Building this Forum

[Cuzittt]

One thing us dopes have been talking about is building our profile with the Minor League Forum. However, we can only do that with YOUR help. How can you help?
 
We have a dedicated forum for our minor league prospects. Some of our threads are very active, others are less active... and some prospects don't have a thread at all. So, pick a prospect. If it has an active thread, pick another prospect. If the prospect has no thread, start one. And then update away. [Daily updates are fantastic but are not necessary. a couple of updates a month would be reasonable. This isn't meant to be a full-time job... but we do want the forum to be active.]
 
I think individual threads for teams is probably a good idea... a place to talk about promotions/demotions, winning and losing streaks and other things related to the team. If someone wants to take charge of a team, start a thread.
 
As much as this is a Red Sox forum and the ml threads here are mostly dedicated to the Red Sox, there is no reason we could not have threads dedicated to the minor leagues in general. And if some of our Yankee friends wanted to start a general Yankees Minor League thread in here... that would be fine.
 
More threads, more activity, greater visibility. That is the goal.

 

[Julius.R]

Sounds great, hopefully this kicks up the activity in this forum. I call Nick Longhi!

 

[Jed Zeppelin]

One idea off the top of my head would be for periodical threads on the progress of given position groups throughout the system. Some positions like 1b are leaner than others but I think this would be a worthy addition to the forum, a good way for lurkers (or anybody) to contribute, and a helpful resource for anyone who wants to catch up on the system in a way that relates to the short & long-term needs/future of the big club.

 

[Orel Miraculous]

Get rid of the Adopt-a-Prospect subforum and just put those threads in here.  It'll generate a lot more discussion about individual players, and it won't exactly clutter up this forum, given that only 5 of those threads have even been updated within the last month.

 

[AlNipper49]

We could always setup tags for those like we do in tblts

 

[Snodgrass'Muff]

Get rid of the Adopt-a-Prospect subforum and just put those threads in here.  It'll generate a lot more discussion about individual players, and it won't exactly clutter up this forum, given that only 5 of those threads have even been updated within the last month.

 
The individual prospect threads will get a lot more attention now that there is actual baseball to talk about.  It's not surprising that most of them were dormant over the winter.

 

[Orel Miraculous]

 
The individual prospect threads will get a lot more attention now that there is actual baseball to talk about.  It's not surprising that most of them were dormant over the winter.

 
Sure, but it's not just an offseason issue. Xander's thread had a grand total of thirteen posts from April-September last season. Thirteen. And this is a guy who was, perhaps, the best Red Sox prospect of the last 40 years.

 

[Cuzittt]

Get rid of the Adopt-a-Prospect subforum and just put those threads in here.  It'll generate a lot more discussion about individual players, and it won't exactly clutter up this forum, given that only 5 of those threads have even been updated within the last month.

 
I'm not against the idea... But I am not certain the issue is that these threads are in a sub-forum.
 
So, what do other people think? Would they be more likely to update their prospect threads if they were not in a sub-forum. Or is the issue something different?

 

[Idabomb333]

 
I'm not against the idea... But I am not certain the issue is that these threads are in a sub-forum.
 
So, what do other people think? Would they be more likely to update their prospect threads if they were not in a sub-forum. Or is the issue something different?

I agree that the fact the threads are in a subforum isn't the problem.  I think it's more that there's a really narrow band of news that fits there.  There were only 13 posts in Xander's thread, but there were lots of posts about Xander on SoSH.  Why put posts there when he's worthy of a main board thread, or even just a full thread in the minor league forum and posts in your day-to-day threads.  And the guys who aren't worthy of bigger threads aren't worthy of many posts either.  I don't think it'll work to try to promote threads devoted to specific prospect news.  I'm not at all suggesting that we end those threads, I just don't think there's a whole lot of room for them to grow as news threads.  Some sort of setup like hash tags might make sense for prospect posts.
 
I don't have anything to contribute on this count, but I'd be interested in posts about prospects' mechanics and how they're changing.  I know nothing about scouting, but I like reading scouting reports on prospects.  Maybe that's a way someone could add to their threads, but that probably relies on a relatively small subset of SoSH to contribute here.
 
I would also be interested in learning about what prospects learn at various minor league levels, especially if we can determine changes that Sox prospects make when they're with a particular affiliate.  Is there a pitching coach at one level who's particularly good at teaching some aspect of pitching?  Are there themes that coaches at a level harp on to everyone?  Other than age/quality and roster management, are there reasons to assign a guy to a certain level, e.g. to help him work on something specific?  Or I guess more generally, other than player age/quality/experience, what are the differences between minor league levels?
 
Is there anything else that might surprise people about minor league baseball specifically?  Does playing in the minors make it harder to think in terms of helping the team win and end up making players focus on personal numbers?  Do minor league players dive less, or slide head-first less, sprint full out less, or anything like that, to protect their own health and possibly sacrifice performance a little?

 

[Plympton91]

The adopt a prospect threads were initially, I thought, supposed to be a place where you collected links to articles about the player, personal scouting observations when you attended a game, or put thought out posts analyzing trends and developments in their career, but day to day discussion of streaks and such was more appropriate to the daily minor league game threads.

One way to ramp up activity in the prospect threads or create more subject oriented threads might be to declare the game threads as "news and updates only," so that if you want to talk about how Vazquez is now hitting .470 in his last 9 games you take it to the prospect thread. Or, to take a real example, if you note that Salem is going for an all time minor league consecutive win record, or that their pitching staff has a sub-2 ERA so far this season, make a thread about it in addition to noting it in the daily threads.

 

[PaulinMyrBch]

What I want and can't seem to find is a June draft thread. I know that pops up around the time of the draft, but I'd like a forum or thread to discuss amateur players that look to go high in the draft. Seems like that was in the Minor League thread before, but I can't find it the few times I've searched. 
 
I'm not sure that fits in the minor league forum, but it would flow somewhat as those are "prospect" style players.
 
Edit: My bad, I linked to this thread from the main page and missed that the draft thread was put up a few days ago. Sorry if anyone wasted their time throwing obscenities my way.