Will Lingo -- Baseball America

By Allen Etzler
Published in Sports on July 17, 2014 1:48 PM

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aetzler@newsargus.com

Will Lingo recently returned to Goldsboro to visit his mother.

While driving around his hometown, he stopped by the house he grew up in and noticed that minor league outfielder John Wooten lives there.

That's when the irony hit him. Lingo can't escape baseball no matter where he goes.

Scattered across his desk are books, magazines, flip guides and loose pieces of paper -- statistics and scouting reports for more than 10,000 baseball prospects over the past 20 years. Lingo is lucky he loves what he does.

"Things are always changing," said Lingo, director of editorial operations at Baseball America, a nationally-renowned magazine widely regarded as the top source for information on prospects in baseball.

"It's always something new and the people make it fun."

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Allan Simpson founded Baseball America in 1981 in British Columbia. He operated out his garage for a year before selling the company to former Durham Bulls owner Miles Wolff.

After years of expansion, the headquarters wound up in what looks like the small corner of an office building owned by Canon -- the office equipment company. But after walking into the building, you realize it's much bigger than just a corner office.

It's a haven for the baseball enthusiast.

A few staff members stand by some empty cubicles and engage in a water cooler discussion about what the Atlanta Braves should do at the trade deadline to boost their offense.

Enlarged magazine covers are plastered across the walls featuring the faces of players who made history before they made history. The stars of yesterday -- Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones -- are joined by today's current stars Stephen Strasburg and Mike Trout.

The stars of tomorrow, whoever they may be, are on the walls somewhere.

"We've done pretty good (getting them right)," Lingo said. "We've had a few misses."

One miss he referred to is Mark Prior, the former Cubs pitcher who seemed destined for greatness before his career fizzled out with injuries.

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Lingo has been around for much of the ride and seen plenty of the faces on those magazines play when they were prospects. He started as an assistant with Baseball America in 1994, and covered the minor and independent leagues.

Then he was primarily a writer.

"Then I just started getting more and more responsibility." he said as he reflected on how he reached this point.

Twenty years later he's the man in charge of overseeing the final products and coming up with some of the big ideas to expand Baseball America. Some of Lingo's new projects include a digital-only midseason prospect update for each team, and a Hall of Fame Commemorative booklet featuring articles published by the magazine when this year's Major League Baseball inductees were just minor leaguers hoping for a shot in "The Show."

They also print a Hall of Fame Almanac and handbook featuring the top 30 prospects in each organization that even some coaches and scouts refer to.

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It's probably safe to say Lingo, a 1985 graduate of Goldsboro High, has done pretty well for a guy who didn't think he wanted to cover the sport he loved.

He went on to University of North Carolina where he worked at The Daily Tar Heel on the city desk. He continued city-desk coverage -- cops and courts reporting -- during his five-year tenure with the Winston-Salem Journal upon graduation from UNC.

Lingo intentionally stayed away from sports.

"I was nervous because I thought it might take the fun out of it," Lingo said. "I thought it would become more like a job."

But after accepting the job at Baseball America, Lingo quickly found the newsroom was filled with people who merged a passion for reporting with a passion for baseball. Working with people who share the same zest has kept Lingo around for two decades.

"It's this rare blend of reporters and baseball enthusiasts, and we all have a passion for what we do," Lingo said. "We all really like baseball. We all like what we do."