Now that the new site’s been up and running a week, I have two major announcements:
The first, which I made last week over at the Projo discussion boards, is that I am ending my affiliation with the Providence Journal. I enjoyed my time writing for Projo, and I have nothing but good to say about Projo sports editor Art Martone, who offered me a spot to keep writing about baseball when Bill Simmons’ Boston Sports Guy site closed down in May of 2001. Art remains one of the voices of reason in baseball writing, and of course I’ll keep checking out his columns.
I intend to eventually load all my columns from Projo and the BSG site into the archives here, and put links to many of them up on the front page; there’s already a bunch loaded, including many of my Hall of Fame columns. I’ll still write longer column-length posts here when I have the time, but as long-time readers are aware, I’ve found it harder ever since September 11 to confine my interests to just baseball. In fact, I started writing columns, back in college, mostly as a writer on politics and world affairs (the sports columnist job on the school paper was taken already by Bill Simmons when I got there). Of course, the world has changed a lot since I was a college student writing columns calling for war with Saddam . . . if I really get ambitious some day I may break out the old WordPerfect for DOS floppies and dig up one or two of those old columns.
By the way, for those of you who are fans of my baseball writing but want to avoid the political stuff – or vice versa – you can do so by clicking on the “Categories” in the left-hand column; I believe you can actually bookmark them.
Second, this site – following the lead of successful blogs like the Volokh site, Asymmetrical Information, Oxblog, The American Scene, The Buck Stops Here, and others, will now be a group blog. While there are obviously some advantages to getting all the credit for a site yourself, this is another move that will assure more content, and more continuous content, on the site even when my work and family commitments don’t leave me time for writing (and thus avoid long silences like the one Dr. Manhattan is now enduring; come back, Doc!).
I am very pleased to introduce my first two co-bloggers, who have chosen to remain pseudonymous. I’ll leave it to them to do their introductions, but they will be writing under the names “The Mad Hibernian” and “Kiner’s Korner.” What I will say is that both are lawyers, both are Mets fans, and both are likely to bring a similar perspective to issues of war and politics to the table to ensure a consistent tone for the content at this site.