Carson Cistulli hired by Toronto

[Laika]

This was buried in the Guillermo Martinez promotion article but is pretty fun news IMO.

 

https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/blue-jays-promoting-guillermo-martinez-new-hitting-coach/

 

"Meanwhile, the Blue Jays have also started revamping their pro scouting department with Fangraphs writer Carson Cistulli announcing that he is joining the staff."

 

For anyone who doesn't read Fangraphs, Cistulli is almost certainly the first classically trained poet and formally educated creative writer to transition into pro scouting.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_Cistulli

 

I believe he started off with Fangraphs doing creative writing on the now defunct "Notgraphs". More recently he has been running the Fringe Five articles, where he scours the minors for players with intriguing stats or stories who do not appear on normal prospect lists. Essentially, it has become an exercise in creative prospect evaluation - an appropriate blend of his background and his inclination for sabermetrics. The funny thing is how GOOD the Fringe Five articles are at identifying actual f***ing talent, which makes this formal career transition make a lot of sense.

 

I am so happy . Hopefully Toronto starts acquiring a s*** ton of Fringe Five type talent, like such as Josh James, etc.

 

[BTS]

I don’t like this. Not because I think he’s a bad hire, but because I loved him at Fangraphs. He single-handedly made their podcast worth listening to.

[Boxcar]

Yeah I'm with BTS. He was far and away their most entertaining writer.

[Laika]

If the Fringe Five dies my Deep Leagues draft research will take a hit.

[Captain Adama]

If the Fringe Five dies my Deep Leagues draft research will take a hit.

 

You and literally everyone else.

 

I will cope with losing the fringe five articles if it means the Jays start getting this talent.

 

<3 this front office.

[BTS]

I wonder if Carson has rights over his "proprietary algorithms".

[BTS]

Meg Rowley is the new managing editor of fangraphs. RIP fangraphs.

[Terminator]

Meg Rowley is the new managing editor of fangraphs. RIP fangraphs.

 

f*** me that's a double whammy. They lose their best writer and now the feminist running the joke that is Hardball Times is the boss at Fangraphs? Yikes

[dineke]

But is she hot?

[Deadpool]

I don’t like this. Not because I think he’s a bad hire, but because I loved him at Fangraphs. He single-handedly made their podcast worth listening to.

 

So, we just get him to do the Radio Scouts podcast instead....

[Laika]

I don't think you people are recognizing how significant this hire is - I think the signal that this puts off about the organization is absolutely tremendous. It's very telling.

[The Cats Ass]

Hopefully Toronto starts acquiring a s*** ton of Fringe Five type talent, like such as Josh James, etc.

 

The hell with Josh James. I want some of that Mookie Betts fringe five talent.

[Boxcar]

Nor does any of this acknowledge the very real benefit of my departure for FanGraphs’ readers — namely, that Meg Rowley will assume not only the role of managing editor but also host of FanGraphs Audio.

[Boxcar]

Lol Fangraphs

 

At least they can be sure Meg Rowley won't be going anywhere.

 

Fangraphs audio: with Meg Rowley, Sheryl Ring and Big Mac Ramos

[BTS]

I don't think you people are recognizing how significant this hire is - I think the signal that this puts off about the organization is absolutely tremendous. It's very telling.

 

It's certainly an interesting hire, because it's not immediately obvious that he brings the kinds of skills that front offices typically look for: he's not a coder, he's not a quantitative analyst, and he's not a scout. He's a good communicator who thinks outside the box, and he's really smart. I like that the team identified him as someone who can improve their organization. It's unconventional, but they'll probably be stronger for having him around. I wonder what their pitch to him looked like.

[Captain Adama]

Lol Fangraphs

 

At least they can be sure Meg Rowley won't be going anywhere.

 

Fangraphs audio: with Meg Rowley, Sheryl Ring and Big Mac Ramos

 

That'd be a great listen.

 

All the MLB front offices are sexist pigs because they're only hiring the male writers from fangraphs.

[Boxcar]

I don't think you people are recognizing how significant this hire is - I think the signal that this puts off about the organization is absolutely tremendous. It's very telling.

 

I understand it and yes I'm happy for the organization, but it also means I will never again read anything written by Carson Cistulli. Cistulli's writing style was so unique and whimsical, and I feel like he could write about literally anything and it would be entertaining.

 

I mean, just read his good bye post

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/an-unexpected-development/

[BTS]

I understand it and yes I'm happy for the organization, but it also means I will never again read anything written by Carson Cistulli. Cistulli's writing style was so unique and whimsical, and I feel like he could write about literally anything and it would be entertaining.

 

I mean, just read his good bye post

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/an-unexpected-development/

 

It's almost impossible to open a Cistulli article and not read the entire thing. He's just an interesting guy.

[Boxcar]

I think in order to hire him, someone in this FO must have been reading him for years, right? I don't know that you could just pick up his resume and be like, "Oh this guy for sure".

 

Which means someone up there is smart. And they are reading other smart people in the industry. So this is good.

 

Hopefully they follow Bauer on twitter.

 

My money is on some sort of human-machine hybrid

[glory]

I remember when we traded for Santiago Espinal, it felt the only thing ever written about him was a Fringe Five piece. Could barely find anything else.

 

Have no idea what this adds to the front office, but definitely enjoyed reading his work.

[Laika]

I understand it and yes I'm happy for the organization, but it also means I will never again read anything written by Carson Cistulli. Cistulli's writing style was so unique and whimsical, and I feel like he could write about literally anything and it would be entertaining.

 

I mean, just read his good bye post

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/an-unexpected-development/

 

I wish we could somehow read his future internal reports.

