Prospectus Idol

This guy here is dead

Btw I thought their BP membership IDs would also be identified. I'm kind of curious how many finalists regularly read and commented on BP.com articles before the competition started...

Guess it doesn't matter, but still something I'm curious about.

Commenting is irrelevant to ability to write an article.

I'm not disappointed I wasn't picked...preparing for an upcoming wedding made it a bad time for me anyway. I was not happy with the quality of my submission, or even the topic I chose. Big congrats to the ten above!

Oleoay, sorry to hear you didn't make BP Idol. I have no doubt you will make it in the sports world one day. Everyone has their own PECOTA career path in the journalism world, but we just don't know when the breakouts are going to come. Keep loving the game, and the game will love you back. Good luck in whatever you do and I hope you stay here with the PEV team. You should think about blogging on your hometown team and try to network with the blogging community.

I really enjoyed 2 of them and rated them A+. The others not as much, maybe because I was not interested in the topic, or I did not agree with their methodology or conclusion.

Having a winner who was published on mlb.com for writing a team article is kind of like American idol, which I do not watch, let Papelbon on the show to do an Irish dance. It's all good though.

It should be fun, a very diverse group.

We're not voting on ths batch of articles, that will start next week. I too am concerned about having too many articles on one day (even if I am first alphabetically). I would suggest running two a day from Mon thru Fri, so we don't get burned out reading ten at one time.

So...are you guys still planning on doing some fun things with other entries that didn't make it? Snippets of some of the better or funnier ones, perhaps? Or Simon Cowell-style snidery?

Thanks for the opportunity BP Idol gives us to read more work and learn more.

I'm a pretty smart guy, but my brain fades as I read numbers over time. My BP Annual is read in small chunks over the course of a month, rather than at one sitting. I hope (and doubt) you have a headline order randomizer, because my experience this week is likely to be my experience every week: The first few articles were very enjoyable, I had to work at the next few, and the last few were more work than I'm used to doing as I read.

I agree with Richard Bergstrom. it is relevant whether they were subscribvers, had comments etc.

yeah, I am disappointed I was not picked.

the one suggestion I would make to BP is that they should have sent an email STATING they received a submission.

that would have been not only courteou but would have left no doubt it was received. as it is, we were left to wonder whether they receieved it. yeah, there might have been a 99% chance they receveived, but they could have taken two seconds to respond ('email receieved').

I DID NOT expect a response to say we were not picked.

that WOULD have been irrelevant as we would know in time anyway.

Much to my dismay at the office this morning, I'm two hours in and I've finished a first scan of about half the articles.

If the unread (and more importantly the unwritten) articles are as good as the ones I've already scanned through, this will be a tremendous 10 weeks of entertaining and informative baseball writing.

Kudos.

My main suggestion to all of the finalists is to learn to write for the Internet. It's not the same as writing a thesis paper.

Please, please, please get rid of the 500 word paragraphs that take up a dozen or more lines. Huge paragraphs on the Internet make reading a challenge and the last thing you want to do is make us not want to read your entries.

Stick to paragraphs of two to three sentences (depending on the length of your sentences), so that the paragraphs don't go past four, maybe five lines at most.

It also helps to organize your posts by utilizing headers to help break up the flow of your text.

Of course Baseball Prospectus itself doesn't help the readability of your entries, or any of its posts for that matter. Black text on white, 1.2 leading, huge measures, Arial? Not exactly a typographers dream.

By the way, since this is going to be a really long competition, is there going to be an easy way to access the entries from the previous week?... Or will we have to dig through the archive?

If you can't post the articles until Sunday, any chance you could throw them out there on Sunday morning instead of the evening? It might make a heck of a difference as far as the time people have to check them all out. Easier to spread around. And sorry, no, I won't ever take the time to watch American Idol. If you guys were only on network TV, your product wouldn't be near as good as it is either.

My criteria as a voter and subscriber is simple: I want someone who can begin to replace Nate Silver. With all due respect to all the other outstanding BP writers, his departure from Baseball Propsectus (and let's face it, for all intents and purposes, he's gone) has left a huge hole. So I'm looking for not just a stats analyst, but for someone who can develop compelling new statistical tools. Perhaps no one will ever be able to fully replace Nate, but I'd like to see someone try.