First and foremost, if you have followed my column over the years, thank you for your readership and your feedback.
I feel the need to explain what has happened to The Wheelhouse over the course of the past year. My media responsibilities have increased with the addition of a Saturday edition of RotoWire Fantasy Sports Today on Sirius-XM (4-7p ET), and even with a brief respite from that aspect of my schedule in March and April, my time to write has been non-existent.
In addition to hosting and production work with the new daily RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Podcast, I started co-hosting a weekly podcast called Short Hops with Bernie Pleskoff last August. That continues to be recorded each week on Wednesdays, and both podcasts have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback despite being in their early stages of development.
As you may know, my core responsibilities at RotoWire include serving as a lead editor for the day-to-day baseball content on the site. Keeping things running smoothly on that front ultimately comes first, whether that's filling in gaps to ensure our breaking news and site tools are the best in the industry, editing and posting many of the articles submitted by our excellent staff of columnists, helping to train new writers, or simply interacting with the staff to keep our team on the same page. I stopped counting the hours a long time ago, but I suspect that many editors are left with a choice between managing a staff in a behind-the-scenes role, or taking on a heavier writing load to put their own words out front for their respective sites. Fortunately, being a member of the hosting team for SXM and the podcasts affords me an opportunity to serve as a voice of the site in the media world.
Perhaps as things continue to evolve over time, I will be better positioned to focus on writing. Regardless of whether that happens, I hope that the team of writers and features we have put together over the past few years have made the gradual disappearance of The Wheelhouse negligible.
While I still have the passion to write a weekly column, I simply do not have the bandwidth to effectively meet my own expectations in terms of quality, timeliness or consistency at the present time.
Best Regards,
- Derek VanRiper
