With the Winter Meetings wrapping up today, I just wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who has stopped by over the last days. On Monday, we set a new RAB record with a hair under 30,000 page views; on Tuesday, we topped that record and hit 34,000; on Wednesday, we blew past Tuesday’s total to end the day with over 42,000 page views. In other words, with Mike and Joe in Vegas covering the meetings and my running the wires in New York, we’ve pulled in over 108,000 page views in three days.
On a similar vein, Rob Neyer penned an interesting piece on his acceptance into the BBWAA. He’s certainly a bit ambivalent about inclusion, and one of his passages strikes a chord:
when I was hired to write for ESPN’s Web site in 1996, nobody told me to respect my elders. So I didn’t. If I thought Tracy Ringolsby was writing foolishly, I said so. If I thought Tom Verducci had crossed the line from intelligent analysis (of which he’s highly capable) into subjective dim-wittedness, I said so. And usually not with any surplus of grace. I believed then (and believe now) that my job, my responsibility, is to entertain and to educate, and that “not ruffling feathers” falls way, way down on the list somewhere.
That gets at the root of what we do. Yes, we’re fans covering our favorite team. But at the same time, we don’t give the Yanks and the papers that cover them a free pass. I cover the stadium issue quasi-fanatically because there’s been an utter lack of skeptical and accurate reporting. Joe takes issue with the New York Post because they more than push that line Neyer mentions. Mike delves into the minors because few others do. We like to hope that we bring something new and unique to the table, and I guess we’re doing something right.
So thank you to the regulars and thank you to the new folks who have stopped by. We’ll be here all winter and into the season as well. Make sure you come back.
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