Prospectus Idol Entry

Yeah. Clearly Brittany is a talented writer, but I agree with invictus.

With newspapers failing, is there room for a traditional beat writer at BP? If BP were to expand, I would prefer reading old school articles like this, to yet another article about VORP or Soccer Prospectus. It is a different approach to the game and one that I fear, may be disappearing.

I love the writing style, but it seems you're downplaying your past experience. You have more articles published at MLB.com than the other finalists and have had access to interview MLB players, managers, etc. Not that I think that disqualifies you, but I don't think you're a "Rookie in Relief" either. So why be coy about it?

And to echo the others what have posted so far, I go other sites for beat writing, and come to BP.com for baseball analysis.

Okay, but how is this different or fresh? Now, the piece was obviously done as a specific task to report back on a specific event. But different and fresh await corroboration.

Meh, I can read this type of stuff in my daily rag on the subway.

Echoing the sentiments above, it seems Brittany is playing up her femininity as being "fresh". That is not enough. BP does have Christina and she does have her own unique take on baseball. Far more overlapping at BP with Brittany's style of writing is Alex Carnavale's well selected quotes each week.

Variety and uniqueness are good things only if they are interesting. Many readers may well have found this article of Brittany's interesting, but obviously many of us didn't. Baseball is many different things to many different people.

Allow me to point to one very female and very original voice whose hilarious blogs had me enraptured a couple of years ago, but seems to have retired now for motherhood: Batgirl (http://www.bat-girl.com/). I wonder if BP could lure her out of retirement?

I'm adding my judging comment to each article:

Ghiroli, Brittany -- 8. It's almost unfair to be able to turn in this article in this format. No other contestant had this kind of access (though I will say I'm disappointed that no one tried to be a reporter or even called a team that I can tell.) She's very solid with the writing, really captures the flavor of such a dramatic moment without going all flowery and overdramatic, and gets great quotes, which is tough in the situation. I worry a bit that some of the heavier stats will trip her up, but I'm curious to see how she deals with it.

Brittany hasn't really tried to write an article for the BP audience here; this article's content was, in fact, specifically intended to NOT be a BP article, in that it was written (well) for the broadest of baseball audiences.

In a week, she'll have written an article to BP's specifications, and comments on the content of her article will be entirely to the point.

"Seemingly everywhere you look there’s a new stats-induced column or rant about the latest million-dollar Yankee signing"

Yeah, and post game write ups are hard to find.

This is a good piece of writing. It was certainly engaging. She's got talent. Let's see how she tackles a column based on stats.

The one sentence per paragraph distracted me and my ADHD and I was more interested to see if you continued to do that instead of what you had written.

I don't know why some people in here imply that sabermetrical information is rocket science. All the information at hand is at the writer's disposal and you have access to it as well as she does.

If you and I both understand what OPS is and have to explain it someone else, invariably, one of us will do a better job than the other.

This is not the creation of a new metric to track careers of minor league left fielders, who converted to third base, and subsequently can now hit sliders 50 points higher than previously.