Not just development: Why farm directors are hyping their players on Twitter
There was a moment from this past spring that Ross Fenstermaker wished had made it to Twitter.
Fenstermaker is the vice president of international scouting and player development for the Rangers, and he was watching one of the team’s marquee signings take a few hacks at the team’s complex in Arizona. Texas had signed Bahamian shortstop Sebastian Walcott for $3.2 million just a few months earlier, and now he was here in the flesh, bat in hand and helmet on head. Facing 25-year-old right-hander Alex Speas, Walcott smacked a single at 107 mph and then a homer at 105 mph. It was highlight-worthy stuff, except none of the assembled media members were recording.
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“The fan base was livid,” Fenstermaker says, “that those guys didn’t have video of it.”
What the fan base could or couldn’t see, and just how livid or rapturous they were about it, didn’t used to fall under the purview of anybody in player development. Prospects would grind through the minors, the cream would rise to the top and then fans would get to know the best of them as big leaguers. At most, a prospect’s performance in the minors would merit a mention or two in the newspaper. Farm directors didn’t worry about getting eyes on their players, just about getting them to the majors.
But the world, and the world of prospects, has changed in the last 15 years. Seamheads eagerly await and dissect top-100 prospect lists, and casual fans likely are familiar with their favorite team’s top minor-leaguers. Almost all minor-league games are available to be streamed through MiLB.tv, and minor-league affiliates regularly post highlights on social media. This year, Statcast data, previously tied to just the majors, is available for Triple A games.
Many player development departments have changed, too. Yes, farm systems are awash in new technology and the process of player development is now more scientific than ever. But it is also more visible. Fans want to see what is going on in the minors, and more and more farm directors see it as their responsibility not just to produce major leaguers, but to produce minor-league content. Fans may have been upset with the Rangers’ cadre of beat writers, but footage of Walcott’s exploits was absent from another channel built specifically for that kind of thing: the team’s player development accounts on Twitter and Instagram.
The Rangers’ PD Twitter account, @TEXPlayerDev, was created in 2019 and now has nearly 13,000 followers. At the suggestion of the team’s scouts, it began as a forum to collect highlights and news about the team’s minor leaguers, but it has since morphed into an important marketing arm of the franchise. It’s one-stop shopping for minor-league highlights, transaction news and Opening Day roster announcements. When Walcott signed with the team, two posts went up — a flashy announcement image and a sizzle reel of the teenager’s amateur exploits.
Welcome to the family, @swalcott242!
We’ve agreed to terms with international free agent SS Sebastian Walcott. 🇧🇸
— Rangers Player Development (@TEXPlayerDev) January 15, 2023
And though the account is run by Texas’ social media team, Fenstermaker and the rest of the player development department is intimately involved. A former scout, the Rangers executive sounds equally as fluent in the language of content creation as he is in the language of swing adjustments and pitch metrics. In the fall of 2021, when Fenstermaker was promoted to his current role, expanding the department’s social media presence was a priority. “I wanted to beef this up a little bit,” he says, “to create a lot of highlight packages and unique content to engage the diverse user base.”
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That may sound odd — marketing is part of player development now? — but Fenstermaker is far from alone. Eighteen of MLB’s 30 teams have Twitter accounts just for their PD departments. Some have been around for a long time — the Mets started theirs in 2012, and the Brewers began one a year later — but most are relatively new. Since the Rangers introduced their player development Twitter, the Pirates, Mariners, Cardinals, Reds, Rays, Orioles, Nationals, Phillies and Red Sox have followed suit. The Twins began their account just in January, and fans may not be aware of it yet. It has just 2,300 followers so far.
And while many are run by the same staffers who handle the major-league accounts of those franchises, that hardly means farm directors sit back as spectators. It was Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham who pitched team leadership on starting an account in February 2021. The Royals have had a PD account since 2018, but “we’ve more recently rebranded and put more effort into it,” says farm director Mitch Maier. Even if the social media team has the keys in most instances, a small group of PD staffers is looped in to make content suggestions and sign off on announcements. The Phillies even have a baseball operations staffer, player development assistant Jake Primack, who counts hunting down Twitter content among his other responsibilities in the department.
“There’s so much interest in minor-league players and prospects,” says Phillies farm director Preston Mattingly. “We think we have a lot of really good players and we want to promote them and give Phillies fans a chance to see them.”
