Hard to believe it’s been this long already, but RAB turned three years old on Saturday.  We share a birthday with Yankee farmhand Jason Hirsh, former Yankee cult hero Shane Spencer, former Yankee draft pick Donzell McDonald, Livan Hernandez, and some kid named Verlander.

A big thanks goes out to your guys, our readers. You make it all worth it, and RAB wouldn’t be where it is without you. The last year in particular has been overwhelming. Ben, Joe, and myself are all stunned by how much the site has grown in that time. Of course, when the team we cover wins the World Series, the positive vibe tends to trickle down. It was a great year all around in Yankeeland, and we’re looking forward to doing it again in 2010.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Happy Birthday to us!

So yes, I’m finally going to create a meme dictionary. Don’t worry, I’ll give it a cooler title, but that’s something to worry about later. What I’m looking for from you guys is a little help putting this thing together. Specifically, I’m looking for a) the meme, b) what it means, and c) the origin with a link (if possible). For example:

IETC: “I enjoyed this comment.” Possible variations include, but are not limited to IETCVM (I enjoyed this comment very much), IETT (I enjoyed this tweet), and IETOMQ (I enjoyed this obscure movie quote).

TWSS: “That’s what she said.” Same as the dirty old man joke.

So, leave whatever you have in the comments, and I’ll compile it all and post it in the near future. Trust me, it’s more work than you may think, so thank you in advance for your help.

Otherwise, use this as your open thread for the evening. The Rangers and Isles are playing (not each other), and Venezuela is taking on the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean Series, which you can see on MLB Network. No Yankees or Yankee farmhands are playing, but hey, it’s baseball. Enjoy the thread.

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Open Thread: An RAB meme dictionary

As we near the three-year anniversary of River Avenue Blues, I’d like to take a few moments to greet and thank everyone who has visited and supported us since our inception in February of 2007. We’ve come a long way since then. Our posts have grown greater in number and deeper in thought. Our audience has grown from few and quiet to many and loud — through not only comments, but emails, instant messages, our web form, and even in real life. For those of you have ambled by here recently, and even for those who have been here for years, this is who we are.

While this particular site launched in 2007, Ben, Mike, and I go back a bit further than that. We all started up our own baseball writing projects in the mid-00s, just because we loved writing about baseball. Sure, at times we each had aspirations of attracting a large audience, but none of us really expected it. It was more a form of catharsis, a way to deal with the day in, day out stress of the baseball season. The players get to vent that stress through physical performance. For us less athletic types, writing sometimes does the trick. It does for us, at least.

The baseball season is, thankfully, fast approaching, and changes will come with it. This seems to happen every year. A certain percentage of the audience checks out after they stop playing games, only to return six, but hopefully only five, months later, just in time for Opening Day. Some readers, intrigued by our non-stop hot stove coverage, tune out during the season, opting to enjoy the game for itself and not getting caught up in the tangle of daily analysis. We do keep many of those who discovered us during the hot stove, and that means the composition of our audience will change.

That won’t change the content. We’ll continue to write stories that interest us. Sometimes that involves a prospect. Sometimes it involves breaking down data. Sometimes it involves comparing players with various statistics. If you particularly like something, but especially if you don’t, email us and let us know. We also appreciate emails in regards to typos and other small errors. We aren’t to the point of hiring a full-time editor — hell, we don’t even really pay ourselves — so any corrections from the crowd are appreciated. If you have an issue with the data we used to analyze an issue, or a conclusion we drew from the data, that’s perfect for the comments section. It might make us think of the topic in another way, perhaps making our posts more complete in the future.

What will change, undoubtedly, between now and Opening Day is the comments section. Again, it happens all the time. It’s happened over the past year, and it will continue to morph and evolve. We have an excellent core of commenters who not only know baseball, but also know how to lighten the mood. As we get more and more comments, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor them. We want nothing more than a robust baseball discussion, but unfortunately there are others who do not. Allow me to elaborate.

