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June 28, 2009 Prospectus IdolRound Six - Deadline WeekGood day to you-it's a beautiful one here in Southern California-and welcome to another episode of Prospectus Idol. I'm Dave Pease, and I want to thank you for reading. After giving our contestants a lot of rope last week, the rules were flipped around on them this time around: they had hours, rather than days, to produce this week's entry. This week's format, courtesy of judge and injury guru Will Carroll: Now that it's just five of you, it's time for Deadline Week. Imagine that you're bleary eyed, just waking up, but that your editor has emailed and said "I need a piece for tomorrow!" (Oh wait, that just happened!) You can't just say no (Believe me, I've tried.) The only thing to do is buckle down and do your best work in the time you have available. I was planning on taking a question from last week's intro article comments, but I actually didn't see one. If you've got a question for the Idol staff, leave it below. If you've got a comment that's really outstanding, we'll take that too. The ability to work on a tight deadline is one of the most important traits of a successful working writer. Were our contestants able to deal with the compressed timeline of Prospectus Idol: Deadline Week? Let's have a look. Click here to visit the Prospectus Idol page.
Dave Pease is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @davepease
20 comments have been left for this article.
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If we vote for everybody this week, can we get all 5 back to do a better topic?
This is/was an extremely dull week, and not because of the writers who (mostly) tried to do their best with the subject(s) at hand. It didn't appear to me that the working on a deadline aspect hindered them, at least not more than the game recap point did.
I enjoy reading recaps when Joe and/or CK do them, because I'll often learn something different, or can appreciate a different POV or opinion or a reaffirmation of a thought or idea I already had about a game/team/player/stadium/etc. Putting the Idolers through a process that is, frankly, done better by the AP game story team doesn't seem fair to them. I just worry that we're about to lose a good writer because of gimmick.
It just had to be related to the games played on Thursday. There was NOTHING in the instructions that said it had to be a game story.
Fair enough.
The writers differentiated very well, all things considered, even within the actual "game recaps"...
IMHO, I still don't think it made for the best week of writing overall.
Then you'll LOVE next week's ... wait. Not this week, but the NEXT week's theme.