Pass out the hats and horns, it's our birthday. Cake at Minor Leaguer's house.
Our little site is growing up. We are nine years old. The first post, welcoming people to the new site, is here. For some reason the byline says VoxMediaUser61249 now. It was written by Marc Normandin, who currently manages Over the Monster and writes for the SB Baseball mainpage. The first real story was about the trade for Lyle Overbay. The poll on the trade was very positive, 78% were happy with the trade (a total of 23 voters).
Marc didn't last long on the site. Mark W. and Slitheringslider soon took over. Then Hugo joined in 2007. Hugo was the reason I joined, I loved reading his stuff, though you often needed a dictionary and I loved the obscure song lyrics he used as post titles. Hugo took a break in 2008 and I filled in for him and I've been here since.
Over the years we've had lots of very good writers join us: JohnnyG, Jessef, Masterkembo and Woodman665. In 2011 Minor Leaguer joined and I don't know how we got along without him. ScottC joined us in Jan of 2013 and he has a whooping 439 posts to his credit, since then.
The great part about being here, for me, is reading the posts from everyone. We've been getting great posts from Nick Ashbourne, MjwW, Noah Sherman and Michael Bradburn. I learn something every day. And thanks to Bowling_Guy25 and Gerse for doing a great (if thankless job) as moderators. They wield the banhammer with grace.
If you want some stats. we have had 8103 posts on the site (I guess 8104 with this one). We've had 2009 FanPosts and 2229 FanShots. And, on a good day, we have well over 10 readers.
Ok, the last one is a joke. Last month we had 812,873, which seems like a pretty good number for the offseason.
Things have changed a fair bit. Back then the Blue Jays had someone named John Gibbons managing the team. And they were trying to remake the team, making some trades and some free agent signings. The team added Lyle Overbay, A.J. Burnett, B.J. Ryan and Troy Glaus all in that first month of BBB's life (well, Ryan was signed about a week before BBB started).
And things have changed for the site. We beat Twitter to the internet by 4 months and, of course, now we have a Twitter account and we have a Facebook page. If you don't already, we'd love you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
So thank you all for coming to read, thank you for your fan posts and comments, we wouldn't do this without you (because, you know, if you guys didn't come to the site, SB would have fired us long ago). The best part about the site is the friends I've made because of it. It's more fun now than back when I was the only one in the game threads.
Now I believe someone mentioned cake......
