Cooper: Thank You To Our Subscribers On MiLB Opening Day

Is there anything baseball loves more than Opening Day?

We had college baseball Opening Day, then we had MLB Opening Day in South Korea. Then we had MLB Opening Day, followed a day later by Triple-A Opening Day.

And now to wrap it up, we have minor league Opening Day, non-Triple-A edition.

It’s our fifth different Opening Day in the past couple of months.

Bring it on. Opening Day is great. Opening Day is a day where I (and probably many of you) can’t get a stupid grin off my face.

Opening Day is when everything is fresh. What makes every baseball season fascinating is starting a season knowing you’ll be surprised repeatedly.

When I go to a baseball game, one of my biggest hopes is I’ll see something I’ve never seen before. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But I enter every season knowing it will be different. No two seasons are ever alike.

You never know who will begin the season as a relative unknown and end it as a star. This is my 23rd baseball season at Baseball America. I and everyone else who works here begin each season excited to see who’s going to take that step.

Somewhere around the country, there’s a player getting ready to play his first full-season game. He’s known to his family, his friends, teammates, coaches and some scouts and front office officials involved in signing him. But to the public at large, he’s an unknown.

He’s dreamed of being a big leaguer, but that desire for now is only a hope. It’s an uncertainty.

Two years ago, that was Jackson Chourio. Chourio began the 2022 season at Low-A Carolina. He was a solid prospect when the Brewers signed him, and he’d started to stand out in spring training that year. But when the 2021 MiLB season began, Chourio could walk through a crowd of the biggest Brewers fans in the world unnoticed.

Two years later, Chourio is one of the favorites to be the National League Rookie of the Year. He’s a star in the making, and someone who’s no longer just another face in the crowd.

And if you follow Baseball America, Chourio is someone you were well aware of in early 2022. We want to make sure you are hearing about future stars first.

Our mission statement is to as best as possible reflect the industry of baseball. We want to give Baseball America readers an experience that makes you feel as if you’re hearing directly from scouts and front office officials in baseball.

Whether you’re reading our website, watching our new Hot Sheet show on YouTube, listening to our podcasts or reading our print magazine and books, we hope that you find our content interesting and entertaining. But we also have the goal of giving you something every day that leaves you feeling more informed about the game we all love.

Most importantly, we want to make sure we are giving our subscribers what they want and expect. Subscribers are who we work for. By supporting us, you allow myself and the rest of our staff to turn our passion into our vocations. We cannot do any of this without you. When you support Baseball America by subscribing, you are a vital part of ensuring we can continue to produce in-depth baseball coverage.

That’s not hyperbole in any way. The world of baseball media in the 2020s does not work in any other way. If we solely depended on advertising, we would have ceased to exist long ago. It is your subscriptions that ensure Baseball America endures. We’re a small, independent baseball media company in the 2020s, we don’t take any of this for granted.

So enjoy Opening Day. I hope you get to see something you’ve never seen before at the ballpark. And thank you for supporting us by subscribing.

If you subscribe, and you have thoughts you want to share, or if just want to say hi. My email address is jjcooper(at)baseballamerica.com.

JJ Cooper
Editor-In-Chief
Baseball America