Young Bucs”, so calling that team “Pirates Prospects” felt like Prince putting Dave Chappelle on his album cover. Ya know? They’re not doing anything illegal, because they’re the Pirates, but I’ve been using “Pirates Prospects” as a specific branding for my site’s minor league coverage since 2010. What can I do but watch and smile and wonder how intentional this was?
I’ll be honest that I rushed to put the site online on March 15th, owning the brand phrasing “Pirates Prospects” that I had used since 2010.
Shortly after the site’s return, on March 31st, Anthony Murphy made his debut on North Shore Nine as a weekly prospect expert.
Baseball America
My live reporting in 2024 was mostly limited to my work at Baseball America.
I wrote a single 350 word article per month, and I had a lot of editorial freedom. This year, I set out to write some of my best articles, in what I planned would be my final year in that role.
I got into this job because I loved reading Baseball America in college. This was the first year that I really got to enjoy and appreciate that I had achieved a goal from so long ago to eventually be the Pirates correspondent for such an outlet.
At the end of Spring Training, I interviewed John Baker in person for several upcoming stories. At the end of May, I set up an interview with Hunter Barco, through the Greensboro Grasshoppers media relations contact. I was able to complete the phone interview with Barco less than 48 hours after submitting the request. My story ran in early June.
My other interview was a sit-down, one-on-one with Michael Kennedy, who was recently traded in the deal to acquire Spencer Horwitz. This article coincided with a month where Baseball America wasn’t publishing a magazine, making this online-only and free of a need for a word count. I had a great interview with Kennedy, and came away feeling he was a genius who would absolutely make the Majors in some way. His scouting report talked about how scouts loved the cerebral approach. I requested to do a longer word count feature to expand upon that, for the same $75 per month that I got paid, which Baseball America approved.
My article on Kennedy ran on May 17th.
On May 19th, Noah Hiles of the Post-Gazette ran a feature on Kennedy, and based on the timing mentioned in his story, the interview between Hiles and Kennedy was after my story was published.
I mention that as a continuation of the trend from Pittsburgh media to quickly follow my work. Prior to this, there wasn’t a single story online about Michael Kennedy. My story at Baseball America had an exclusive of two days before the Pittsburgh media coincidentally turned to Kennedy for the first time. This often happens with the Post-Gazette assigning a young reporter to shadow my work.
If you followed this site over the summer, you’d know I was very critical of the hitting approach by the Pirates, down throughout their minor league system. This goes back to the themes of my original conversation with Baker in 2021.
For my Baseball America feature in July, it took a week for Baker to get back to me on a request to discuss Zander Mueth. He requested that I send questions via email, which isn’t a good journalistic practice. I was running up against a deadline, after being busy with the draft coverage on my site. I ended up conducting that interview via email.
In August, my plan was to interview Termarr Johnson. The Pirates 2022 fourth overall pick had a hitting streak in July, after a slow start to the year. I wanted to ask him about his development at the plate this year.
Reaching out to Greensboro about two months after the Barco story, this time they requested that I send questions and information on what the story would be about. I told the Greensboro media contact that I was focusing on Johnson’s hitting streak and hitting development this year.
After not getting a response for a week, I emailed a follow up. At that point, I was told that the Pirates were not making Johnson available for interviews for the rest of the season. When I asked the Greensboro media contact who made the call, they declined to specify.
I reached out to Baker, who said that this call would come from Warecki and Kurish in the Pirates media/communications department.
When I reached out to Warecki and Kurish, I didn’t receive a response from Kurish, while Warecki was on vacation.
I told JJ Cooper and Matt Eddy at Baseball America that it would be best to replace me, since the Pirates were shutting me out. I explained the situation, while also mentioned to them some of my concerns surrounding Murphy. There was no attempt by Baseball America to assist on my behalf, in the name of journalistic integrity.
I didn’t get a response from the Pirates. Eddy, my editor, responded to my email accepting my suggestion that it would be best to part ways. I posted about the situation on Twitter, which was followed by an email response from Warecki. He stated that he was on vacation, which was the reason for the lack of a response. There was never a reason given as to why Kurish didn’t respond.
