One major theme of the A's minor league system's August has been the widespread promotion of pitchers from one level to the next, especially in the teams' starting rotations. With only a few weeks remaining in the 2023 minor league season, I look at fourteen recently-promoted pitchers across the system and discuss what led to each of them getting the call, how their early returns in their new assignments have gone, and where their recent developments put them in the A's organization's pitching picture down the stretch and looking ahead to 2024.

In the second Q&A episode of the 2023 minor league season, I fielded sixteen questions about different topics across the A's system (and beyond), ranging from macro topics such as putting the organization's starting pitching and top position players in context, to anticipating key offseason events like the Rule 5 Draft and Arizona Fall League, to discussing the progress of several specific players at different levels and stages of performance.

This week's episode is an Excessive Prospect Analysis Podcast first: a chat with someone else, namely Jesse Goldberg-Strassler, the tremendous lead broadcaster of the A's organization's High-A affiliate in Lansing. Jesse was incredibly generous to take a full podcast's worth of time out to talk with me about a wide range of subjects delving into both on- and off-field aspects of minor league baseball.

We spend the first 1:10 or so of the conversation focusing on various aspects of broadcasting and the role folks in Jesse's position play in shaping our understanding of what goes on with the teams they work for. We get into Jesse's particular path to his current position and broadcasting acumen, his broadcast philosophy, all the things that go on behind the scenes in a broadcaster's day, the minor league broadcast audience, and plenty more. For the rest of the chat, we discuss various topics around the Lugnuts team: find out how several of the team's new players have looked, what trends Jesse's noticed in being around the team every day, his take on the biggest stories of the 2023 Lansing season, what you might expect from Lugnuts players in batting practice, and learn about some of the cool things some of the squad's players have done off the field as well.

Even as closely as I've followed the Lansing team this year (like all A's affiliates), and as familiar as I've become with Jesse's broadcasting style, I learned so much from him about so many different things in this conversation, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of insight from it as well.