Some of this, of course, is low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. Only in the last 10 or 15 years have there been these types of channels to reach fans or the available content with which to fill them. Now, if Phillies prospect Johan Rojas makes a great catch, it’s a simple enough task to clip the video and disseminate it. But other aspects of PD’s social media revolution have required thought. It’s often PD staffers who are brainstorming ideas like putting a microphone on a prospect during a minicamp, as the Red Sox did with infielder Nick Yorke. It’s PD staffers who notice a play or a stat line and think, “Fans need to see this.” And it has farm directors thinking like social media heads.
🔊 INF Nick Yorke mic'd in the Fort!
— Red Sox Player Development (@RedSoxPlayerDev) January 29, 2022
Take the trend of hidden camera call-up videos. Abraham has seen them proliferate, but on top of considering them through a baseball lens, he can’t help but think as a content creator. The Red Sox might do some in the future, but he worries about authenticity. Do too many of them, and they’ll lose their charm. “Having it be a real situation and not feeling staged for every team is really hard,” he says. When Maier talks about his department’s various social media accounts — the Royals have PD accounts on Twitter and Instagram — he could be mistaken for the head of a news organization. “We’re navigating across multiple platforms,” he says. Fenstermaker pays close enough attention to notice how different segments of the team’s audience behave.
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“Latin player posts do really well on Instagram and domestic player posts do better on Twitter,” he says. “The user base is a little bit different in terms of their social media consumption.”
Social media hardly takes up the lion’s share — or even the lamb’s — of any staffer’s day, but more and more teams are deciding the effort is worth it. Not all, though. The Marlins have an PD account on Instagram, a team spokesman said, but it’s private and just for staff and player use. One farm director, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, said his team had discussed hopping on the trend but felt the major-league social media accounts offered plenty of exposure.
Some farm directors are against the idea on principle. “The goal is for the player to improve and have success through performance,” says one PD head with an AL team. “A PD account makes it about us, less about the player.” An NL farm director agreed. “We’re always focused on the task at hand, and that’s getting the guys better,” the farm director says. “That’s what our players focus on, on a day-to-day basis. In the end, if that gets you praise and accolades from outside, that’s great. But I don’t think that should be or is a focus for us.”
Additionally, that NL farm director worries such an account would lead to as many sore feelings as happy ones among his players. “You start pushing guys on there and other guys will maybe be like, ‘Why is this guy on there? I’m not on there,’” he says. “I don’t want to breed that type of culture around our guys.” The extra attention, and the possible imbalance of it across the system, is something that Twitter-hip farm directors say they keep in mind. “There’s definitely some downsides to it,” says Fenstermaker, “but there are some unique opportunities as well to promote our players.” At any rate, the prospect-hype horse left the barn a long time ago.
“So many of our players have access to their own highlights,” Fenstermaker says. “They post them on Instagram. We figure if they’re going to post them on their individual Instagrams, we can do some stuff from our perspective.”
The Rangers and Royals are among teams that also serve another audience — scouts. Both earn plaudits from scouts for regularly posting back fields lineups and pitching matchups during minor-league spring training and instructional league, a practice that helps scouts ensure they’re in the right place to see the right players. Fenstermaker, a former scout, says the Rangers “want to be scout-friendly.”
Casey Schmitt was 2 for 4 with two doubles and 3 RBIs in Friday’s victory over El Paso
— SFGProspects (@SFGProspects) April 9, 2023
There may still be holdouts, but the ranks of social-savvy PD departments are growing. Prior to 2019, only five teams had PD-specific Twitter accounts. Nine have been added since the start of 2020. Fenstermaker sees only more teams getting on board. “My guess is we’ll see closer to 25 or 30 (teams with accounts) in another year or two,” he says, “if not by the end of this year.” The audience is still catching up — only the accounts of the Mets (48,600), Mariners (26,800), Cardinals (21,700) and Yankees (24,000) have more than 20,000 followers — but the appetite is there.
Into no man's land for the third out.
What a snag by Danny Serretti!
— Detroit Tigers Player Development (@RoadtoDetroit) March 26, 2023
Being in the minors used to mean anonymity. But that doesn’t mean it still has to. Instead of being secretive, Fenstermaker says, more teams like the Rangers want to “give our players the opportunity to put their abilities out there into the world.” In the future, there will be fewer Sebastian Walcott homers that go uncaptured. Everybody has a camera these days.
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And nobody has more of them than a player development department.
(Photo illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Jill Weisleder / Getty Images; Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox; Ben Ludeman / Texas Rangers)