At a certain point, I expressed some related concerns about the comments Kurish previously made about me having not met Anthony Murphy, and was told by Warecki, the head of Pirates media, that he personally didn’t know who Murphy was.
A few days after this, Dejan Kovacevic announced that he was adding Anthony Murphy to his site, in order to boost his site’s minor league coverage.
Murphy would begin a daily post at DKPittsburghSports.com, with a link to Bucs on Deck for more prospect information. Does that concept sound familiar?
In the introductory post that doubles as a reflection of his journalistic and personal integrity, Kovacevic specifically mentioned that if Murphy wanted to run a feature on Termarr Johnson, Kovacevic would ensure that Murphy gets an interview.
When Baseball America asked for my replacement, I suggested Andrew Destin of the Post-Gazette, who I feel does the best prospect features these days. I can confirm that they reached out to Destin and he declined.
Anthony Murphy is now the Pittsburgh Pirates correspondent for Baseball America, as of November.
I sent an email to Cooper and Eddy, requesting information on how Murphy came to be their new correspondent, and who exactly recommended him.
I haven’t received a response.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
Kevin Sandusky: Now, if you recall that whole hullabaloo where Hollywood was split into schisms, some studios backing Blu-ray disc, others backing HD DVD. People thought it would come down to pixel rate or refresh rate, and they’re pretty much the same. What it came down to was a combination between gamers and porn. Now, whichever format porno backs is usually the one that becomes the uh most successful. But, you know, Sony, every PlayStation 3 has a Blu-ray in it.
Kirk Lazarus: You talkin’ to me this whole time?!
Kevin Sandusky: I was talking to whoever was listening.
Kirk Lazarus: Jesus Christ, man!
*****
At this point, I’m going to sum up a trend that exists. The trend is that each time I push forward with my 100% owned site, backed by my discernment, some sort of opposition forms that tends to originate from the Pittsburgh Sports Now network.
- May 16, 2021: I first interview Pirates farm director John Baker.
- May 18, 2021: Anthony Murphy makes the move to writing almost exclusively about Pirates minor leaguers.
- July 2021: Pittsburgh Baseball Now starts, attempting to capitalize on the hype of the draft, and originally wanting me to give them my archives for free and work for them. Anthony Murphy and North Shore Nine start podcasts on their network.
- December 2021: John Dreker sends me an article written by Anthony Murphy as I’m adding contributors to Pirates Prospects.
- December 27, 2021: Anthony Murphy’s first article is published to Pirates Prospects.
- January 4, 2022: I returned to publishing this site, starting off by going into detail about the new individualized development approach by the Pirates. Most of my year was producing the content schedule for what would eventually become Bucs on Deck.
- 2022 Season: I start to realize that Anthony Murphy’s information is likely coming from inside the organization, speaking as someone who would know these things from years of reporting experience.
- August 2022: I went on a road trip, covering games for nearly three weeks. On this trip, Pirates Director of Baseball Communications Patrick Kurish made the comment that I needed to meet Anthony Murphy before getting him credentials in 2023.
- 2022-23: I had various conversations with Dejan Kovacevic about teaming up with his site to allow Pirates Prospects to boost their minor league coverage.
- 2023 Season: I operate under the idea that the future Bucs on Deck writers were not working with me.
- May 2023: Wilbur Miller tells me that he is going to start a site for the other contributors if I don’t prioritize his player pages on the front of the site.
- June 2023: I started noticing the contributors were not contributing to the feature ideas I was suggesting. They later used the same ideas on Bucs on Deck.
- July 2023: Prior to the draft, PiratesProspects.com was getting DDoS attacked almost daily, with a lot of coinciding prodding from Jeff Reed about my future plans to develop the site and the content. After the draft, and after I outlined my plan to the contributors, they left to form Bucs on Deck, with certain commenters spamming every article on my site, telling people to go to the “new site”.
- August 2023: I traveled to Greensboro for interviews, continuing my coverage as a solo site. I submitted my credential request to Greensboro on 8/15. It was approved on the same day. Anthony Murphy submitted his credential request on 8/17, to cover the following homestand, putting him in position to follow any of my features with one of his own.
- Offseason 2023: I stepped back from publishing to study Bucs on Deck and their commenters. My only contact who I allowed to think still had my trust was John Dreker, who was still being paid to not write on this site. I eventually told Dreker of my intentions to run a solo site, and he slowly became publicly aligned with Bucs on Deck.
