Site news time: We’ve had something of an ambiguous naming situation going on here since Day 1. The site is called River Ave. Blues and our website’s always been RiverAveBlues.com. To ease the confusion of the Ave./Avenue differences, we’ve acquired the RiverAvenueBlues.com domain name. So you can now reach the site by typing in either address in your web browser. Exciting times.

As we can see in the previous thread, not every Yankees fan is in agreement on every issue. And nor should we be. Baseball is a complex game, from the field to the front office. And so we debate over the issues.

While it seems most of us enjoy the current format of the site, we’re thinking about adding something that will expand upon our comments sections. Instead of writing a diatribe in response to someone else — and not knowing if 5 or 5,000 people will read it — wouldn’t you rather get your two cents in on the main page?

Yes, we’re thinking about opening up a guest column series. However, I want to do a preliminary check to see if there’s enough interest in it. After all, a guest column series wouldn’t be all that fun if we had the same three people submitting stuff every week. So here’s what I want to do.

If you’re interested in doing a guest spot on RAB, email me (it’s in the masthead on the left) and let me know. Pitch an idea or two if you want, too. The hope is to get an idea of how many people are interested by mid-week, and then get the contest up and running sometime next week.

Oh yeah: There’s a chance that the spam filter on my email might block out some of your emails. If you don’t hear back from me within a day or so, feel free to hit me with another one.

If anyone’s having problems accessing the site or if you’re receiving a pop-up message asking if you want to download something, please e-mail me at ben (a) riveraveblues dot com or leave a comment on this post.

If you have entered our Opening Day contest, you have until 1:05 p.m. to do so. The prize: A copy of MLB ’08 The Show for PlayStation 3. Information and contest details can be found in the contest’s original post. Get to it.

As much as we don’t like rules around here, now and then, we have to enforce some measure of control over our anarchy. With Opening Day just a few hours away, let’s take care of this bit of housekeeping right now.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen a huge increase in the level of visitors and comments to this site. As I noted yesterday, we’ve had over 1.25 million page views since the Yankees 2007 season ended. With baseball on tap, we expect this site to remain popular, and we’ll be updating just as frequently during the season as we did during the off-season, if not more frequently. We’ll have game threads on a daily basis and other special RAB events as the season unfolds.

But before we get to the fun, I want to announce the RAB Commenter Guidelines. First-time visitors and long-time readers should take a minute to read through the guidelines. If you have questions or concerns, you know where to reach us. The guidelines will be posted permanently on this page, and a link above the comment box on each post will direct you to them if you need to consult the guidelines at any point. Click through the jump to read the guidelines.

Here’s to Opening Day.

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A little while ago this evening, RAB set a new single-month record for page views and unique views. We’ve now had over 256,000 page views in March, and we want to thank all of you, our readers, for making this site so successful. Since the Yankees were bounced from the ALDS in October, we’ve had well over 1.25 million page views, and since we started RAB, we’ve had 2,043 posts and 27,474 comments (and counting). With the season set to start on Monday — and a new RAB give-away contest coming on Sunday — we’re set for a great season here just as the Yanks are set on the field. So thank you to everyone.

The three of us here at RAB try our best to make the site as fun and informative as possible, and judging by how popular it’s become, it’s safe to say that we’ve done a pretty good job. Usually we take that popularity and use it to rub our egos while wallowing in our own self-righteousness, but it’s about time we did something constructive with it.

Craniosynostosis is a birth defect characterized by the premature closure of sutures in an infant’s head, which causes an abnormally shaped skull and in severe cases, places excessive and damaging amounts of pressure on a growing child’s brain. One in every 2,000 children are affected, with males being affected three times more than females. Jorge Jr., son of Yankee great Jorge Posada, was diagnosed with craniosynostosis when he was just ten days old, and has since undergone five surgeries to the correct the condition.

The Jorge Posada Foundation was launched in 2000 with the goal of providing emotional and financial support to families with children affected by craniosynostosis, as well as to provide funding for research and create further awareness of the condition. Since it’s inception, The Jorge Posada Foundation has raised millions of dollars and provided immeasurable support to those in need, but there’s still so much more that can be done. And that’s where we come in.

This season we’re going to hold a pledge drive where readers of RAB agree to donate an amount of money (set by them) for each strikeout recorded by The Big Three. At the end of the year we’ll collect the pledges and donate all of the money to The Jorge Posada Foundation in the name of “The Readers of River Ave. Blues.” So say that Hughes, Joba and IPK combine to rack up 500 strikeouts on the season, and a reader agrees to donate five cents per strikeout, then 500 K x $0.05 = a $25 donation. That’s it, piece of cake. Any denomination is welcome, and all donations are fully tax deductible.

If you’re interested in pledging, shoot me a line at mike (at) riveraveblues (dot) com. Please put “Pledge Drive” or something to that effect in the subject line, and be sure to provide an email address that I’ll be able to contact you at for the forseeable future. I’ll keep track of the pledges throughout the season, and contact everyone when the time comes. PayPal transfers seem to work best, but we’ll also accept donations in the form of money order or personal check. Until we get a better system figured out we’re going to have to do this on the honor system, so please, serious pledges only.

Eventually we’ll get a permanent link up on the site somewhere where you can read about what we’re doing whenever you please. We’re not going to have any strict limitations on this, so if you get the urge to pledge in August for the rest of the season, that’s fine. If you want to pledge but not have your contribution exceed a set amount, that’s fine too. We’ll get it to work so that everyone wins. The more pledges the merrier, and this gives all of us another reason to root hard for The Big Three.

Jorge’s been there for the Yankees and their fans since 1995, so it’s time to be there for him. Come join us in fighting this terrible condition, and if nothing else, do it for Jorge Jr.

