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Going back to year one of what is now nearly a three-decade run, Baseball Prospectus has not just been a publication but a source of community. We not only held multiple chats a week on the site, but also had our annual book tour and regular in-person events at ballparks and major metropolitan pizza establishments. I always preferred the latter, because whereas at the ballparks we necessarily played second-fiddle to whichever team personnel were good enough to join our panel, at what we called “pizza feeds” the focus was on BP writers and readers. We got to meet you, and you got to meet each other.
It occurs to me now that if any of you kept meeting each other, BP babies resulting from the earliest feeds would now be out of college and either looking for jobs and/or just about eligible for arbitration. Possibly some are already assistant general managers.
A lot has changed over the years. The pizza feeds and book tours gave way to, well, the pandemic, while the rise of social media seemed to lessen the need for our chats; if we could talk to you at any time via Twitter or its various competitor and successor services, special occasions no longer were warranted. As with so many things from the before-times, once a system in motion winds down, it is difficult to wind it up again.
It is a pleasure we very much miss. In one small way we’d like to turn back the clock: starting next week, we’re opening up our reader mailbag, taking some of those interactions that would be locked in an email or contained in a thread and spotlighting them here on the site in a feature we’re calling BASEBALL PROSPECTUS, PLEASE! I’ll play host for the first one, but any member of our legion of erudite and attractive writers might join you in subsequent outings.
The success of this endeavor is dependent on you. If there is a baseball topic you’d like to raise (although honestly, almost any topic within bounds for a family-friendly publication is fair game), write in to mailbag@baseballprospectus.com and, if your topic is accepted, we’ll respond here on the site. Heck, if it’s really good we might just send you a book or a coupon code or Jeffrey Paternostro’s secret recipe for vegetarian chili.
I well recall an early BP pizza feed in which one of our founders offered a prize to the first attendee who could correctly spell “Jazayerli.” No one could, so I still don’t know what the prize might have been. It is in this same sense that without you, BASEBALL PROSPECTUS, PLEASE! wouldn’t be possible, so please write in for the first of what we hope will be many mailbags.
Thank you for reading
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