First Pitch: Pirates Prospects in a Time of Building

2 Aug 2021

From my side of things, the last year has been chaos.

Good chaos, structured chaos, and some timeline branches that were unexpected.

But, chaos nonetheless.

I’ve been trying to bring an idea to life, while shelving the one site that I called my job for the last decade.

When I closed Pirates Prospects last year to open Pittsburgh Baseball Network, I said that Pirates Prospects would return in 2021.

At that time, the Pirates had added Nick Gonzales in a five-round draft, Liover Peguero and Brennan Malone for Starling Marte (in a lost minor league season where we couldn’t see Peguero or Malone in action), and had traded for extra international bonus pool space with the limited trade chips they had. Oh, and they got Austin Davis.

There really wasn’t much to cover with a prospect site, so it seemed like the perfect time to shut things down at P2, and start to build up over here.

Wow, have things changed in a year.

The Pirates have added enough prospects to make up their own top 30, and I’m guessing that top 30 would be better than a lot of organizations in the league. Add in the prospects they had a year ago, and you’ve got a system that looks like it could contend as one of the best in the game.

I’ve missed writing for Pirates Prospects over the last year, and can’t wait to jump back in with so much to cover in this organization.

This won’t be the same Pirates Prospects as before. Because we have the big league team already covered here, Pirates Prospects is now able to focus exclusively on prospect analysis.

To start, there will be at least two articles per day. One will be the Prospect Watch, and another will be a daily feature, rotating between player features and analysis. That started today, with my return column on the site. The schedule will continue as follows:

Monday – Player Feature

Tuesday – Players of the Week

Wednesday – Player Feature

Thursday – Scouting Notes

Friday – Player Feature

Saturday – Transactions Analysis

Sunday – Column

The scouting notes article on Thursday will be a collection of observations and things heard from other scouts each week, with John Dreker and Wilbur Miller contributing.

The Transactions Analysis on Saturday will recap all of the movement from the week, while asking “When is Matt Fraizer moving up to Altoona?” every week until it happens.

John Dreker will have the Players of the Week feature that you’ve seen on here every Tuesday. I’ll have a column every Sunday. I may have additional columns or features, and Wilbur or John might add their own features from time to time.

Eventually the schedule will expand to one player feature, one analysis feature, and the Prospect Watch each day.

My current schedule is set up to run a feature on each of our top 75 prospects by the end of December, along with full positional breakdown and level-by-level analysis.

Oh, and as for those top prospects, we’re putting our midseason rankings together, now that the draft signing and trade deadlines have passed and stocked up the system. The Pirates Prospects midseason top 30 will be released in the middle of August.

Pirates Prospects will be the only paid site on PBN. Everything on No Quarter and Pittsburgh Baseball History will be free. Subscriptions for the new Pirates Prospects will start mid-August, and any active PBN subscriber will carry over automatically.

My site development plans for Pirates Prospects over the next year are to add a stats database and an app.

And those developments will unlock the future developments we will discuss this time next year.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss what’s ahead in year two at No Quarter.