Issue 1: Leading Off
Let’s get this thing started!
Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to the first issue of my newsletter. If you’re already subscribed and reading this, I assume you’re coming here from Twitter and you’re familiar with who I am and generally what I do. If not, a quick bio and a primer on what exactly this newsletter is (and what it isn’t).
My name is Carlos Collazo and I’m a writer for Baseball America. Specifically, I spend most of my time covering the MLB Draft. As we step into 2024 I will be covering my eighth draft with BA.
The point of this newsletter is to find a new, and hopefully better, way to share the work I’m doing at BA with those who might be interested in following along and to get out the random thoughts I might have on the game that don’t fit in a separate BA article or podcast (I also co-host the Future Projection podcast with Ben Badler and talk about the draft on the Baseball America podcast feed).
Since 2010 or so, those thoughts have primarily landed on Twitter. However, for the past few years (and before the entire Elon/X saga began) I started using Twitter less and less frequently to try and focus on actually producing better and more consistent work. That remains the case today, especially with the current experience of Twitter being as bad as I can remember and all the Twitter clones (Threads, Bluesky, etc.) serving up the same experience—just worse, with fewer interesting people and interesting content to consume.
Newsletters on the other hand have been a bit of a godsend in the age of social media, and over the last few years I’ve enjoyed following various writers and keeping up with what they are working on in this medium. It reminds me of what I think of as “the golden days of the internet” back when I was in high school in the late 2000s and early 2010s when blogs were cool and everyone had one. At the time I my mom encouraged me to start a blog of my own because she knew I liked writing and I liked baseball and it was an obvious way to combine the two. Thank God for that, because I might not have the amazing career I do now if she hadn’t.
So if you’re interested in the draft or prospects in general or baseball overall or for whatever reason you have enjoyed following me on Twitter over the years, perhaps this newsletter will be interesting for you as well.
What this newsletter definitely isn’t is another paid subscription. I’m lucky to get to write mostly behind the paywall at Baseball America and have no desire for this to be anything other than a casual newsletter where I can share some thoughts on the game and keep people updated on what I’ve been writing and podcasting. You know, the sort of content that Twitter used to be good for.
Other than that, I’m going to try and figure this thing out on the fly. I’m not sure how often I’ll want to send newsletters—once a week sounds about right, but perhaps that will turn out to be too frequent. Certainly the title of the newsletter is no good, but alas, I have never been good with titles. If you have any ideas on that front (or any suggestions or thoughts in general) reach out and let me know.
For now, here’s everything I produced for Baseball America in the month of December (in addition to the 2024 Baseball America Prospect Handbook, which you can order here if you are interested):