Look Who’s Blogging Now: Minor League Player Blogs [Part 2]

June 28th, 2009

[Read Part 1]

June 28, 2009 — In my previous post I offered a high-altitude survey of the who, what and where of minor league player blogs.  In this post, I’ll start drilling down into the individual stats, namely, number of posts per author, word count per post and number of comments per post. The analysis here will begin to tease out what sort impact each of our ballplayer-bloggers is making in the MiLB.com blogosphere.

Results

A few notes about these numbers. When looking at the total posts, remember not everyone started blogging at the same time. Nonetheless, most started blogging during spring training, around February/March. Word count is an approximate average calculated for a randomly sampled handful of posts, roughly five or six, when possible. Comments/Post was calculated via a similar method—grab a handful of posts, count the total number of comments, divide by number of sampled posts. Hopefully this makes sense.

Not sure if the charts do much to clarify the stats. They sure look pretty though, don’t you think?

Author	Total Posts	Post Length	Comments /Post
Daniel Moskos	21	350	23
Casey Weathers	12	230	8
Daniel Schlereth	8	200	3
David Kopp	7	280	3
David Matranga	6	350	1
Quintin Berry	5	300	1
Dan Dorn	4	350	4
Javy Guerra	4	670	3
Matt Young	3	450	5
Bobby Scales	3	400	25
Brett Lawrie	3	350	6
Greg Burke	3	280	3
Totals	79	351	7

Author	Total Posts	Post Length	Comments /Post
Chris Hayes	41	1260	4
Chris Rosenbaum	26	370	2
Neil Wagner	17	550	3
Matt Cusick	13	420	3
Sean Doolittle	7	250	2
Beau Vaughan	6	970	7
Trevor Plouffe	5	470	12
Gordon Beckham	4	520	18
Dennis Raben	4	390	5
Justin Turner	3	500	3
Casper Wells	1	780	1
Totals	127	589	5
Totals w/o Hayes	86	522	6

Analysis

Analyzing these numbers is hardly an exact science due the high number of variables contributing to the final results. Suffice to say these results alone probably won’t reveal any useful, magical formulas for success. They will, however, provide an important starting-off point for when we start assessing the content of each blog. Thus I want to at least discuss some of the general principles/assumptions/wild speculations before moving on.

At first blush, the American League (127 posts) seems to be leaving the National League (79 posts) in some serious dust. After removing blogs by Chris Hayes, who’s posted a staggering 41 entries since mid-February, the adjusted totals are a bit of a mixed bag. Post frequency and comments/posts are roughly equal. The big difference, not shown in the charts, is total word output. Even without Hayes’ contributions, American League bloggers produced roughly 4,421 total words, about double the National League’s 2,149. On final analysis this researcher concludes American League minor leaguers are a more cyber-sociable group than those hailing from the National League.

Total Posts

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Total posts is an indicator of post frequency. And why is this important? Although there’s no clearcut consensus or magic formula for blogging success, most blog readers seem prefer the following combination: high post frequency + medium word counts + a photo/video gew-gaw or two.  Of the three, post frequency seems to make or break the spell for most readers. While we’re on the topic, about those, “Sorry, I know it’s been a while”  excuses, use them sparingly. After awhile, it won’t matter why, readers will stop clicking over.

Post Length

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While easy to quantify, this stat is a bit tricky to qualify. On the one hand, longer posts mean more news. On the other, a long, winding story that takes too long to get to the point will quickly lose your reader. 300-400 words is a perfectly acceptable length. The less-is-more writing technique takes some practice to pull off, nonetheless, it’s a worthwhile skill to cultivate, particularly since your audience is used to having information delivered via 2:35 minute YouTube videos and/or 140-word Tweets. One website declared the average page visit lasting only 96 seconds. Woof.

This post, in fact, teeters dangerously close to marathon-like. Nonetheless, there are times when popular appeal must be sacrificed in the name of scientific truth-seeking.

For longer posts, think about including in a photo, widget or video clip to help break up blocks of boring print. (Now do you see why I included the charts? Ssssh! That’ll be our little secret.) One handy trick if you find yourself with a novella of 1,000-plus words is to chop it in half, or even three,  and offer them as a matched set. Best of all, by stringing them out like this, you’ve given yourself a deadline extension of at least another week before having to come up with something new, witty and charming.

SIDEBAR: The Amazin’ Hayes

Speaking of post length, now would be a good time to make special mention Chris Hayes. The side-arming relief pitcher with the yoga-instructor wife has produced roughly 51,660 words as of early June, when I sampled his blogs. In real-world terms, he’s well on his way to putting the finishing touches on a mass-market mystery or romance paperback.

To put this into context with his professional peers, below is a bar graph representing Hayes’ total word count compared to the other 22 ballplayer-bloggers. It is really, really tiny because Hayes’ total word count exceeds that of his peers by orders of magnitude, in other words, multiples of 10!

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OK, goggle-eyed amazement aside and back to the original concern stated in Part 1, does this sort of quantity mean a better blogging experience? And if not, what is the magic formula to a well-written, well-visited, well-spoken of blog? Stay tuned, and these mysteries will be revealed. . .

Comments

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You’ll notice no data was collected on star-ratings. Although quite easy to tally up, these little popularity polls offer no contextual information as to why a certain post is popular, or not. Also, the quick-and-easy, one-click process means you can never be quite sure if the rater even bothered to read the blog before boosting up (or dragging down) someone’s work with a quick click. Kind of like choosing players for the All-Star Team; pick your favorite and start voting away, up to 25 clicks/day. (BTW, if you’re wondering, no, I don’t participate in All-Star Team voting, minor league or otherwise.)

A better litmus test of who is actually reading is provided by comments. Feedback via reader comments are a very important indicator of whether your blog is actually “doing anything” besides just taking up space on the server hard drive. For example, a loyal commenter following usually indicates the blogger is providing useful/entertaining information for his targeted audience. Comments can also give a reading on how friendly/interactive a blogger is with his readers. A couple of our ballplayer-bloggers have taken interactivity a step further, asking for comments and feedback, which is a great way to generate repeat visits. One caveat, blogs showing only a few comments doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not popular. For every comment posted, there’s likely to be a whole mess of lurkers. Also, it’s important to note blogs with the most comments are not necessarily the ones with the most frequent entries or longest posts.

Coming up in the next section, we move on to the blog-by-blog, qualitative analysis. Unlike baseball, this portion of the competition will be a judged event, which means I’m open to bribes, . . .er, oops! I mean suggestions. In this most critical section of the whole shebang, I’ll do my durndest to point out what seems to work, as well as what doesn’t. . .Your friend in baseball.

Entry Filed under: Major League Baseball,Minor Leagues,Rancho Cucamoga Quakes