This week was so busy, I forgot to celebrate a milestone that passed on Monday: my three-year anniversary as an internet columnist. Here’s my first piece, from May 5, 2000, on a proposed baseball rule change. Of course, back then, I had never heard of a blog (and people like Glenn Reynolds were still completely unknown), although my columns were running on the Boston Sports Guy website, which really did all the things you would expect from a blog – a daily battery of links accompanied by snide commentary, a breezy, first-person interactive dialogue with the readers – and wound up making Bill Simmons, the site’s proprietor since the mid-90s, into one of the earliest internet-only celebrities. My location and format have changed since then (although I’ve owned the www.baseballcrank.com domain for almost the whole 3 years), moving to the outskirts of Big Media (the Providence Journal) and back. If you’re new to the site, check out the “Baseball Columns” category – while some of the stuff is dated and I’m far from getting all the old stuff loaded, there are a number of pieces there that I’d humbly submit are still worth reading.