Daily Prospect Notes: 5/5/21
In past years, I’ve produced Daily Prospect Notes like this four times a week during the minor league regular season, combing through the box scores once all the games are complete and writing up a handful of the players who had great games for the following morning. While I expect others at the site will contribute to DPN this year, I’m starting the year off by experimenting with a new format. Here I’ve screen recorded myself going through the box scores. Rather than whittle down the notable performers to five or six guys, now you get to hear me talk through a lot more players. It’s not as swift as a quick, five-minute skim but it disseminates more info to our readers with less work for me. It also gives you a glimpse into the process by which I start to flag new names for analysis.
The way I talk about players’ backgrounds may evolve to suit readers more precisely as I do more of these, or I may just return to writing them like I used to. For now, please accept this maiden voyage and the recent minor league video I shot here in Arizona.
Eric Longenhagen is from Catasauqua, PA and currently lives in Tempe, AZ. He spent four years working for the Phillies Triple-A affiliate, two with Baseball Info Solutions and two contributing to prospect coverage at ESPN.com. Previous work can also be found at Sports On Earth, CrashburnAlley and Prospect Insider.
An hour and 55 minutes? I don’t have that kind of time, and I’m retired.
Agreed. The world is going to podcasts and videos, but even though retired, I don’t have the time. Appreciate the desire to educate us to the process, but written comments are SO much more efficient and respectful of my time.
I don’t do videos. I’m sure it’s still good, though.
You are sure its good lol.
I’m trying to be nice. I appreciate the work Eric does, but I don’t really get anything out of a recorded lecture. I don’t even really watch TV except for baseball. Maybe other people will appreciate it more. So I think I’ll skip the prospect notes until it comes back to something I can read.
While I appreciate that you want to “pull back the curtain” on how you do some of your work, as I use it, the Daily Prospect Notes are so that I don’t have to go through every minor league box score. I don’t know how many people have the time to view a two hour video like this during the day, but I am sure it is far fewer than can read a five minute article.
If you wanted to keep this format, there are several things that I think would be required. First, from an accessibility standpoint, you need to either provide a transcript or closed-captioning for your video, or a section of the population will be completely unable to access the content. As I understand it, there are dictation services that can do this automatically, so this should not be too burdensome.
Second, if there are particular players that you want to highlight through the course of the video, there is no way to know who they are or where you discuss them in the video. I would think it would be advantageous to have some kind of bulleted outline of the video with key players you talk about and the timestamps associated with them. This at least gives time-pressed readers the ability to focus on on some of the prime content without needing to view the entire video.
This touches on the final point that I would want those key players tagged in the article somehy so they can be found later. From a fantasy standpoint, I will frequently from me an interesting player and then go through archives to find more information about him, but I would completely miss this post if he were discussed in it.
A little hard to digest this way. Might be better with time stamps for levels or games. What is the trick with the URL to get minor league savant game feeds? I don’t think we could actually see that part of the browser.
I figured it out. You get the minor league game’s primary key from the milb.com box score, then sub that in after the equals sign in the baseball savant game feed URLs.
100%
Make it snackable
A good broadcast has a good script. If the script doesn’t hold water, then it is just rambling… which is super common. Simply freeforming into a microphone is much easier, less but far less valuable to your audience.
My big takeaway: Carter Kieboom would be a 40+
I actually think just getting this on something other than Youtube would go a long way. It’s extremely unfriendly to mobile listeners
This is a nice idea, but unfortunately as a deaf person, it locks me out of being able to enjoy this content. The prospect notes have been a highlight of previous seasons for me. Also, I think asking people to commit 2 hours to this is a lot.
Roansy Contreras should be top-100; Gabriel Moreno should be closer to 50 overall than 100
Agree on Moreno – you don’t see a hit tool like that on a catcher too often.
Not sure why people downvoted this lol, it’s literally what Eric said in the videos
One possibility to help us team-centric fans is to go alphabetically through the organizations. For me, then, I’d jump ahead to the P’s and hear what you had to say about my Pirates. I know there would be some redundancy there because you’d revisit each game twice, so maybe that wouldn’t work.
Personally I don’t mind the video format, but as others have mentioned something involving time stamps is necessary. I really am only interested in Pirates prospects so being able to get a quick 5 minute overview would be excellent.
Just my two cents – I’m sure y’all will figure out the methodology that works best for you all in the coming weeks
this is great, love it!
FYI – MLB Pipeline and Baseball Cube have great minor league trackers. That will save you about 1 hour, 54 minutes per day.
I think Noda was the PTBNL in the Stripling trade.
Not sure how much work this would be, but if you had timestamps for where each boxscore starts so that people can quickly fast-forward to the ones they are interested in that would be huge.
I dig this and hope you keep doing them, but I wonder if it might be better suited by being paired up with the Twitch stuff you guys have been doing as opposed to being an “article.” I’ve really enjoyed the scouting video sessions as well, but I get the sense that you’re going to have a large chunk of the site that’s going to have no interest in consuming what is essentially streaming content. I’m sure there is a happy medium somewhere.
Eric, if this is going to be a regular feature please consider having a RSS feed of it. Even if not having the video result in some missed context, having the audio only option (for those of us not wealthy enough for Youtube Premium) would be nice.
great!
I’m still trying to figure out whatever you did on Baseball Savant. How do I get there!?!?
Edit: Just saw it in the comments. Nice!
My browser does that all the time on MLB/MiLB box scores as well Eric.
I do appreciate the video as a look behind the scenes, but two hours is pretty long and I’m not interested in every last minor league game unfortunately. If timestamps of the games were provided, maybe with names discussed, that would be really helpful for the future.
This is a fun idea.
I liked this quite a bit. I was able to use the game tracker at the top of the screen to guess when the teams I was interested in would be talked about. Took me about 10 minutes to listen to all the Royals info I wanted to get plus some stuff on the teams they were facing. Helps that Eric went AAA on down.
I wonder if this would work better in a weekly to twice a week format instead of a daily video.
I loved this and thought it was a great resource!
I understand the criticism of the format. However, they immediately posted some prospect notes the next day in the usual format. Let the super prospect nerds geek out and keep doing these videos periodically! I do think that a sort of table of contents if there’s an interesting commentary on some prospects you want to highlight could be helpful if people want to use the video to listen in on specific players. Either way, I hope we continue to see this posted every now and then