You all ever hear of FirstInning.com?

[Giants]

Well I just bought it. I already spend way too much time on my baseball writing for a pretend baseball league, and I've wanted to write or blog or something for awhile (I actually created a blog called Really, Molina's Batting's Cleanup? that was going to be about what a joke the Giants lineup was last year) and what's stopped me was not having the time/energy to do keep up quality content and do the promotion to build up a following. FirstInning is a great resource as a reference site, and as a day to day way to follow the minor leagues, but it has no live content and it is dying for some, so I'm hoping to provide it and that it won't suck.

The ultimate vision would be to create a FanGraphs like community but dedicated to the minor leagues, we probably won't get there this season but we might by next year. To that end, I wanted to use this site as a mini-focus group. If you've never been to FirstInning.com check it out, sign up and get your daily player tracker going. If you've been there, what do you think of it? What would you like to see more of when it comes to covering minor league baseball? Does anyone have a particular niche (team, league, position, etc.) they'd like to write about? I'm really excited about this opportunity, and it certainly would never have happened if this league hadn't forced me to learn about minor league baseball and start following prospects. Look forward to seeing you all on the site!

[Mets]

thanks dude..just ruined one of my secrets.

[Rangers]

thanks dude..just ruined one of my secrets.

Don't worry, it wasn't a secret.

[Rangers]

Well I just bought it. I already spend way too much time on my baseball writing for a pretend baseball league, and I've wanted to write or blog or something for awhile (I actually created a blog called Really, Molina's Batting's Cleanup? that was going to be about what a joke the Giants lineup was last year) and what's stopped me was not having the time/energy to do keep up quality content and do the promotion to build up a following. FirstInning is a great resource as a reference site, and as a day to day way to follow the minor leagues, but it has no live content and it is dying for some, so I'm hoping to provide it and that it won't suck.

The ultimate vision would be to create a FanGraphs like community but dedicated to the minor leagues, we probably won't get there this season but we might by next year. To that end, I wanted to use this site as a mini-focus group. If you've never been to FirstInning.com check it out, sign up and get your daily player tracker going. If you've been there, what do you think of it? What would you like to see more of when it comes to covering minor league baseball? Does anyone have a particular niche (team, league, position, etc.) they'd like to write about? I'm really excited about this opportunity, and it certainly would never have happened if this league hadn't forced me to learn about minor league baseball and start following prospects. Look forward to seeing you all on the site!

Congrats, should be a fun project.

[Orioles]

Good stuff Jake. I've been checking FirstInning periodically for a couple of years now I guess, and playing around with the player tracker, etc. A few thoughts off the top of my head.

- I was originally drawn to the site b/c it has easily accessible and sortable stats w/ a lot fewer pages to click through to view/sort them (as on MiLB.com and Fangraphs). The park factors are nice to have right there as well.

- The addition of the prospect notes is something I just noticed, but I think has great potential to be a unique addition to the mix of sites out there. Baseball Digest Daily had a "ballbug.com" type search bot (or whatever you call it) which produced headlines from some of the major and minor sites covering prospects, though they no longer have a page dedicated to prospects.

- I like how FI sorts the "recent news from around the web" by relevant player, rather than just spitting out headlines etc. It would be great if you could easily access player pages (browsing rather than searching), then scroll down to find a collection of the most recent scouting reports/ articles/ rankings/ notes referencing that prospect. Maybe the page dedicated to showing all the most recent minor league player notes would allow you to also click through to the recent minors news by organization (or by level maybe).

- the user page where you can select prospects to track their daily performance is pretty cool. MiLB.com supposedly allows you to "bookmark" players to add them to a personalized list that you can access, but I don't think that feature actually works (at least not nearly as well as the FI.com player tracker).

Just went on the site again now for the first time in a while, but will definitely explore it a little more now though.

[Twins]

I've been using FirstInning for a while now, and I love how easy it is to use and to get to individual player pages. It's not over cluttered, and since I go there almost exclusively to look at stats, I really like how it's not bogged down with useless analysis and fantasy advice.