First Pitch: Grindin’ | Pirates Prospects

Major League Baseball is a tough battle, no matter what your relationship to the sport is.

It’s a daily sport for six months of the year, with six weeks of spring training before that and six more weeks of playoffs after that for competing teams. The time from spring training to the end of the regular season is exhausting enough. It takes a special love of the game to stick with it every day for nine months of the year.

This is my 16th season of publishing daily articles on the Pittsburgh Pirates and their minor league system on this site. It is also only my second year of running this site on my own. Now in my 40th season, I can no longer sustain the 80-hour work weeks that I did when I was younger. Back then, baseball consumed nearly every minute of my life. As the site grew, I spent more time managing the site and editing contributors’ work, which left me little time or energy to write my own daily articles.

If you’ve been following the site before this season, you’ll know that I took a break around this time last year. I finished the season with light daily releases and a few breaks. For the first time since 2008-09, I had a reduced off-season where I scaled back my releases. Eventually the site went offline as I was considering whether to continue with it.

Pirates Prospects returned on March 15 of this year after I committed to enduring the rigors of another season. My simple goal was to publish articles daily with a focus on updating the status of the minor league system.

Today is the 150th day of this publishing schedule and this is the 398th article I have published this year, not counting the monthly articles I have put my journalistic energy into at Baseball America.

I’ve been able to get a good work schedule in place this year, with a daily Prospect Watch and a daily First Pitch article, plus an additional feature 4-5 days per week. This also gives me time to watch games in the evenings, with the goal of not feeling dead by the end of September.

I’ve been expanding a few things on the site recently as I’ve fully settled into my existing publishing routines.

Transactions

This site has been my full-time job for years. One of the biggest money makers of publishing a sports site is tracking the trades. The market share is so large that in June and July smaller sites try to find their way and maximize this market with trade rumors and bogus trade proposals. I have seen it happen.

I was lucky this year to be able to ignore the transaction posts. I grouped them together in the daily articles, but because I had less time to write, I didn’t have the time to include the transactions on the site.

That changes in the last two months of the year. This weekend I added a transactions page to the site. On this page you will find articles with the latest developments as well as a list of all developments this month.

Rankings

One of the things I’ve been focusing on this year is developing a new method for evaluating prospects. I’ve released three versions of my Top 50 Tiered Rankings, which have been expanded to include the current ratings of all players in the system.

You can find these on the Rankings page, which contains the current top 50 after the draft and the trade deadline.

This list will be updated this week. Whenever I make a new version of the list, I throw out the old rankings completely and start from scratch. This means I give each player a new grade and prediction, then combine the list and refine the tiers and rankings within the tiers. It’s a lengthy process, but I believe it results in 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 covering the development of young players. In fact, I recently looked at sports psychology degree programs and found that a recurring feature of each program is the opportunity to spend 200 hours one-on-one with athletes. I’ve now logged thousands of hours, most of which have focused on talking to players as they make adjustments and navigate the difficulties of getting from the lowest minor levels to the major leagues.

This 16-year experience has been an honor and I do not take this ranking lightly. Version 4.0 of my Top 50 ranking is expected to be released this week.

Pirate Observation Clock

The Pirates Prospect Watch has been running on this site since 2010. Along with First Pitch, which I started in 2012, the Prospect Watch is the core of this site’s daily publications.

The latest update deals with a big day of Kervin Pichardowhich the Pirates acquired in a small trade earlier this season. Nick Yorke extended his hitting streak to 15 games. Jase Bowen And Johnny Severino also a home run. Read all about Sunday’s action in the minor league system in the latest Pirates Prospect Watch.

And check back with Pirates Prospects every day for all my updates on the Pirates 2024 season, from the majors to the rookie leagues.

Song of the day

I haven’t done a song of the day in a while. To be honest, I’ve been listening to a lot of the same music on repeat this year without adding much new. This one felt fitting today. Especially since I’m from Virginia, where there’s nothing to do except cook.