 

"To say that Rowdy Tellez is slow or a below average runner, as the consensus of our professional scouts opine, would be to use the literary device most commonly referred to as 'euphemism'. Rowdy's foot speed by any statistical measure ranks him in the 1st percentile of all professional baseball, that is to say, in a sense that is entirely not literal, he is as slow as they come."

[Key22]

But is she hot?

 

[TheHurl]

Meg Rowley is the new managing editor of fangraphs. RIP fangraphs.

 

The positive is that Baseball Prospectus has been bought by the Senior writers (yes Sayre too) and is going to re-tool itself. Here is their announcement from earlier this week.

 

 

An Announcement from Baseball Prospectus

BP Staff

November 13, 2018

SHARE:

 

For more than twenty years, Baseball Prospectus has offered subscribers baseball analysis, wit, and wisdom on a daily basis. A lot has changed since Gary Huckabay fired up his photocopier and published the 29-team Baseball Prospectus Annual in 1996: OPS is displayed on team jumbotrons (it’s a start), Brad Ausmus’s career WARP went up by 20, and we even redesigned the site once. More importantly, the names and ideas that came out of the wellspring that was early BP have flowed into baseball itself, into analytics and scouting departments. The world of baseball has transformed almost as much as the internet where it was born.

 

One thing that has not been altered in those twenty years is its crusade to continually develop how we think about the game. Though the masthead of the company has been graced by the likes of Davenport, Sheehan, Kahrl, Keri, Silver, Woolner, Wyers, Goldstein, Parks, Lindbergh, and Miller, the most indelible element to the company is its culture, how we’ve progressed from one era to another, sometimes changing in style or presentation, but always maintaining that same grassroots spirit of its early days. It’s ironic to think, given how many of our alumni are now inside the game (and it is, without a doubt, a source of great pride), but Baseball Prospectus has always been, at its heart, a collection of outsiders: writers and thinkers who examine the sport critically and externally. The stereotype of the blogger who doesn’t watch baseball has never been true, but is clearly evident now: we are people who love baseball, and love thinking about it.

 

In light of this introduction, it is our pleasure to announce that today marks the newest of the many eras of Baseball Prospectus. A group of the site’s senior staff has purchased Baseball Prospectus, effective immediately. For the first time in a long time, BP will be run by BP again. By the people who have worked to make the site what it is.

 

Over the coming months, we’ll be making general improvements to the site as we refocus our energies on making BP the best it can be. This is an exciting time for us, as we’ll be rolling out new projects that we’ve been working on for some time (hello, DRC!) and add some polish to make the tools we already provide more intuitive and user-friendly (goodbye, legacy stats pages!). But while we have our own shopping list of improvements, we also want to hear from you, the subscribers and lapsed or prospective subscribers, to hear what you’d like to see us prioritize in the coming months and beyond. For that, we’d like to ask you to take the following survey, and tell us what you want BP to be, in both the short and long term.

 

Baseball Prospectus Subscriber Survey

 

Along with everything that has changed in the game of baseball, a lot has changed about the game of baseball writing as well. Baseball Prospectus was one of the early examples of the subscription model of publication, and with sites like The Athletic, the rest of the sportswriting world is slowly coming around to our point of view. Quality baseball writing and analysis depends on an environment where consumers pay for their content, just as it always has. That’s why one of the most visible changes we want to make in the near future is to make it easier to access and enjoy the benefits of your subscription: from improving our glossary to make our statistics more intuitive, to improving the visualization of our statistics, to providing fun, easy-to-use tools to visualize BP’s vast repository of data. We want to make BP not only more valuable, but also easier than ever to use.

 

The other element of Baseball Prospectus that we have high hopes for is to revitalize the community of public sabermetrics. In the eighties, sabermetric thought was so scarce that reaching out to like-minded fans meant drawing half of a fish in the dirt; in the nineties, and during the early days of BP, it still felt like a secret clubhouse. It’s not the same now—as ESPN2’s broadcast of the NL Wild Card game proved, “advanced” stats are much more mainstream—but that sense of fellowship and participation isn’t only vital for us, it’s part of sports fandom in general. That’s why we want to re-envision the site as a way to get you, the readers, more involved and in touch with what we do. It’s not just lip service about new products, and it’s not just our writers and experts handing down information like a college lecture. It’s about reviving Hacking Mass, and the Internet Baseball Awards, and other participatory events. It’s about reviving the ProGUESTus series and inviting people to write for the site itself when they have good ideas. It’s about recapturing what truly made the sabermetric revolution exciting—not that it changed baseball, because baseball was and is always changing. It was the fun of figuring it out together. It’s also about recognizing that as teams and the leagues continue to bring outside baseball minds into the fold, the public sabermetric community needs to refresh both its personnel and its statistical tools, to ensure that full enjoyment of the intricacies of baseball is not limited to a privileged few.

 

So get ready for the next Baseball Prospectus, which should feel like the old Baseball Prospectus with a new cutter. We’re fortunate to exist alongside a sport that serves as such a capable metaphor for the next phase of the company, one of cyclical advancement, a shared team name seeing through continuous eras. We think this next era is going to be pretty great. We hope you’ll be there with us for it.

Edited November 17, 2018 by TheHurl

[TheHurl]

I understand it and yes I'm happy for the organization, but it also means I will never again read anything written by Carson Cistulli. Cistulli's writing style was so unique and whimsical, and I feel like he could write about literally anything and it would be entertaining.

 

I mean, just read his good bye post

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/an-unexpected-development/

 

maybe we can get him to put messages to you on the Jumbotron.

[Boxcar]

The positive is that Baseball Prospectus has been bought by the Senior writers (yes Sayre too) and is going to re-tool itself. Here is their announcement from earlier this week.

 

Bret Sayre has Chris Paddack pegged as a #4 starter because reasons. Clearly we need more of that high level insight.