- January 2024: I take PiratesProspects.com offline, while giving Dreker a specific reason for the site going down, which was immediately found on a Bucs on Deck comment section, announced by Wilbur Miller to all former readers.
- February 2024: I traveled to Bradenton for a Baseball America feature. While there, I was alerted by the Pirates that a site called DraftNation was claiming they were tasked with continuing my site’s Prospect Guide, pairing up with the Bucs on Deck group. The next day, they begin to promote their book on Twitter, sometimes calling it the Pirates Prospects Guide.
- March 15, 2024: Pirates Prospects returns online, in time to cover the Spring Training minor league game for the Pittsburgh “Pirates Prospects.”
- March 2024 (Undisclosed Date): Jim Rosati at North Shore Nine revives an idea to have Anthony Murphy as a weekly prospect expert on his show. The specific date of this communication was withheld by Rosati upon multiple requests.
- March 31, 2024: The first weekly “Starbucs on Deck” between North Shore Nine and Murphy runs, presenting Murphy as a prospect expert.
- May 2024: Pittsburgh Baseball Now and North Shore Nine both agree to cease using the name “Pirates Prospect Watch” for their minor league reports, after separate requests to each party. Pittsburgh Baseball Now agreed to change the minor league coverage from being displayed as “Pirates Prospects.” Dan Kingerski attempted to gain ownership of the PittsburghBaseballNow.com domain, but my legitimate ownership of the domain was upheld. My conditions to give him the domain for free remain, to this day, a full audit of the Pittsburgh Sports Now network, with no NDA.
- June 2024: I start getting critical of the hitting development failures throughout the Pirates’ system in my writing on Pirates Prospects.
- July 2024: I begin having difficulty setting up interviews with John Baker and the Pirates to complete Baseball America features.
- August 2024: I stepped down from Baseball America, due to an undisclosed member of the Pirates restricting a Termarr Johnson interview, with a complete runaround as to who made the call that Johnson couldn’t be interviewed. I’ve yet to have the question answered, despite multiple requests. Days later, Anthony Murphy is added to Dejan Kovacevic’s site to boost their minor league coverage, with a stated promise by Kovacevic that if Murphy wants to interview Termarr Johnson, Kovacevic can make that happen.
- Late August 2024: I bring up what Patrick Kurish said about Murphy in an email to the Pirates communications department. Kurish offered no response, while Brian Warecki, the head of communications for the Pirates, claimed he didn’t know who Anthony Murphy was.
- November 2024: Anthony Murphy is hired as the new Pirates correspondent for Baseball America.
KINGERSKI AND THE RIVAL
Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a God?
What’s a God to a non-believer
Who don’t believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright
No church in the wild
*****
The final thing I will say on this subject is that I had a call with Dan Kingerski, stated owner of the Pittsburgh Sports Now network, in January 2024.
In that call, Kingerski attempted to purchase the PittsburghBaseballNow.com domain from me, while also making an offer to buy Pirates Prospects. His stated intent was to give Pirates Prospects to John Perrotto and Cody Potanko, which plays up on my previous stated intentions to find Perrotto a similar site to profit from. Potanko is a person who joined the Pirates scene after 2020, podcasting with Anthony Murphy and Jeff Reed. He now goes by Cody Weber online.
During my call with Kingerski, he told me a story about a rival he had.
This person entered a market that Kingerski felt belonged to him. The rival, according to Kingerski, thought he was stumbling into a group of independent people. He didn’t realize he was dealing with a large organization, of which they were all members.
So, Kingerski tried to send a message to his rival.
This person got denied credentials from the team he was covering, but from Kingerski’s view, the rival didn’t get the message.
Kingerski told me that he made it his intention to crush his rival’s entire life.
I told Kingerski that it sounded like he needed to get some therapy for his hierarchical view of others, and his tendency to respond to a challenge with the childish need to hit others who caused him discomfort.
We ultimately never came to agreeable terms, I hold a 1-0 record in the legal system, and if Kingerski were to ever go a serious legal route against me, he would open himself to the exact discovery that I am requesting, in exchange for volunteering his domain to him, without an NDA.
