Welcome to the Roadwire Prospect podcast. I'm your host James Anderson. And with me this week is Chris Blessing, the director of prospect analysis over at baseball HQ.

Chris, I'll be seeing you shortly here at First Pitch, Arizona. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me, though. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. I'm just taking my break from lunch for lunch right now outside my office and my

car. Beautiful weather. It's phenomenal. This is a good day. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, you know, I love chatting with you about prospects because, you know,

you're a legitimate scout. Like I don't consider myself a scout, but I mean, you put in the

work, you go to the games, you know, you've been doing this for a while. You've, you know,

worked closely with a long time evaluators

and stuff like that so uh really appreciate getting your perspective on a lot of the prospects that

that you get to see each season um how long how long have you been going to games, minor league games, as a talent evaluator?

I was thinking about this question.

And, you know, I often say I've been doing it for a decade.

And my first interaction with anybody about this was in 2009.

I didn't write my first article until 2010, but on

Twitter, I had befriended a former Fangraphs writer named Mike Newman, who was a prospect

guy. So, you know, essentially he was the one that taught me how uh how to do what i do today uh and it's

funny too because like he's been out of the game since 2014 uh we we just actually reconnected uh

we we call each other once or twice a year i reconnected a few weeks ago and he was just absolutely

amazed that a how many people were doing this in the fantasy

world now? And then B, that I was still going. So, yeah, so it's pretty cool. You know, I've probably

been the longest. Well, I was talking to Jeff Ponce the other day and for Baseball America.

And I think I'm the only fantasy guy that goes to the park anymore now that he's not, not doing it.

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