April 1, 2014

Baseball Prospectus News

Introducing Mongolian Yak Racing Prospectus

by Russell A. Carleton

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Prospectus Entertainment Ventures (PEV), which owns the highly successful website and annual book franchise Baseball Prospectus, has announced that it will be expanding its next-level coverage of sports into a new area. PEV CEO Joe Hamrahi announced on Tuesday that a new website, Mongolian Yak Racing Prospectus, would be launching soon and that several Baseball Prospectus regulars would be contributing content. Said Hamrahi, “We’re always looking to strengthen our brand, and this seems like a natural fit. We borrowed a supercomputer from a MLB mystery team, it told us to expand into Mongolian yak racing, and we all know that supercomputers are NEVER wrong. Which reminds me, I need to return this supercomputer.”

BP editor-in-chief Ben Lindbergh will do double-duty as MYRP editor-in-chief and its companion site Yakworthy, which will consist mostly of GIFs of yaks falling over. Lindbergh was excited by his new responsibilities, saying, “We’re going to offer a lot of great coverage, including the latest in yak racing rumors. We’re bringing on an as-yet-unnamed fetus who has been tweeting about yak transactions from his mother’s womb.”

The staff of the new website did suffer a loss when Harry Pavlidis was hired by the Ulaan Batar Eagles to become a full-time in-house Yakametrics analyst (#RIPHarry). However, BP stalwart Jason Parks has already been dispatched to the backfields of Erdenet to look for the next new star in yak racing. “I’m looking for yaks who show a lot of #want and who have nice #hooves,” said Parks. “I saw one yak who had thick #fur and #mane. It made me tingle in all the right places, although I could see him ending up as a relief yak rather than a starter. I’m done with the Dominican Republic. I’m going to spend most of my time getting #dark here in Mongolia.”

Yakametrics writer Russell Carleton said that he would mostly be writing about J’Voey Otto, a Yak from the Darkhan Greens. “Everyone says that he’s a powerful young yak who’s not getting paid to walk so much, and that he’s costing his trainer races,” Carleton said. “I think his ability to walk and clog the racing lanes is vastly underrated. Look at his Context-Neutral Value Above Replacement Yak (CNVARY), which adjusts for rider and track hardness.”

Reaction from the broader yak racing community was mixed. One veteran Mongolian yak racer said, “I don’t know what I think about all of this numbers stuff. Why would anyone use a hierarchical linear model on yak racing? I mean, who needs that? Everything I need to know about a yak, I can see with my own eyes.” He’s reported to be pursuing a studio analyst role on Mongolian Yak Racing Network.

Shortly after it launches, MYRP will offer coverage for the fantasy yak racing community as well as for fantasy yak polo enthusiasts, and will host an event at the forthcoming Mongolian Yak Racing Festival. Lindbergh also reported that plans are in the works for a daily podcast with Sam Miller entitled “Yakin’ It Up.” “It’ll be a 10-15 minute thing, tops,” he said. “Honest.”

Mongolian Yak Racing Prospectus will debut sometime in the next few weeks, or maybe later.

Russell A. Carleton is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @pizzacutter4
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