First Pitch: Day Fifty Six – Pittsburgh Baseball Network Updates

26 Jan 2022

Sometimes I feel like a literal time traveler.

It feels like yesterday that I was announcing a new format for Pirates Prospects — a weekly digital magazine format with weekly article drops on Tuesday.

Four weeks and four article drops later and I’m pleased with the initial results.

Each Tuesday we brought you seven features — an average of one per day if you wanted to stretch them out. Releasing them in a group allowed for better coordination of article topics, including a few chances to collaborate on a subject between multiple writers. We also kept up with the latest news, with some great updates on the international signings from John Dreker.

My goal in this first month was to establish consistency of releases with the new approach, and get you used to the release schedule.

Going forward, I’ll be expanding by adding features.

First, I want to hold a weekly Q&A for all of the commenters to get a chance to ask questions outside of the article discussions. Those discussions in the articles have been fantastic, and I want more of a chance for similar baseball discussion on the site.

This week I’ll be starting that Q&A feature on Thursday, and it will run every Thursday going forward.

In the future, when there are actual games, we will have our normal daily posts with articles like the Prospect Watch, which will provide areas for discussion.

Beyond the Q&A addition to the site, I have plans for a weekly videocast feature, as well as an eventual podcast. The long-term goal will be to have additional interactive features like this during the week. Tuesday will still be the day for all of our featured articles, containing our reporting and analysis. The other four days will have Q&As, video casts, podcasts, and more. And I haven’t even thought about the weekend yet, because I’ll want to give everyone a chance to catch up.

I’d say we’re in the early stages of a Pirates Prospects Rebuild, but I didn’t put this much thought or forward planning into the original Pirates Prospects. This is a Build, if you will, toward a new, bigger thing.

On the other side of that bigger thing, I took off from baseball writing on No Quarter over the last few weeks. That is changing this week, going back to articles daily, with some new contributors joining the site. If you’re interested in writing anything for No Quarter, email me at timwilliams@pittsburghbaseball.com. I want this part of PBN to be more community-driven, giving a place for anyone who wants to analyze the game in long-form outside of comments.

Going forward, you’ll be able to come to No Quarter daily and get a new baseball article to read at 8 AM, two articles on Pittsburgh Baseball History, and then head over to Pirates Prospects or Pittsburgh Baseball Now for all of the updates on those sites.

In the past, our strength was that you could come to Pirates Prospects every day and get plenty of updates on the Pirates — often 5-10 articles per day. Whenever baseball returns, I’m envisioning around 40 articles on Pirates Prospects per week, plus around 30 on No Quarter, 15 on Pittsburgh Baseball History, and I’m sure the guys over at Pittsburgh Baseball Now can get the combined PBN effort over 100 articles per week.

Life is hard sometimes, and everyone needs an escape to their hobby of choice. My goal with Pittsburgh Baseball Network is to build a group of sites with plenty of daily articles for those of you looking to escape into the world of Pirates baseball.

And you won’t have to explain why the Pirates are your escape of choice when you’re here.