Woohoo! Let the world know. 400 blog entries! Where are the fireworks? Why didn't the President call to congratulate? Where is the AP story on the news wire? Come on! The Fan reaches 400 posts! That's a lot of words, people!
It's been fun. When this blog started, Clemens hadn't reached 300 wins yet. The Fan was still lauding Barry Bonds's career. Rickey Henderson was looking for a job. Oh yeah...he still is. The Fan was writing in the first person. Who WAS that guy?
Apparently, the Fan wrote 231 posts that first year. Life sorta got in the way after that and there were some lean years. Maybe those sports writers that the Fan envies should get more respect for doing it for so long and so consistently. Well, yeah, they get paid for it and us lowly bloggers have day jobs and type these things with bleary eyes when we should be sleeping. Maybe that's what happened during those lost years, the Fan just decided to sleep more.
But the itch came back regularly and a furtive startup would happen. The Fan would announce that he was back! He would let sportsblogs.org know he was back in business. But it would fizzle after a few posts. Well, this time the Fan is back for good, doggonit. There have been 33 posts this year in just 23 days. What? Is he nuts!? And that was after 24 posts in December. So these two months beat all of 2007's post count. Pitiful.
But it looks like the Fan has gone off the deep end. He checks his sitemeter everyday to see how many people showed up. He is giddy after someone leaves a comment, even if it is only his buddy, Josh, again. After all, the Fan didn't know Josh before this blog, so he counts, right? But it's true. The Fan has gone over the top. His single goal in life is to get to the first page on Sportsblogs.org (there, they've been mentioned twice! Kickbacks are expected). Right now the Fan is consistently on the nine or tenth page of the list of blogs on that site (which is based on click throughs). Grrrr....I'll bury you, Sox Blog and Bleed Cubbie Blue. Enjoy your stay at the top, man, because the Fan is coming. Of course, the Fan could cheat. If you go to the list on Sports Blogs and continue to click the "View Blog" link on your own blog, it will open up from that link and your count will go up by one. The Fan is just Sicilian enough to not do that because surely, somebody is watching for that.
The dream has overtaken reality. The dream is to be mentioned in Neyer's "Wednesday Wangdoodles" or to be like Big League Stew and go from obscure blog to a Yahoo regular. That's the dream, Baby! For now, it's at least good that Josh likes to show up often and some gal named Goooood girl thinks this blog is very good. Small steps, my friend, small steps.
The thing is, the Fan loves to write. It's what Josh and the Fan share. And writers (or would be writers) are always encouraged to write about what they are passionate about. Baseball fits. So baseball it is. Of course, the Fan is also passionate about gas-guzzling SUVs and the terrible commercials that show them creaming the environment for the heck of it. But that blog only lasted five posts.
Baseball is different. It's in the blood. It's deep, man...really deep. Okay, you're getting scared and will never come back. Apologies. We'll try a little more tranquility. For those of you who have read more than one of the 400 posts, thanks. Hope you stick around. It will be fun. For those of you who are reading this post as your first time ever at the Fandome, please don't be scared away by this giddy little trifle. Read a few posts and see what you think.
And hey, to celebrate 400 posts, if someone comments on this very post (except for you, Josh, because you've already been mentioned), the Fan promises that your name will somehow be incorporated 400 times in the text of the 401st post.
Let's enjoy this ride together, shall we? And to see how this blog has evolved from the beginning, this post will end with a copy/paste job of one of the very first posts. Enjoy:
In one of the great headlines of all time that would make Mickey Spillane proud, ESPN.com crows: "Billionaire Broad confirms interest in buying Dodgers." Broad, of course, is referring to Eli Broad, the Los Angeles dynamo last heard from when he tried to bring an NFL franchise back to LA. I'm not sure that letting a Broad run things is going to restore this franchise to its former glory days of Alston and then Lasorda and the proud Dodger blue. The last great Dodger headline was a while back when a small article indicated that "Monday will be out Tuesday." Monday was Rick Monday, the centerfielder that played for the Dodgers in the late 70's and early to mid 80's. Another great thing about ESPN.com is that you can look at the statistics of former MLB players. A lot of sites offer that, but ESPN has a really cool feature where under each stat, the player is ranked in that stat all time. For example, you can find out that Rick Monday ranks 160th all time in home runs but only 407th in career RBI. Isn't that cool information? Okay, let's try a few of my personal favorites: Bobby Murcer hit 252 homers to place him 141st on the list or 19 in front of Rich Monday. But Murcer ended up with 1043 RBI which places him 188th all time and dozens ahead of Monday. The day Murcer was traded to the Giants for Bobby Bonds was one of the most shocking and sad days of my life. To this day, I can still do Murcer's stance at the plate. I remember going to Yankee Stadium for opening day in 1969--Murcer's first full year. Murcer wore number 2 and a player named Jerry Kenney wore number 1. Since the Yanks were so bad, they needed a gimmick and Kenney (#1) batted first and Murcer (#2) batted second. In this memorable opening game, the visiting team didn't score and Kenney and Murcer hit back to back solo homers. Murcer went on to hit 25 more home runs that year but Kenney hit only one more. A year later, Kenney hit below the Mendoza line (.194) in 404 at bats and was out of baseball a few years later. Anyway...the day Murcer was traded was terrible. He was a victim of those horrible years when the Yanks had to play at Shea while Yankee Stadium was being rebuilt. At Yankee Stadium, Murcer averaged 27 homers a year. The first year at Shea, his numbers tumbled to 22 and the following year 11. He was then traded to the Giants and hit 34 homers in two years in the cold and wind of Candlestick Park. Murcer played two years for the Cubbies before coming back to the Yankees as a sentimental favorite in their glory years with Munson and Reggie Jackson. Murcer did have a decent career and in one nine year stretch averaged 90 RBI a year. Hmm...Bobby Bonds...72nd all time in homers with 332 and eighth all time in strikeouts with 1757 (in 14 years!). I bet you didn't know that! His son Barry Bonds has more runs scored in his sixteen years than his dad had strikeouts. In two more seasons, Barry has five hundred less strikeouts than his dad did. Okay, one more stat peek and I'll stop: Fritz Peterson. Fritz was a pretty good pitcher for the Yankees through their truly awful years of 1966 (two years after their last pennant of the 60's) and 1976 (two years before their first pennant since 1964!). They came in last or next to last for most of those years. Despite that, Fritz ended his career 133 - 131 with a 3.30 ERA. Not bad! Of course, he'll forever be known as one half of the famous Yankee scandal of wife swapping. He and a fellow pitcher named Mike Kekich (39-51 lifetime) decided to switch wives in mid-season. It must have been natural for Peterson's ex-wife to state that Kekich came in out of the bullpen. It was quite the fiasco at the time. I don't believe there was a happily-ever-after. I think the Kedich-Peterson duo worked out but the Peterson-Kekich pairing fizzled out faster than Fernando Valenzuela's fastball. Well, this column meandered all over the place. That's okay, if you discover ESPN.com's stat collection with the lifetime rankings, it will have been worth it.
Hey, the Fan was pretty good, even back then. A little rambly, but not bad. See you tomorrow.
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