I share that story because in August 2020, I was denied credentials by the Pittsburgh Pirates when I applied to have David Hague taking photographs of the first game back.
I wondered, after that very pointed story Kingerski told me, whether I was the rival.
Hague still takes photos for the Now network. At times during 2021-2023, I paid Hague for photos to be used on both PiratesProspects.com, and for free on PittsburghBaseballNow.com, as part of my attempt to help their growth.
As I told Alex Stumpf a month later when I was set to return, none of it matters.
No weapon conjured against me shall prosper.
I’ll add one final thing about that phone call with Kingerski.
He lamented that due to his rival’s actions and dumb persistence, Kingerski was now having to pay the salary of an extra writer.
There is no publicly available data on Bucs on Deck paid subscription data.
Murphy claims that the site is fully reader supported.
The public subscription total — which includes free and paid subscriptions — initially jumped to 600 users upon formation. The combined total is currently at 862 over a year and a half later. Murphy charges $5 per month, but the amount of paid subscribers he has is unknown.
Murphy now presents himself as doing this job full time, while also traveling to cover games.
The subscription numbers don’t line up with the expected financials to justify the reality he is presenting, based on my knowledge of this exact niche.
Murphy has since teamed up with Kovacevic and Baseball America. From the outside, Murphy looks more legitimate with these two outlets, along with a weekly North Shore Nine podcast, backing his claim as an independent prospect expert, no different than me.
There has been a large effort to get Murphy where he is right now. I have assisted, with a growing suspicion that he had greater help than I could provide.
I met Murphy in Bradenton this year, while he was at a Marauders game for coverage. I was there to interview Kennedy for Baseball America.
During a brief talk, I treated Murphy as if he was just like me years ago — someone who was legitimately aspiring to be a writer. If there was an industry, I was going to treat him as if he had no clue of its existence, just as I did at one point. I didn’t want to be wrong about a real person.
Murphy’s comment on the Bucs on Deck split was that the contributors could have communicated the move to the new site better, which I appreciated, but my issue was and still remains how they have falsely painted me to the public in the year following the launch.
That brief interaction wasn’t enough to get me to trust Murphy, as I suspected he was being funded by dark money, and I don’t know his personal ethics.
Pirates Prospects survived and thrived for years on the back of thousands of $30-40 subscriptions.
This is the Bernie Sanders of prospect sites. I exist on the spare change each year that Pirates fans don’t spend on alcohol or marijuana after watching this organization.
I existed on $100 every three years from a core group of users, along with a revolving crowd of $30-40 annual users and $5 monthly users. We also run advertising, because you can’t survive running a true independent site without that. In 2022, when I promoted an “ad-free” site, that loss came out of my own pocket. On this site, every individual has always been limited as to how much they can purchase on this site, unless they create multiple accounts beyond my knowledge.
For that reason, no individual’s money holds any real value to me. If you tell me that you paid my site hundreds of dollars across a nearly ten-year period, I can show you how John Dreker got all of that amount and more in the first month of this site being a subscription site in 2015.
Substack, where Murphy hosts Bucs on Deck, is a platform that makes it possible for any individual to pay any amount to a creator. From my experience as the actual version of the success Murphy is claiming to be having right now, I can tell you that he’s got donors paying much more than the $5 per month he advertises.
*****
During the last few years, I heard something that I’ve yet to verify.
Employees of traditional media establishments, like newspapers, have traditionally been given a stipend.
Each individual can use this money to support other ancillary members of the industry.
I learned this while studying the American news industry during the 20th century. If the system still exists, then it would allow the collective of media in a city to create a secondary tier of media, working under and for the main tier, and presenting as an outspoken member of the public, with no regulation over these relationships or the presentation of truth to the public.
In Pittsburgh, there’s no need to show that this system exists. So many sites like DraftNation stem from that secondary Pittsburgh media market.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that Bob Nutting, the owner of the Pirates, actively owns over 100 newspapers across America. The Nutting family entered the newspaper business in 1890, about ten years before the Block family entered the advertising business for newspapers. The two families, over a hundred years later, still control the traditional print media industry surrounding Pittsburgh.
