John Sickels (born January 5, 1968) is an American baseball writer who specializes in minor league baseball and amateur baseball.

Biography

Sickels is a graduate of Northwest Missouri State University (1990, BA in history and philosophy) and the

University of Kansas The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. Tw ...

(1993, MA in history). He resides in Kansas with his wife, Jeri. He has two sons, Nicholas and Jackson. Sickels worked as research assistant to noted baseball writer

Bill James George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. ...

from 1993 though 1996. From 1996 to 2005, Sickels was a columnist for

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

.com, writing regular "Down on the Farm" columns that took an in-depth look at baseball prospects. Sickels parted ways with ESPN in February 2005 and soon thereafter started his own blog, www.minorleagueball.com, part of the

SB Nation ''SB Nation'' (an abbreviation for their full name ''SportsBlogs Nation'') is a sports blogging network owned by Vox Media. It was co-founded by Tyler Bleszinski, Markos Moulitsas, and Jerome Armstrong in 2005. The blog from which the network ...

Vox Media Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company based in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass ''SB Nation'' (a sports blog network founded in 2005 by ...

empire. Sickels was previously a regular contributor to the

fantasy sports A fantasy sport (also known less commonly as rotisserie or roto) is a game, often played using the Internet, where participants assemble imaginary or virtual teams composed of proxies of real players of a professional sport. These teams compete bas ...

website RotoWire.com and can still occasionally be heard on Rotowire podcasts. He hosted Down on the Farm Friday on XM Satellite radio from 2005 to 2008. Sickels writes and edits the annual ''Baseball Prospect Book'', which profiles roughly 1,000 players in baseball's minor leagues, and is only available directly from his personal website. The book is wildly popular, but some sold-out versions remain available in

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

format via Sickels' website. He also penned a 2004

biography A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or ...

of baseball Hall of Famer

Bob Feller Robert William Andrew Feller (November 3, 1918 – December 15, 2010), nicknamed "the Heater from Van Meter", "Bullet Bob", and "Rapid Robert", was an American baseball pitcher who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Clevel ...

called ''Bob Feller: Ace of the Greatest Generation.''

Other interests

Sickels has also written

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

, and has had multiple role playing books published within the Star Fleet Universe game system offshoot of

Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into vari ...

.minorleagueball.com
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References

External links

John Sickels' personal website

John Sickels' baseball blog

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sickels, John American sportswriters ESPN.com 1968 births Living people Fantasy sports Writers from Des Moines, Iowa Northwest Missouri State University alumni University of Kansas alumni American people of Palestinian descent