BP Idol, Very Impressed – Just Not with the Contestants

In a rather creative move, the genius that is Baseball Prospectus began their first ever BP Idol competition a few weeks back.  Borrowing a page from the Simon Cowell playbook, they chose 10 contestants to partake in the competition, which, similar to American Idol, eliminates one contestant each week based on fan voting.  There is a theme for each week’s articles and three of the BP veterans provide their thoughts and feedback, at which point the masses vote – if you have a BP account.  The winner takes home a small cash prize along with the more valuable contract as the newest addition to the BP team.  Given that many former BP writers have recently taken jobs in MLB front offices, becoming a staff writer is most definitely valuable.  The BP Idol home page is here, anyone can read, only those with account can vote.

My initial thought when I first read about the competition was “given how many people choose to write about baseball many times a week with nothing to gain (read: CubicleGM, et al), there surely will be thousands of super talented people that will partake”.  How many college students will skip classes each and every week to meticulously write their entry?  How many people will spend a few hours at work each day crafting their article?  How many baseball fanatics just happen to be unemployed in this economy and will slave over stats to enter great pieces?  I was almost certain the entries would be top notch, and even wondered to myself whether they would be better than the BP columnists themselves.

Boy was I wrong, in a big way.  I have struggled to finish even 20% of the posts.  They just are not interesting.  And, please don’t color me jealous – I’m not jealous that they are in the competition – I had no interest in competing.  I’m sorry, I just don’t find the vast majority of them interesting.  I love almost everything about baseball, but I quit reading most of these less than two paragraphs in.  Many of them suck plain and simple, and I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to fairly portray my perception of the entries.

A few of the contestants are fantastic, and I thoroughly look forward to reading them over the next several weeks, and hopefully far into the future either with BP, with some other publication, or here on CubicleGM.  Wherever it is, they should be writing often.  My early favorite is Matt Swartz, a PhD candidate in Econ at UPenn who has covered why pitchers have minimal control over BABIP, and how to improve upon BP’s Pecota projections using some readily  accessible stats in his two posts thus far.  He is great – must read material in early competition.  My second horse is Brian Cartwright, a BP subscriber for 10+ years, self-proclaimed stat-head, and soon-to-be father who is unfazed and trudging along with his entries.  Older than most of the other competitors, he is a better writer than most of the competition, too – not particularly surprising, the youngsters can’t write.

Outside of these two, I have found the articles to be inconsistent and poorly written.  They are neither about particularly interesting topics nor engaging.  And that observation has led me being 100,000% more impressed with the BP authors than I was circa 3 weeks ago.  They publish 3 to 4 baseball-related posts a day and I complete 80%+.  They are both superbly written and about topics that I want to spend my time reading.  I doubt that when they started this project their goal was to show how high quality the BP content is, and how irreplaceable it is for the baseball lover, but that is most certainly a bi-product, in my eyes.

Share/Save