Memories I’ll Never Forget

I spent this past summer as a beat reporter intern for the Bourne Braves of the Cape Cod Baseball League. The CCBL is the most prestigious amateur collegiate summer league in the nation and embodies the pure nature that baseball draws its roots upon — playing solely for the love of the game.

I took hosts of photos over my months on the Cape and the majority feature beautiful sunsets and landscapes that make the ballparks tourist destinations as well as baseball hot spots. Here is one such photo that I took during a late-summer game between the Bourne Braves and the Falmouth Commodores at Arnie Allen Diamond at Gav Fuller Field in Falmouth, Massachusetts. I photo-shopped the Cape Cod Baseball League logo onto my image to create a new one in hopes of better identifying in which league and where the game was being played.

 

 

[pin_widget url=”https://www.pinterest.com/pin/441775044677460141/”]

 

 

 

I first cropped my image to make it more visually appealing. The original image contained bleachers, fence and other obstructions that weren’t ideal aesthetically. By cropping the image in the way I did, not only did I remove unneeded distractions, but the slight upward movement of the edge where the grass and dirt meet helps move the audience’s eye from the logo — which I placed later — to the players and into the cotton-candy sky. There are also minimal players involved with the cropping I used. This helps highlight the image’s real importance: the eternal, poetic duel between pitcher and hitter. The cropping decision helped make the image more appealing, which in turn makes it more viral.

The decision to include the league’s logo on my photo was an easy one. Without it, the photo could have been taken anywhere. But with it entrenched in the bottom left corner, the entire image calls to a niche audience of Cape Cod Baseball League fans to interact and engage with it. People are more likely to share the image because it elicits feelings and emotions that watching a summer baseball game on Cape Cod tends to bring. Without it, regular baseball fans would have engaged regardless. But with it’s inclusion, it makes engagement more personal and rewarding and therefore more likely to happen.

When executing my marketing plan, I want to interact with influencers, friends, coworkers and players that also have fond memories of their summers on Cape Cod. Just as a large majority of professional baseball players get their start on Cape Cod, aspiring media professionals also garner experience. As working in and with the CCBL gave them their first glimpse into their passion and future careers, many hold it in high regard. By marketing my content to these other aspiring media members, I plan to maximize the engagement I’ll receive. I also want to distribute my content on different platforms and at different times to help the image’s potential be reached. Twitter will be the primary social media source used, but I will promote my content through tweeting out the link only, the picture and the link, and using different taglines on twitter as well. Hashtags are also an effective way to reach niche audiences that are sure to engage with my content. There are both Cape Cod and baseball communities that are sure to take this photo and run with it. The summer of 2015 was the best summer of my life as I spent it covering baseball by the beaches of the Cape. It deserves to be marketed as such so that it goes viral.