When I started at FanGraphs eight months ago, I announced our team of prospect writers, with some holdover writers and some new writers I had hired, then I asked for people interested in joining the team to email me. Some of those writers didn’t work out, some have moved on and a lot of you emailed me about coming on board. For those writers from group two that have moved on, I’m 100% happy to see them go on to bigger and better things in the game, because I was also forced to jump form job to job to continue chasing my dream in baseball, so it’s fun to see people I believe in continue their journey.

In that spirit, I wanted to announce some of our prospect writers have moved on to greener pastures. Ron Shah has joined the Houston Astros in a scouting and development role, Zeke Fine has joined the Atlanta Braves as a scout, Eric Longenhagen has joined ESPN to work with Keith Law on the prospect side for Insider and Andrew Krause has joined Perfect Game as their newest full-time employee doing a number of things on the scouting end. These guys have been here for varying tenures: Ron has been with FanGraphs since my first day, Zeke only wrote a handful of articles before Atlanta scooped him up and Andrew was hired away shortly after joining the staff. Andrew’s first article ran today and we have another post that was in process when he left that will appear soon.

The length of their tenure isn’t the important part of this story, as opportunities in baseball come and go at different rates. The takeaway here is the caliber of baseball mind that we’ve been able to have on the scouting end of the things at FanGraphs in the short time I’ve been on board. These four guys were the only four guys I’ve hired while at FanGraphs (at least until I hired Jesse Burkhart two weeks ago) and all came with long track records of writing online and/or multiple recommendations from scouts and executives. For now, I see this role as a platform to prove your talent to a huge audience in the industry, with these four guys proving it can get you a job with a team pretty quickly if things line up just right.

While I’m sad to see this talent walk out the door, I’m also confident that we will expand what we’re doing on the prospect end and that’s one reason why I’ve been soliciting more applications to write for us on twitter. If you missed those, email me (kiley dot mcdaniel at gmail dot com), give me a little background about yourself and some sort of sample of your writing. I’ve already received dozens of submissions that I’m steadily working my way through and I should respond to all of you within the next week (now that I’ve finally finished the team prospect lists). I don’t have a number of people in mind, so it could be one new writer to join Jesse and Nathaniel Stoltz, or a whole bunch of them. We won’t replace these departed writers per se, but we can find people that are just as talented in their own way, play to their strengths and hopefully see you succeed as much as this first group has.