Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

For a number of reasons, I’m excited to put 2024 behind me. I hope you all had some down time to spend with family and relax over the last few days and weeks. As a North Carolina native currently residing in Virginia, it’s always great to get back to the Tar Heel state and spend time with family.

We’re officially in the second year of the newsletter. When I started this venture a year ago on January 1, the goal was simple: I wanted a place to share my work and share my thoughts about baseball that wasn’t social media.

It’s been successful on that front and, more importantly, I’ve had a lot of fun writing these newsletters. The goal in year one was to feel out the format, experiment, find what sort of cadence worked for me and flex the writing muscles a bit more. I sent 28 total newsletters in 2024—just about one every two weeks—and stumbled into a better name than the original “Carlos Collazo Newsletter.”

In 2025 I’ll try to up the frequency to something like once per week. As always, the challenge will come in the middle of the summer when draft coverage reaches a fever pitch and my travel picks up.

If you guys have any thoughts, questions or requests for specific kinds of content here please let me know. You can comment on the newsletter posts on the web or simply reply to the email you received in your inbox. At this point email is the best way to get in touch with me since the death scrolling apps aren’t downloaded on my phone.

I do have a few new pieces to share with you since the last newsletter: I redrafted the 2020 class with five years of hindsight to guide us, and man, this class has not panned out well at all. That was probably an easy assumption at the time given the nature of the covid draft, but not a single top-10 pick in the real draft went top-10 in this redraft. As a complementary piece to the redraft, I also looked at winners and losers from the class. There’s probably more to be written about the 2020 draft class in this space in the future.

I also wanted to push JJ Cooper’s first ever Hall of Fame ballot. Both JJ and Ben Badler have Hall of Fame ballots this year for the first time, which is a ton of fun. While JJ’s ballot wouldn’t be mine if I had one (I don’t), the rationale behind his process was well thought out and interesting to read through. Plus, the more Andruw Jones voters the better.

That’s all I have for you guys this time. Thank you so much for following along and reading over the last year if you have, and if you’re new to the newsletter, welcome!