Baseball incites argument. That’s good. We can all learn a lot from people whose opinions differ from our own. But, contrary to what many people think, not all opinions are created equal. The opinions which count for the most are those which are supported by evidence. As Tango likes to say, an opinion without evidence is bullshit. You can still hold said evidence-less opinion, but don’t expect it to garner much respect among our commenters.

If you hold an opinion and cannot back it up with evidence, we ask that you not act like a jackass about it. Accept it as just your opinion, with no basis in fact, and move on. There’s plenty to discuss. If you do continue to post evidence-less opinions, well, good for you. If you feel the need to do that, again, we just ask that you not act like a jackass about it. That’s the most important point, as you can see.

For the core commenters, we’re asking a bit more. By responding to jackasses, you’re legitimizing them. Over the past few weeks I’ve seen plenty of this — ashamedly, have been part of it once. It takes the focus off the baseball discussion and puts it onto the jackass. We do not want this. It generally leads to everyone acting like a jackass, and the comment thread devolves into an unreadable mass. Remember, we’re here to talk baseball, not act like tough guys on an internet message board.

As we specify in our commenting guidelines, we really appreciate you keep comments true to the topic of the post. If a conversation moves a certain way, keep it within that particular thread within the comments. Even then, we ask that it not get too far out of hand. For off-topic comments, we have an open thread every evening. We’ve also added an off-topic thread, which you can find in the navigation bar, and by clicking here.

To our readers who don’t use the comments section, we thank you every bit as much as our regular commenters. You’re welcome at any time to drop in and add to the conversation. We hope our threaded comments layout makes it easy to follow different conversations within the thread. We’re also working to make improvements on the layout, including re-adding the ability to see unread comments. Again, if you have any suggestions please contact us. We make it ridiculously easy to do so.

We’ll leave this post up overnight. Baseball will be back in the a.m. Thanks again for reading.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

State of the RAB

The idea of the pledge drive was simple. For every run the Yankees scored this year, you’d pledge some dollar amount, whether it be $0.05, $0.10, whatever. The Yankees obliged by leading the league with 915 runs scored, and most who pledged were kind enough to include their postseason runs scored as well, and some even rounded up their donation beyond that. The generosity of the RAB community never disappoints.

We raised $1,050 for The Jorge Posada Foundation in 2008, and I’m proud to announce that we raised $1,500 for Joe Torre’s Safe At Home Foundation in 2009. I rounded my pledge up just to make it nice round number again, just like last year. A screen cap of the rather bland donation confirmation page can be seen here. I included a note saying that it came “From the readers of RiverAveBlues.com,” however that apparently gets noted nowhere. Their donation setup is pretty weird; instead of making one big $1,500 donation, it was 1,500 donations of $1.00. Whatever.

Thank you again to everyone who pledged, and also to those fellow bloggers who spread the word. We greatly appreciate everyone’s help and support. We’ll surely do it again in 2010.

If you missed out on the pledge drive but want to donate, visit the Safe At Home website.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

The 2009 RAB Pledge Drive Update

The survey below is a whopping six questions long and should take you all of one minute to fill out, but it’ll be a tremendous help giving us an idea of whether or not putting an app together is worth it. You guys aren’t stupid, I’m sure you realize that if we don’t think we could made some money off it, we probably won’t go ahead with it. We’re not looking to get rich (not that we’re opposed to it), but the more we have to offset our perpetually increasing hosting costs, the better.

You won’t have to input any personal information and we wouldn’t share it anyway, as per our privacy policy. We just want to add up all the survey information and use that to determine whether or not we move forward with a mobile app. At that point perhaps we can boost our revenue and justify spending even more of our time on the site. I think that’s works to everyone’s benefit.

Take the RAB Mobile App survey.

Thanks in advance, we greatly appreciate it.

Anyway, now that that’s taken care of, use this puppy as your open thread for the night. The Devils and Nets are the only local teams in action tonight, but American Idols auditions are on and those are usually good for a laugh. Anything goes, just be nice.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Open Thread: Mobile app survey

Happy New Year everyone.

