Progress on the Amazin' Avenue Annual is being made, though rarely at a quick enough pace to reassure us that it'll be finished in time. But that's for us to worry about. There are still two big announcements that we'll hopefully be able to make within the next couple of weeks. The first is regarding one of the contributors to this year's book, and the only reason we haven't made it public is that I won't believe he's actually writing something for the AAA until I have it in my hands. The second is regarding the means by which you might procure your copy of the book, and that one is essentially good to go but I'm just waiting until everything is official before spreading the word.
Some other notes that I can talk about after the jump.
- You can now sign up for the AAA e-mail list to receive updates about our progress as well as when the book is released and whatnot. No spam, just the good stuff. Plus we'll give away some number of free books to a random set of subscribers.
- A couple of weeks ago we talked about the challenges of selecting and securing cover art. We thought everything was finalized -- a couple of you even generously offered to donate the cost of licensing the photo from Getty -- but then I got the details of our license and it didn't cover electronic distribution (it only covered printed books, like the ones you could buy from Amazon last year). We were originally told that there would be an additional cost to license the image for electronic formats -- iPad, Kindle, and so on -- so things were touch-and-go there for a while. I was finally able to have a phone chat with our rep from Getty and got everything sorted out. They're including the electronic licensing for the price we've agreed upon for print licensing, so everything is good to go.
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We do have a few contributor announcements to make. The first is that Will Leitch, writer of books, New York Magazine columnist, founder of Deadspin, and apparently the person responsible for everything that's wrong with the internet, is on board. He's going to write something about the 2006 Mets.
Our good friend Ted Berg of SNY.tv and TedQuarters is working on a mind-blowing piece about the Omar Minaya and Sandy Alderson transition. Mind. Blowing.
Tommy Bennett, Phillies fan and author at Baseball Prospectus, is writing an NL East preview that will blow your mind. Wait, did I use that one already? It's going to rock your socks off. Yea.
Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing is going to share his experience of rooting for a team that went from having a geocentric worldview to a heliocentric one. No word yet on whether #6org will make an appearance.
Grant Brisbee from McCovey Chronicles will tell us to be optimistic, because teams with mediocre expectations can win the World Series.
Our friends Greg and Jason from Faith and Fear in Flushing are back and will contribute something, probably lengthy, about Mets history.
Some other folks, too. Plus all of us, of course.
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We're still trying to figure out what the player profiles are going to look like. Last year we (read: Alex) wrote profiles for every last player in training camp with the exceptions of Kai Gronauer and Mike Nickeas. We filled up a lot of pages, but there were also thousands of words there that needn't be written since thirty or so of those guys had no chance of making the team. Alex Cintron, anyone?
This year we're going to keep it to the 40-man roster, though some of those guys will actually appear in the minor league section as part of Rob's top prospect list. So in all we'll probably have 25-30 actually useful player profiles, plus any truly meaningful non-roster invitees who get picked up between now and deadline.
We haven't quite figured out the final look of the profiles, though. Rather than writing lengthy profiles on each player I think we're leaning towards having shorter, more meaningful write-ups along with a useful chart or graph (e.g. Carlos Beltran's year-by-year SLG compared to the average center fielder), plus three years of stats and probably 2011 projections from somewhere (not CHONE, though, since Sean Smith is working for a big league team now).
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For anyone interested in where the AAA magic happens, here's a photo of command central.
(click to embiggen)Left-to-right that's a 22" Samsung LCD (with the Devils/Flyers game, hooked up to a slim Windows XP machine), a 27" HP LCD, and my 13" MacBook Air. On the desk are the indispensable Garner's American Usage, a tattered copy of last year's annual, plus a couple of books on writing.
That's it for now. More to come, I'm sure. Now back to work.