Business Relationships

Here's something I wrote last week:

"Second is a coming partnership with a well-known scouting company that will roughly triple the visits I get. They're about as well-respected and widely-read as you can get, so trying to nail down the specifics of the partnership is crucial."

Well, the deal has been concluded. You know what's so funny about how the deal was made? I've never even met them in person. I know that's not rare in business today, but it's amazing that technology can link up people across state lines and partnerships can be made without physically meeting.

I guess what I'm saying is that the old method of sealing deals with a handshake is close to becoming obsolete in some sectors. The company (which shall remain nameless until the announcement) that I've partnered with found my work online, followed it for awhile, sought contact through e-mail, then all it took was one phone conversation on an iPhone where I could look at an e-mail proposal, and the deal was done. It was that simple. Technology has really changed the way things work.

I think it has changed things for the better, but I'm not completely sure. In this situation, it has definitely worked out for the better. In the old days, when this company was only a magazine publisher with no web site, this could never have been possible. They would have never seen my work, and the odds are that I never would have started my work in the first place. Where would I have published it? I can't afford the cost of capital required to start my own magazine, so this wouldn't have even been possible 20 years ago.

However, I do sometimes wish the old business style of meeting face-to-face over dinner or in the office was still relevant. It is in a lot of contexts now, but not where I've been working with my own business. I wonder if I'll ever see that again.

It's Almost Over...

I have to admit that this class has been difficult, not in the content, but in the volume of the work. For those of you that are unaware, I'm in the midst of taking 7 classes this semester, which means a lot of short nights by itself. However, in addition to that workload, every day brings us one day closer to the day where I essentially don't sleep: draft day.

By draft day, I mean Major League Baseball's amateur draft. I've already written some about what it is I do, but there are more developments happening every day that bring me closer and closer to living life as a workaholic.

First, I've completed a transition to a professional blogging platform, and I'm now a part of the most widely-read sports blogging platform in America, Sports Blog Nation. My blog, which you can find here, is one of 35 baseball blogs on their network, and it's the only free blog nationwide that provides nationwide scouting reports. The transition took a lot of time and energy, but now it's essentially a real job in addition to going to school and being a husband, so time is short these days.

In addition to the transition to blogging full-time, I'm also working on a pair of monetizing deals related to MLB draft content. First is the MLB Draft Notebook, a PDF product that is due to be published in early June that will cover scouting reports on 750 players and all 30 baseball teams. My estimate after writing preliminary reports on all those players is that it will be north of 500 pages. Goodbye sleep. Second is a coming partnership with a well-known scouting company that will roughly triple the visits I get. They're about as well-respected and widely-read as you can get, so trying to nail down the specifics of the partnership is crucial.

I guess the main issue of this entry is that technology opens so many doors for people, yet really overextends people, as well. I'm simply tired. Once I get through these last couple weeks of the semester, I essentially don't have time to breathe. I have to be working hard on the Draft Notebook, as well as the blog, then May classes start up soon after. What happened to vacations?

Anyway, this is due to be one of the last blog posts made here, and I definitely don't see myself ever writing in this blog again once the semester is done. One full-time blog is enough. Starting June 10, the day after the draft concludes, I think I will sleep for 36 hours.

Technology's Advancement

As I've already established before, I'm a big baseball fan. I've been following baseball since before we had a computer growing up. However, when we did get our first computer, complete with Internet accessibility, I realized the potential of following baseball online.

At first, the best you could do was look up box scores online, as well as the AP recap of the game. Though that was valuable, the best it did was give me the same exact information I could find in the paper the next morning. However, I was still thrilled that I could look back and forth for different days of box score information, when the paper only had the one day's box score. With the Internet, I didn't have to save a stack of newspapers to look back at how a player did a few days ago. I could just click and go.

Over time, that technology has evolved, and now sports is on the cutting edge of technology for the real-time sports fan. Here's what I can do now to follow baseball online as a Texas Rangers fan living in Atlanta:

-I can follow the GameTracker for today's game. That GameTracker is complete with pitch-by-pitch coverage in real time, with box scores and more. The most impressive part of GameTracker is the ability to use what Major League Baseball calls PitchFX. They have technology that can track the velocity of each pitch thrown, along with its vertical and horizontal movement, then the technology can tell which pitch was thrown, whether it be a fastball, curveball, slider, etc. You can interact with a PitchFX database, looking at the average velocity for pitches, how much pitches break, etc., then compare that information across different pitchers. All online. Sites such as FanGraphs make good money doing an excellent job interpreting these numbers.
-I can listen to the game while using GameTracker, all in synchronized real-time. For only $20 a year, I can listen to every single game for the entire season across the entire league, including archives of the games. If I missed a game earlier today, I can log in to the MLB.com Multimedia site, then listen to the game.
-Even better, I can watch every single game for the entire year using MLB.TV. For $100 a year, I can watch every single game of every single team if I wanted to, giving me the capability to go beyond simply watching SportsCenter, which is what I did as a kid to catch glimpses of other teams. I was a subscriber to MLB.TV Premium for the past few years, and though there are occasional glitches, the quality is constantly improving, and the capabilities of current media are simply amazing.

This is in addition to added coverage of minor leagues, blogs, and more baseball sites than ever before. The amount of information is amazing.

I use baseball as an example, only because it's the specific subject in which I use online media the most. It's a great example of how far things have come.

I'll be interested to see where technology goes from here for the home user, as it's hard to top what you can do with technology now in terms of a sports viewer from home.