This post is for a competitive fantasy league run by one of my buddies. He ran this last year on another blog, and they actually had too many guys sign up at the beginning. If anyone has any questions or concerns about this, email me and I’ll get right back to you. This friend will also help to host our eventual RAB Day at the Park — he’s there every Sunday on top of the parking garage, grilling and generally acting like a loon with the rest of us.

Hello RAB bloggers, I wanted to invite everyone to the RAB fantasy league for 2008 (yahoo). I ran the fantasy league on another Yankee blog last year and we had a lot of success. I wanted to bring the league over to the best Yankee blog this year (ed note: his words, not mine). Below is some specefic information regarding the league. It will be $35 a person and for the people that join, we can decide how much the splits should be for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes. Please get back to me asap so we can move forward with the RAB league. There are already a few people that are part of RAB blogging that are going to be in the league.

What I need from everyone right now are their opinions and preferences.

1. What time is good for doing the live online draft for everyone? I think March 23rd, Sunday, at 7pm EST would be good, 1 week before the season starts. We will also have a better idea of the rosters.
2. Depending on how many people play, how would you prefer the prize money to be divided up?
3. I will pay for the league initally, ($125), but for payment from everyone, I just wanted to know how many people have paypal? I have a paypal account so you can make your payment there. Paypal will is probably also safer for the person giving money since all transactions are documented there. If you don’t have paypal, a check would be fine.
4. Since majority of the people have voted for the point system, here is an option so let me know what you think. There maybe some people that are doing this for the first time so this may seam basic to some people.
   • The categories for points can be Runs, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, Wins, Saves, K’s, ERA, and WHIP. At the end of the season, you are ranked in each of the categories. For example, if our league is 9 people, if you finished first in each category, a perfect score for 1st place would be 90(10 categories X 9 peole being ranked). Let me know if these are the categories you are okay for the league.
   • most people prefer the option to make daily roster changes, please tell me your preference (daily, weekly, 2 times a week, etc).
   • When would you like the trade dealine (7/31, 8/14?) give me a peference for a date, it doesn’t have to be the 2 I mentioned.
   • for trades to get approved, its is recommended that the league in majority has to approve a trade. This can help someone giving up and trading all his good player to a friend. With league approveable of a trade, this usually cannot happen. Let me know.
   • These are the roster positions that we can have, let me know if this format is okay. C, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI (corner infielder), MI (middle infielder), OF, OF, OF, OF, Utility, SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P, P, BN (bench), BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL. Before the draft, check player position eligibility on yahoo fantasy baseball.

Look forward to hearing from everyone,
Relaunch
parazor@yahoo.com

We’ve added a neat little feature to the RAB experience today, an Organizational Depth Chart. It runs 5 deep for the players at each position, and can always be accessed via the link up top. Everything else you need to know about it explained in the page’s intro.

Update: Pitcher listing has been shortened due to popular demand.

You know, today marks the one-year anniversary of River Ave. Blues. Well, technically it was yesterday. But we’ll just pretend that February 29th already happened and call it even, okay?

Back then, on February 20, 2007, this wasn’t quite the place to be. It was Ben, Mike, me, and a dozen or so readers from our previous endeavors. And I’ll admit, it was a little frustrating at first, seeing that no one was reading. We had all been fairly visible just a few days earlier. But we traded it all in for this.

So, as the venture capitalist who was promised the world but isn’t seeing a quick return on his heavy investment, I started to sweat a little. Yes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all those other clichés about patience and hard work. But I’d been patient, and I’d worked hard. I started doing this in mid-2005, thrilled that I got 30 people a day to read me. Mike entered the game first thing in 2006, and I’m sure he had the same rush. Ben’s been doing this longer than both of us.

Slowly, the audience started building. We were getting six, seven comments on posts. People were engaging each other with well thought-out ideas. I started to get that excited feeling again. We were talking, and not only were people listening, they were interacting. Hell, I can’t tell you how many times I took an idea from the comments and developed it into a full post. And because of this interaction and give and take, we continued to grow.

I don’t want to launch into some braggardly rundown of our traffic numbers — they’re freely available at the bottom of the right sidebar, if you’re so inclined — but suffice it to say that we have more readers that I could ever have fathomed. Some participate, some just read. (Some click our ads, which is always appreciated). But whatever it is that the readers are doing, they’re blowing my mind. Why?

Because you don’t have to read this.

This isn’t the old guard, where your choice is just among the writers in the daily papers. You can choose from dozens of outlets for your news and insights. Just check out all of the Yanks blogs listed at striketwo.net. And that’s not even all of them. I’ll go out on a limb and say you can get a reasonable level of coverage from at least 10 different Yankees blogs. Yet, for some reason, you come back here. And I can’t begin to tell you how cool a feeling that is.

Honestly, I wouldn’t want to do it the other way. Throughout college, I thought I wanted to be a sports journalist. What better profession could there be, I thought. You get to watch and write about sports.

Ah, to be young and naive again. Little did I realize at the time what being a beat reporter meant. Why would I want to hang around a bunch of people who clearly didn’t want me there? It was around the time I started asking that question that I started to think that there could be another way.

Of course, I had missed the boat by a few years. Things had been moving another way. Baseball blogs were a trend long before I jumped into the game. I’m just glad I realized the potential of this platform, and didn’t try to shun it as so many in the mainstream media have.

So we are here today to celebrate a year of working with you guys to create this community that I think is the best Yankees-related one on the web. We are here to celebrate open discourse and the exchange of ideas. Yes, we take stands on certain issues, but we’re always open to an debate — just as long as you’ve got your argument straight. Anyone who’s gotten into it in the comments can tell you, it can be a hell of a lot of fun.

We’re here today to celebrate many things. But most of all, we are here to celebrate our independence.