*YES did a commercial like this, we know. But it’s still hilarious.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Watching the ball drop

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Hot Stove Open Thread

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Draft Order Tracker updated

Now is as good a time as any to let our newest readers know all the different ways you can access RAB. If you’ve been around for a while, then consider this a refresher course.

RSS Feeds
Hopefully by now you’re taking advantage of the magic that is really simple syndication, or RSS. If not, that’s cool, but I recommend signing up for something like Google Reader. This site will tell you everything you need to know about using RSS feeds, but in short, you can subscribe to the feed of your favorite sites, and instead of manually visiting each one multiple times a day, the information will be brought right to you as it’s posted, all in one convienent spot.

Our main feed can be found here, but we also have a feed specifically set up for our amateur draft coverage. The main feed will bring you all of RAB’s content, the second is just for draft coverage. As you can imagine, it’s not very active between mid-August and March.

Subscribe via E-mail
If RSS feeds aren’t your cup of tea, you can get RAB sent right to your inbox. Just stick your email address in the appropriate box to the right (the one that says “Subscribe to RAB via email,” duh), and all of our content will be emailed to you as it’s posted.

Twitter
Has anything changed sports coverage in recent years as much as Twitter? Any breaking news will be posted their first, in 140 characters or less. You can use a (free!) service like Tweet Deck or Echofon to easily follow your friends, favorite sportswriters, celebrities, whoever has a Twitter account.

We have two separate Twitter feeds here. Our main feed is @RiverAveBlues, where the three of us will muse on various topics, post any breaking news, engage in playful banter with readers, stuff like that. It’s worth signing up just to read Ben’s knee-jerk reactions during the games. Our second feed is @RABfeed, which will automatically link to all of our posts as they go up. That’s pretty much all it’s there for, but it’s very useful.

If you want, you can also follow the three of us on our personal accounts: @bkabak, @joepawl, and @mikeaxisa. I can’t promise everything we tweet about will be about the Yankees, or even baseball for that matter, but you won’t regret it.

Facebook
It’s probably our least utilized social media presence, but there’s still over 850 people that are fans of RAB’s Facebook page. I’m not much of a Facebook person myself, but I recommend hitting our page up to connect with fellow Yankee fans.

Contacting Us
If for any reason you want to contact us (maybe you have a question, or a link to a cool story, etc), the best way to do so is to use our little “Submit A Tip” box. You can’t miss it, it’s just to the right of the main column. If you want to tip us off to a trade rumor that we’ve missed, or something like that, please make sure you send us a link. Otherwise it’ll only take us longer to get a thread up about it.

If you want to contact us individually, then just drop us a line. Our addresses are in the far right sidebar. I know I haven’t been the best at replying at a timely manner, but my early New Years resolution is to improve on that.

So, you got all that? There’s a ton of ways you can have RAB’s content brought right to you, but nothing quite duplicates the experience of coming to the site, reading the posts, then debating the topics with our great group of commenters.

* * *

Here’s your open thread for the night, so go ahead and talk about whatever you want. The Isles are the only local team in action, but it’s Friday night, go out and do something you’ll regret in the morning.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Open Thread: Accessing RAB

We already have a ton of ideas ranging from mundane to major overhaul that we’re going to pursue this winter, but we feel it’s important that you guys, the readers, have some input. Do you want to see more statistical analysis? What about less? More long features, or more short blurbs? What about the game threads, any ideas for improving the flow of those guys? Paginated comments perhaps? What about comment registration? Whatever you think can be done to make this place better than it already is, let us know. We’ll review and consider everything.

Leave any suggestions in the comments, otherwise use this as your open thread for the night. The Sunday night game is a good one – the Patriots at the Colts. Go Peyton. Talk about whatever you like, just make sure you follow the guidelines and be cool.

Post from: River Ave. Blues A New York Yankees blog

Open Thread: Improving RAB