Personal prototype — not an MLB or MiLB product · Built by Rob Runnels. Club below is fictional. Player data is live from MLB's public Stats API.

The Bullpen

A prototype, built to ask better questions

Fictional

What this is

Since consolidation, MiLB's central capabilities have gotten meaningfully stronger. Inside MLB exists, clubs submit promotional information centrally, shared assets are available, and league communications move consistently. I am not trying to rebuild any of that.

The question I became interested in is the last mile: how does useful information make its way from a central resource to the person actually doing the work at a club? In a smaller front office that might be a marketing coordinator, a ticket seller, a groundskeeper, or someone building the videoboard for that night's game. The Bullpen is a sketch of what a more proactive layer on top of existing resources might make possible.

I recognize this problem because I have lived versions of it, from the club side, the MLB club side, and the national partner side. I have some ideas about what might help. Anyone inside the system knows it better than I do today, so the most useful thing that can happen here is being told where I am wrong.

I do not know which parts of this already exist, have been tested, are funded, or have been ruled out for very good reasons. Every panel here is intentionally a question rather than a recommendation. I built it because I have spent enough time around team, league and partner environments to be interested in the seams between them, and I thought building something would lead to a better conversation than arriving with a list of opinions.

The fastest way to make this useless is to find out I am sketching something that is already solved. That would be a good outcome.

Built by Rob Runnels, August 2026. The club is invented. Player data is live. Operating figures are sample or open questions, labeled inline.

JD · "proactively communicating marketing best practices and standards that can be deployed locally"

The Last Mile

League communications can be excellent and still face a last-mile problem at a small club. A message may enter through senior leadership, while the actual work eventually belongs to someone in marketing, partnerships, operations, ticketing or game presentation.

This panel asks a simple question: could the same communication be translated into role-specific actions, deadlines and acknowledgements without changing the system that already distributes it?

League memo in

Example current-state workflow: a message enters through senior leadership and moves onward at their discretion.

Routed out Sample club roles

Same memo, split by who does the work.

Pick a memo and route it.

A measurement I would want to understand

The communication system may already capture some of this. The question is whether reach, acknowledgement and completion are ever viewed through the lens of the person ultimately responsible for the work.

—Reached the doer
—Acknowledged
—Completed by deadline
Open question: I would want to understand what account or engagement data Inside MLB already captures. Could any of it help answer a distribution question like "did this reach the person who actually needed to act?" If that view already exists, I would want to understand how clubs use it today.
Figures are illustrative and the club is fictional. The panel exists to ask whether this view is available to clubs, not to assert that it is missing.
JD · "doing great work with limited resources"

Gameday

A sketch of one place for everyone who has to be ready for a game: the board operator, the creative coordinator, the media relations writer, the broadcast crew, and the visiting club that may need the same players.

Note on what is live here: club names, venues, leagues and affiliations below are hard-coded. Only the roster and headshot call goes out to MLB's public API.

The headshot workflow below is a small example of how a centrally solved problem can still create repetitive work downstream.

Asset lineage: a simplified version of a workflow I have experienced

The first step is solved centrally and solved well. The steps after it can repeat locally, per club and per roster move.

Once, centrally

1 · Source image created

A high-resolution player image is captured and distributed centrally. In workflows I have experienced, that source image often carries parent-club branding.

Often repeated locally

2 · Cut out for production use

A club may pull the same source image and repeat background removal or other production work locally. The cutout itself is the same regardless of who does it, which is what makes the repetition interesting.

Genuinely local

3 · Local visual identity

The source image may still carry the parent club identity, while the local club needs its own visual system. This is the step that is actually club-specific, and it is the one most affected by local capacity.

Then reused everywhere

4 · Reused across departments

Videoboard, media guide, website, social, and potentially the visiting club's broadcast and graphics. Several of them may need the same underlying asset.

Informal workarounds can emerge: shared drives, peer-to-peer asset exchanges, or simply recreating something another club may have already built. Those solutions work, but they depend on relationships and local capacity. When a player is called up, traded or signed mid-season, the work can begin again at the next club.
The question this raises: the cutout looks invariant while the local identity is the variable. If more of the production step happened once at the source, the remaining club-level work might be much smaller. I would want to understand whether that has been considered, what the rights and workflow constraints are, and whether the current arrangement exists for reasons I cannot see from outside.

What is the duplication actually worth?

I don't know these numbers. Every input below is editable on purpose. Put in what you know and the math updates.

—Hours today
—Hours if cut once centrally
—Hours returned to clubs
Deliberately not a claim. It is a structure with your assumptions in it. If the real duplication factor is 1.2 instead of 3, the argument gets smaller and I'd rather find that out from you than defend a number I invented.
JD · "Serve as a thought leader and consultant for MiLB clubs"

The Index

The Fall Business Summit creates a valuable annual exchange of ideas. This asks what some of that learning might look like if it stayed searchable throughout the season, including for the club employees who may not have been in the room.

