Happy Birthday to Us

We are 15 years old today. I remember being 15 (this is where my kids start talking about how I avoided the dinosaurs on my way to school).

Since our birth, the Jays are 1157-1171. A good 2021 season, and we could be .500 (presuming we have a 2021 season that goes more than 50 games).

Why start a baseball blog in the middle of winter? I’m guessing that SB Nation wanted to have all the MLB teams covered. Let me tell you, it isn’t much fun trying to write about baseball in the winter, so I feel for the guys trying to get the site off the ground in December.

The first post, welcoming people to the new site, is here. For some reason, the byline says VoxMediaUser61249 now. Marc Normandin wrote it. Mark ran Beyond the Boxscore and has written for SB’s main page and FanGraphs (and other places) since leaving us. Part of the intro post:

For those who have no idea who I am (lets see...all but 3 of you) I write for Beyond the Box Score (an SB Nation sister site) and for Baseball Digest Daily. The Jays are a team I enjoy watching greatly, and I am excited for their future thanks to a strong farm system and extra money to pump into free agents. My favorite Blue Jay is without a doubt Roy Halladay...I think Roy is the reason I love mlb.tv to be honest. My second favorite Blue Jay just joined the team tonight. Lyle Overbay is one of my favorite players in the league, so it is nice that he joined up with the Jays. I’ll have my thoughts on that in another post though.

A few quick thoughts of mine on the Jays: I love Orlando Hudson. Russ Adams is better than he has shown. Aaron Hill may be very good. Roy Halladay is the best pitcher in the American League, and possibly in baseball if Roger Clemens is done playing. The Jays bullpen is young and will get better with aging. Dustin McGowan will be an ace pitcher someday to compliment Roy Halladay. I trust J.P. Ricciardi, even if he did spend money pretty freely lately. If there is anything else anyone would like to know, feel free to ask me via comment! Once again, welcome to Bluebird Banter!

The first real post was about the trade for Lyle Overbay. The poll on the trade was very positive. 78% were happy with the transaction (a total of 23 voters).

Marc didn’t last long on the site. He would go off to write for Over the Monster. Mark W. and Slitheringslider soon took over. Then Hugo joined in 2007. Hugo was the reason I joined, he was always fun to read, and I loved the obscure song lyrics he used as post titles. Through his titles, I found a lot of great music that I likely would have never heard. Hugo took a break in 2008, and I filled in for him. I’ve been here since. A couple of months later, Hugo came back, and we ran the site together until his real life job got in the way.

Over the years, we’ve had many excellent writers join us: JohnnyG, Jessef, masterkembo and Woodman665 (Jasper Bosman) joined in soon after I started. In 2011 Minor Leaguer joined. Scott C. joined us in Jan of 2013. We’ve also had posts from Nick Ashbourne, Jared Book, Michael Bradburn, Gerse, Damaso’s Burnt Shirt, TFSML, Jared Macdonald, Noah Sherman, Mike Hannah, Kevin Papetti, Sean Herman, eelliott29, Jake Sinclair, Mark Colley, Cole Shelton, dexfarkin, and Martin Barratt. I know I’m missing some, I apologize to any I have missed.

Matt W started doing posts for us in March of 2014, and now it is hard to imagine the place without him. Matt Gross came to us in the Troy Tulowitzki trade. Kate joined us a couple of years ago, and I don’t know how we got by without her. Erik.T has given us many great posts over the last few years. Expo45 and Siefert have also chipped in with several posts.

We can always use more writers. If you would like to play in our sandbox, send me an email.

If you want some stats, we have had 15,602 (plus or minus a couple) posts on the site (not counting GameThreads). We’ve had 2694 FanPosts (we can always use more).

I’m coming up on 13 years on the site (funny, it seems like April was 13 years ago). I got thrown into the deep end. On my first day as manager, people from Lookout Landing crashed the GameThread. We had several times the usual number of comments in the thread (though still less than what we get for most games now). The odd one should have been banned, but no one told me where the ban button was. I have since found it. I’ve used it once this past year.

I’ve told the story of how my first couple of weeks went a few times, but I like it, so I’m going to again. When I started, we were just running GameThreads (but we would put all the day’s news in the post). Near the end of my first GameThread, the nice fellow that watched over the baseball sites for SB sent me a note saying ‘we do recaps after games’. I said there have never been recaps on the site before. He said, ‘we do recaps after games’. So I did a recap.

A couple of days later, he sent me a note saying ‘we do a morning post each day.’ Again I suggested that this never happened on the site before. He said, ‘we do a morning post each day’ (we had a great relationship). So I started doing morning posts.

A week or so later, I got a note saying (you guessed it) ‘an afternoon post would be a good idea.’ I may have said some words that we don’t use on the site.

The tl/dr.....I went from rarely writing anything to writing four posts a day within two weeks.

Thankfully we had Jose Bautista, who was good for at least one post a day.

Thank you 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.