Hello there! Welcome to 2020!
Welcome to this new site, which will focus on covering the farm system and prospects of the San Francisco Giants!
But why is this site here? Don’t you have enough Giants’ websites to follow?
First, let me introduce myself. My name is Kevin J. Cunningham, and I’ve been writing about and covering the Giants farm system for 18 seasons. I started writing for SFDugout.com in 2002, and stayed with it until the site closed down in 2011. In 2012, I began helping out at McCovey Chronicles, and became a regular contributor in the following years. Over the last few years, I’ve partnered with Roger Munter, helping bring daily reports for people to read, and to learn about the often-frustrating Giants farm system.
So why did I stop?
Well, to try to make it a short story without bringing too many politics into it, California passed a new law in 2019 called AB-5, placing limits on various industries to use contract workers. One part of the law made it so that a writer could not write more than 35 articles in a calendar year for a single company without getting paid as employees, with benefits and all.
Even weekly reports don’t really fit into 35 articles, and while I wouldn’t have minded getting paid more, the work I did wasn’t full-time employment status. I have a day job with great benefits, and didn’t need or want it. Vox Media, which owns SBNation that McCovey Chronicles is a part of, was unable to make all of us full or even part-time employees on sites that made very little money off of advertising. So…all of us at McCovey Chronicles were let go.
After a lot of soul-searching, I decided I couldn’t stop writing about the Giants’ farm system, especially as the farm system is in the best shape it’s been in years, and some of the team’s most exciting prospects since before they began winning World Series again. So…here we are.
Here at Giant Futures, I’m going to continue with weekly reports every Monday with The Prospect Round-Up, summarizing the best of the week in the Giants farm. I’ll also continue to write up other news, cover the draft the same way I have at McCovey Chronicles for years, and even continue to write a little bit about stadiums and uniforms, just because it’s fun.
And…I decided to just not bother with ads. Frankly, they pay nothing at all, are annoying and ugly, and a fair percentage of people block them anyway. There’s also no subscription fees. For the amount of content you’ll get, it’s also just not worth it. But what I will be asking for is your help.
To pay to keep the site hosted, and fees, I’ve set up a Patreon. If you like what you’re reading and want to support it, I hope you’ll consider contributing. I set it at a $1.50 a month. I could make comparisons for how much that is, but I’ll trust that you can do math.
I don’t know what the future holds at this site. Maybe other writers will join in the future. Maybe things will wrap up after a couple of years. Who knows.
For now, there’s Bart, and Ramos, and Luciano, and many many others to follow. I hope you’ll follow them here.
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