Four Years

Yes, it’s been four years now that I’ve been doing this – four years ago today that my first “Baseball Crank” baseball column appeared on the internet. Wow. (Among other things, this means that I’ve been moonlighting as an internet sportswriter for more than half my career as a practicing lawyer). For those of you who are new to the site, a brief recap: I started out writing a weekly column for the Boston Sports Guy site, run by my former college classmate Bill Simmons, in May 2000. It was a great time to be writing for Bill’s site – he was just starting to really reach a national audience – and I still think that the columns I did for the BSG site are some of the best writing I’ve done. (My one disappointment was the fact that I had a huge trial in October 2000 and wasn’t able to write about the Subway Series as it was happening). Bill closed his site down a year later, moving up to a national platform at ESPN.com, where he remains to this day. I was fortunate to land a spot at the Providence Journal Online, thanks to Projo sports editor Art Martone, and I kept writing weekly columns there. (You can still access my full archive of columns from the BSG site and Projo here).
On September 11, 2001, of course, terrorists blew up my office in the World Trade Center; I wrote about the experience for Projo, which even published my column in the ‘dead tree’ paper that Sunday. After September 11, it became harder to just stick to baseball. After my mom died in August 2002, I was feeling pretty down and decided to do something new; on something of a whim, I set up a blogspot blog (also under the Baseball Crank name), and immediately got hooked, discovering that the flexibility of blogging worked much better with my work schedule and varied interests than a weekly column. Barely two weeks into blogging, I got linked by Andrew Sullivan (fifth item down, linking to this), and there was no going back. In March of 2003 I wrote my last column for Projo; in April 2003 I opened the Movable Type site here. It’s been quite a ride thus far.