Nutting wouldn’t need to use the Pirates to influence the media. If I go to Altoona, I’m in the same room as Jarrod Prugar, who works for the Altoona Mirror, which is owned by Nutting.
All Nutting would need to do to restrict my coverage is send word down the chain to have Prugar box out my coverage while I’m in town, practicing the same gatekeeping as the rest of the media.
I mention Prugar as an example, only because he cut me off when asking a development follow-up question in a press conference after Paul Skenes’ debut. I am not saying he had these orders.
Besides, it wouldn’t matter.
I talked with Skenes one-on-one the next day.
THE INDUSTRY
DUDE: They’re nihilists.
WALTER: Huh?
DUDE: They kept saying they believe in nothing.
WALTER: Nihilists! Jesus. … Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism,
Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
DUDE: Yeah.
WALTER: And let’s also not forget–let’s not forget, Dude–that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city–that isn’t legal either.
DUDE: What’re you, a fucking park ranger now?
WALTER: No, I’m–
DUDE: Who gives a shit about the fucking marmot!
*****
Within this article surrounding Murphy, you can loosely see the industry.
When I call Murphy an industry plant, I am saying that I believe he is being funded by the Pittsburgh media.
I honestly can’t say that this same group and system didn’t fund me for years without my knowledge. That’s why I’m hesitant to ask for money from readers going forward, even with the grassroots approach. Yet, that also would require me to shut down operations as a true independent site.
Separately, I believe Murphy is being fed information by people inside the Pirates’ development and scouting departments. This isn’t criminal, as it is part of the job of a reporter. I fully understand if sources inside the Pirates prefer to push Murphy in an attempt of getting me out of the business.
I am the only real reporter in Pittsburgh, and I provide real accountability to every member of the Pirates’ pack.
I provide the truth.
What I am going to determine in the coming days and weeks is whether I will continue in this market and industry.
At this point, my life focus has grown way beyond Pittsburgh Pirates minor leaguers. My intent over the last few years was to add more prospect writers to the Pittsburgh market, so that it wasn’t just my opinion treated as gospel.
Thus, I welcome Anthony Murphy’s addition to this scene, so long as he is authentically who he claims to be.
I also welcome the Young Bucs initiative, which in the summer of 2020 was a priority creation for the Pirates new marketing department under new Pirates president Travis Williams (no relation).
Not long after, a flood of new young, aspiring writers, including Murphy, started hitting the internet with a Pittsburgh sports focus. A few of those accounts have gravitated toward Pirates minor league coverage.
All roads seem to lead to Dan Kingerski and the Pittsburgh Sports Now network, which is largely made up of past and present Pittsburgh radio personalities. Murphy and the North Shore Nine podcast were both introduced into the Pirates media scene after 2020, via Pittsburgh Baseball Now.
As noted above, Pittsburgh Baseball Now rushed to form ahead of the Pirates drafting Henry Davis with the pick that would define their rebuild.
My biggest personal concern with all of this would lead to a need to investigate the Pirates marketing approach that was initiated by Travis Williams in 2020, while also exploring deeper the role of Kingerski in Pittsburgh media.
Despite this article finishing at nearly 13,000 words, it does not include my conclusive experience with the parties mentioned in this article, nor are the parties mentioned the complete list of people I have concerns about in the Pittsburgh media market.
I also feel the need to explicitly point out that my mental health issues in life right now relate 100% to this subject, and by writing this, I am simply able to reclaim my own ecosystem. This situation may sound difficult to some, but it has not and never will break me. I am at no risk of suicide or self-harm. I take no drugs which can lead to an overdose. I don’t own a gun. I am looking forward to a lot of life experiences in 2025, some of which might include baseball.
What I would publicly recommend to the Pirates is to stop playing games of perception. Quit trying to tell the public who you are, through media manipulation, and show them who you are via actions.
What I would publicly recommend to the Pittsburgh media is to use this New Year to be stronger individuals. Learn a little from the lone wolf, and stop glorifying your pack system.
And so help me God, if I see any of you discussing the homeless problem by punching down on the homeless, or the addiction problem by shaming the addict, I will show up ready to educate you in public on how we can get you to be a better human being.
That’s all any of us are trying to do.
Regardless of whether or not we roam in packs.
Happy New Year!
SONG OF THE DAY
