Sox Scoops 40.82: "Staff Memo: The Blueprint™"

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Sox Scoops 40.82: "Staff Memo: The Blueprint™"

Post by HoosierVic » Sat Oct 19, 2019 12:53 pm

June 1, 2040

To: Black Sox Franchise Personnel
From: Vic Caleca, general manager
Re: The Blueprint™

Good morning everyone.

Many of you have already been briefed by telephone about our new intellectual property initiative, The Blueprint™, but a few have not, so I think it only appropriate to loop you in.

What, you may be wondering, is The Blueprint™? Well, for the most part, it’s an initiative of our owner, Vinnie Vitale, who was distressed to find that Portland and Charlotte had already branded their team philosophies: The Plan™, in the case of Charlotte (via Nashville), and The Master Plan™, in the case of Portland.

Vinnie and I had a discussion a few days ago, and arrived at The Blueprint™ as appropriate branding for the team building philosophy of our franchise.

As you know, Black Sox Park was designed as a so-called “pitcher-friendly” field that tends to depress batting average and home runs while rewarding hitters that can hit balls into our spacious outfield gaps for doubles and triples.

To maximize the benefits of this park design, the front office has arrived at some guiding principles for the kinds of players and talent we want to attract to our franchise.

These principles form the backbone of The Blueprint™.

So, you may be wondering, what are these principles? Among them:
  • We will emphasize pitching, defense, and OBP over hitting for average and home run power.
  • We will look for players with excellent plate discipline, or “eye,” ratings from our scouts and coaches. The acquisitions of Hotha Popo and Mark Simpson are examples. We need to do much more in this area, though, as our team OBP standing in the Frick is currently an unacceptable 15th.
  • We will seek to build our pitching staff into one that can compete with anyone on the road and dominate at home. We have a long way to go on this front, but Amayas Moelling and Juan Nicto give us an excellent start. After their spots in the rotation, of course, we tend to hold our breath. Still, our pitching staff – statistically, at least – stacks up pretty well with the Frick competition (we rate from 1st to 6th in team categories tracked by BNN.
  • As part of our pitching emphasis, we will favor groundball or extreme groundball pitchers. And, of course, we want above-average to elite “movement” ratings.
  • We will seek hitters with excellent “gap power” ratings. This is a new point of emphasis, as you can tell by our rather woeful standing in doubles and triples so far (we rate 14th for both doubles and triples). We will seek to remedy this going forward.
  • We will seek excellent to elite fielders at all positions, but especially in our outfielders and up-the-middle infield positions. We have done well here: our defensive efficiency and zone rating are both 2nd in the Frick (as opposed to last season, when we tended to rate towards the bottom of the Johnson). There is room for improvement here, though, as the gap between us and league leader Yellow Springs is still fairly wide.
  • As part of our fielding emphasis, we want to attract outfielders and middle infielders with elite range (like CF Jim Lorenzen). If their scout ratings are below, say, 9, they would need to be extraordinary offensive talents to be candidates for the major league club.
There are other components to The Blueprint™, of course, but we will brief you on those in a separate more detailed document in the near future. This, however, should give you a decent grounding in what we mean by the term.

Now, the critical thing to remember is that we should try to reference The Blueprint™ whenever possible when discussing player moves, signings, trades, etc., or when discussing the team’s philosophy in general.

Vinnie is intent on making The Blueprint™ a “thing” in the BBA, and to do this it must become common in our press releases, our interviews, and in our local game TV, radio, and streaming broadcasts.

In written communication, both The and Blueprint must be capitalized, and the trademark symbol (™) must be used. It is acceptable, however, to refer to say, The Black Sox Blueprint™ or, for our minor league affiliates, The Gold Sox Blueprint™, say, or The Flight Blueprint™.

Kudos, by the way, to Beloit Manager Keith Russell for referencing The Blue Sox Blueprint™ in recent interviews about the unfortunate incident with Carl Pitts missing the team bus.

Now, a couple of cautions: when referring to the Black Sox philosophy, never refer to it as a plan or master plan. Vinnie does not want to give free advertising to rival intellectual property, or risk being the target of a complaint of misusing Portland or Charlotte’s trademarks.

There are rumors, too, that California may be on the verge of branding its team philosophy as The Right Wind™ (don’t ask, I don’t get it, either. Sounds like a fever dream to me).

We have already counseled our broadcast crews to be very cautious about referring to winds blowing towards or out of right field – we don’t want to inadvertently blunder into a trademark violation. Those California folk are pretty unpredictable.

So, there you have it.

We will be following “The Blueprint™” to the best of our abilities, and making frequent reference to it. You all will be expected to do so as well – unless you have a desire to join me in working night shifts for South Side Towing.

Thanks all! Happy Blueprinting™! (Not sure if we can actually trademark that, but we’ll check with our intellectual property attorneys to make sure).

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Re: Sox Scoops 40.82: "Staff Memo: The Blueprint™"

Post by 7teen » Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:29 am

HAHA I actually LOL'd at the Right Wind comment.
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Re: Sox Scoops 40.82: "Staff Memo: The Blueprint™"

Post by jleddy » Tue Nov 12, 2019 1:05 am

Hmmm...the Blueprint™ is exactly what we're trying to accomplish in Boise.

Maybe I need to re-evaluate things...
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