Major League Baseball is a grind, no matter your relation to the sport.
It’s an everyday sport for six months out of the year, precluded by six weeks of Spring Training, and followed by six more weeks of playoffs for contending teams. The stretch from Spring Training through the end of the regular season is exhausting enough. It takes a special love of the game to stick with it daily for nine months out of the year.
This is my 16th season publishing daily articles on this site, covering the Pittsburgh Pirates and their minor league system. It’s also only the second year that I’ve run this site solo. Currently in my age-40 season, I can no longer do the 80-hour work weeks like when I was younger. In those days, baseball consumed nearly every minute of my life. As the site grew, I spent more time managing the site, and editing the work of contributors, which left me with little time or energy to write my own daily articles.
If you followed the site prior to this season, you’d know that I took a break for awhile, starting around this time last year. I finished the season with light daily publishing, along with a few breaks. I had a reduced offseason for the first time since 2008-09, where I scaled back publishing. At one point, the site went offline, as I determined whether I could continue doing this.
Pirates Prospects returned on March 15th this year, after I made the commitment to go through the grind of at least one more season. My simple goal was publishing daily articles, with a primary focus on updating the status of the minor league system.
Today is the 150th day of that publishing schedule, and this is the 398th article I’ve published this year. That doesn’t count my monthly articles at Baseball America, which is where I’ve been channeling my reporting energy.
I’ve been able to establish a good work schedule this year, with a daily Prospect Watch and a daily First Pitch article, along with an extra feature about 4-5 days per week. This also leaves me time to watch games at night, with the goal being that I’ll get to the end of September and won’t feel dead.
Lately, I’ve been expanding a few things on the site, as I’ve gotten fully into my existing publishing routines.
Transactions
This site has been my full-time job for years. One of the biggest money makers in publishing a sports site is keeping track of the transactions. It’s such a big market share that you see smaller sites trying to make their way with trade rumors and mock trade proposals during June and July, trying to maximize that market. I’ve been there.
I was fortunate this year to be able to ignore the transactions posts. I’d recap them in the daily articles, but with my writing time reduced, I didn’t have consistent time to make the transactions part of the site.
That is changing over the final two months of the year. This weekend, I added a Transactions page to the site. You can go to this page to find articles with the latest moves, along with a list of all of the moves that have been made this month.
Rankings
One of the things I’ve been focusing on this year is creating a new method of ranking prospects. I’ve released three versions of my Top 50 Tiered Rankings, which has expanded to include Current Values from every player in the system.
You can find those on the Rankings page, which includes the current top 50 after the draft and trade deadline.
That list will get an update this week. Whenever I do a new version of the list, I throw the old rankings out completely and start from scratch. That means giving each player a fresh grade and projection, then combining the list and fine-tuning the tiers and rankings within the tiers. It’s a lengthy process, but I feel it leads to the best Pirates rankings you can find.
Very few people follow the minor leagues as closely as I do, and I don’t think anyone has my experience of reporting on prospect development. In fact, I was looking recently at sports psychology degrees, and found that a recurring feature of each program was a chance to have 1-on-1 interactions with athletes for 200 hours. At this point, I’ve got thousands of hours under my belt, with most of those focused on talking with players as they make adjustments and deal with the difficulties of making the majors from the lowest levels of the minors, all the way through the big leagues.
This entire 16-year experience has been an honor, and as such, I don’t take these rankings lightly. Expect Version 4.0 of my Top 50 Tiered Rankings to release at some point this week.
Pirates Prospect Watch
The Pirates Prospect Watch has been running on this site since 2010. Along with First Pitch, which I started in 2012, the Prospect Watch represents the core of this site’s daily publishing.
The latest update looks at a big day from Kervin Pichardo, who the Pirates acquired in a minor trade earlier this season. Nick Yorke extended his hitting streak to 15 games. Jase Bowen and Jhonny Severino also homered. Read about all of Sunday’s action in the minor league system in the latest Pirates Prospect Watch.
And keep checking Pirates Prospects every day for all of my updates of the 2024 Pirates season, from the Majors through the rookie leagues.
Song of the Day
I haven’t been doing the Song of the Day for awhile. Truthfully, I’ve been listening to a lot of the same music on repeat this year, without a lot of new additions. This one felt appropriate today. Especially since I’m from Virginia, where ain’t shit to do but cook.