Every entry starts with information the League may already have through approvals or other existing systems, then adds the context that is harder to capture centrally: what worked, what did not, what it required, and what another club should know before trying it.

The potential unlock: the Index may not need to begin with a new collection effort. Existing approval and event data could provide a useful spine — which clubs ran which promotions, when and where. The system could organize and enrich that first. Club contributions then add the part a database cannot infer reliably: results, execution notes, what went wrong, and who another operator should call.
Simulated corpus Thirty simulated entries. Public references are linked where available, with basis_type and source_note separating documented examples from operator synthesis.
JD · "Lead Brand Insights… partnering with MLB Strategy, Marketing, and external partners to translate fan data into actionable insights"

Ticket Data

This tab started with a recent club-side conversation. When I asked what would make the biggest practical difference to a local marketer, ticketing data surfaced almost immediately. I do not know what is already possible centrally, so I have treated the example below as a question rather than a recommendation.

The example that came up

One concrete scenario. There are many shaped like it.

A fan has an account with the club's ticketing provider. On a Tuesday in June they put four tickets in a cart for a bobblehead night, then abandon it. Maybe the date didn't work, maybe the total surprised them, maybe a kid started crying.

Depending on what the club can currently access, that intent signal may never become usable marketing information. The marketer may not have a segment or a trigger they can act on locally, even though the fan did two high-intent things: created an account and chose a specific promotional night.

If even a tokenized segment came back, the play writes itself: serve that group an offer for the next bobblehead night. Same promotion type, different date, known intent.

Why this may benefit from league-level leverage

An individual club may have limited leverage with a shared technology provider.

If a meaningful share of clubs operate through common ticketing infrastructure, there may be opportunities that are more practical to explore centrally than club by club. I would want to understand the actual vendor landscape, ownership structure, data rights and existing integrations before assuming what is possible.

The shape I keep coming back to is the same one throughout this prototype: where something is genuinely hard and genuinely shared, doing it once centrally may leave clubs with something they can act on locally.
The important unknown for me is not the technology first. It is governance: what clubs can access today, what fans have consented to, who controls which data, and whether useful segments can be returned without creating a central profile store.

What I would want to understand before building anything

Naming the constraints is the point of this panel.

Consent and jurisdiction. Whose privacy policy did the fan accept, the club's or the provider's? Retargeting on abandonment would need a lawful basis, and my understanding is that this is not uniform across states.

Who owns the fan. Clubs are independently owned businesses. A central profile store across independently owned clubs would be a governance question long before it is a technical one, and trust here seems difficult to rebuild once spent.

Tokenization may be necessary but not sufficient. A tokenized segment still needs a delivery path back to a real inbox, and that path is where much of the risk would live.

Start narrow. If it were worth exploring at all, one promotion type at one club, opt-in and measured, seems a more sensible starting point than anything resembling a profile graph.
I would rather show that I understand why this is hard than show a mockup that pretends it is not.
JD · "strategic leadership of our Copa de la Diversión Hispanic program… audit of impact to-date"

Copa Localization Kit

League creative provides a common starting point, but localization still creates work at the club level. Clubs also vary meaningfully in staff size, creative capability and local-market needs.

This panel asks what pieces can remain standardized while giving clubs enough flexibility to make Copa genuinely local.

Master asset

One template, resolved for three clubs. Sample copy, written for this prototype.

The audit the JD mentions

"An audit of impact to-date." Here is the honest version of that table.

I left these blank on purpose. I could invent plausible numbers, but that would defeat the point. Before recommending anything I would want to understand what is already captured centrally, what clubs track consistently, and where the gaps actually are. If approval data already contains which clubs ran Copa and on what dates, part of this table may fill itself.
JD · "identification and expansion of commercial opportunities across MiLB"

Sponsor Prospector

Local prospecting is relationship-driven by nature, and smaller staffs do not always have dedicated research resources. This asks whether publicly available market signals could give sellers another useful reason to call.

Cached search results
Adjacent question: opt-in league partnership programs can give clubs access to national opportunities they might not otherwise pursue locally. I would be interested in how clubs evaluate that tradeoff. Could a seller see the league-program economics alongside what the club has historically generated from that category locally? If that comparison already exists, great. If not, the underlying data may be useful decision support.
Live version calls a search API server-side. Cached here so the demo can't fail on a network hiccup.
JD · "translate fan data into actionable insights"

Attendance Read

A small club probably does not need another dashboard for its own sake. The value is turning the data into a small number of practical things worth considering before Tuesday.

The data Sample

Sample homestand, fictional club, 2026 season. Simulated data.

The read

What a club actually wants back.

The Bullpen — a working prototype, built to ask better questions rather than propose a finished product. I recognize this problem because I have lived versions of it. Anyone inside the system knows it better than I do, and being told where I am wrong is the point.
Live player data from MLB's public Stats API. Fictional club, sample operating data, cached search results, and open questions — all labeled inline.