Off-Season: What Do You Want?

This weekend, the 2009 season mercifully comes to a close for the Cubs. If you haven’t noticed, not many of us have had the desire to watch, let alone write about, this team down the stretch. I don’t think I’ve watched more than an inning or two at a time all month of September. Beginning Monday, our focus switches to the 2010 edition of this team and I want some feedback from you regarding where we need to head as a blog. I have few ideas that I want to run by you on topics I’d like to tackle as well as ask that you leave some ideas on what you want to read. Here’s what I have so far.

1. A month long series on the changes I’d like to see happen with the game of baseball.

This one will basically be a different change each day. My plan is to do the bulk of the writing on this, but also open it up to you guys as well as the other writers here as well. I think it will be a lot of fun and lead to some good discussion about what is right and wrong with the game today. (Planned Date: January or February)

2. Break down the team position by position

The plan for this is to take a look at what we have in the Majors and Minors and the positions as well as who might be available via free agency. (Planned Date: Mid to Late October)

3. Breakouts / Busts down on the farm

The game plan for this one is to take a look at various prospects that either had breakout years, severe declines, etc and perhaps make some commentary and, when possible, share scouting reports on them from before the season. (Planned Date: Sporadically Pre-Christmas)

4. Monthly Newsletter

This one has been on the back burner for the past 6 months, but it’s something I really want to get started with. The newsletter would be delivered via e-mail the beginning of each month. It would contain things like:

• The monthly “Lizzie” awards
• Feature articles from the site’s writers
• Interviews
• Links to popular posts from the month
• Important site news & announcments
• Monthly Trivia Question

I’d like to flesh this one out a little more and welcome more suggestions on content for this one. (Planned Date: January?)

5. 2010 Predictions for the team

I’ve been giving this one a lot of thought this past month as I read all the arguing over guys like Derrek Lee, Milton Bradley, and Jake Fox. The plan is to have a thread for various players and invite everyone to predict / comment on those players before the year starts. We’d also do this with trades and signings, etc. The goal is to have something to refer back to when we argue. =) It will give you a chance to be bold and let the site know where you stand on various players, topics, transactions, etc. (Planned Date: First off-season transaction)

That’s all I’ve got so far, but I’d love to get your feedback on this and other suggestions for this off-season. When I say that, I mean it. I want the comment section on this post to be full of good feedback. Let’s here it, even if you’re not a regular commenter.

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Ask and you shall receive

There was a request for a collection of links to all the books reviewed on the site by Cubbiedude. I went ahead and post a section in the right sidebar called CubbieDude’s Bookshelf in which I linked to all the wonderful posts he’s written.

I think I’ve gotten them all, but I may have missed some. Feel free to let me know if you find anything and I’ll be sure to update the list. Enjoy!!!

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May Giveaway: American Icon

As a way of saying thanks to the people who read this site and make it fun to do what I do, I’d like to give away a prize each month to a random reader / commenter. At the end of the month, I’ll choose a random person to receive the gift that month and get in contact with them.

This month, the giveaway is a book “American Icon: The fall of Roger Clemens and the rise of steroids in America’s pastime”. The book hasn’t been released yet, but it can be yours by simply participating.

What do I have to do? – To enter to win, all you have to do is comment on the site. The more comments you leave, the better your chance of winning, but please don’t just comment for the sake of commenting by saying “hi” or “i’m in”. The goal is for us to increase discussion on the site and really build community.

How is the winner determined? – At the end of the month, I will tally the total number of posts and randomly select one of those posts. From there, a random commenter on the post will be chosen as the winner. If the post chosen does not have a comment, a new post will be chosen. If the random comment selected is one of the writers on the site or myself, a new comment will be chosen.

Good Luck!!!My Sister’s Keeper movies Lost Voyage movie

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Housekeeping

Just a quick housekeeping note for you guys. I have been fiddling with ways to allow people to best use the comment section. I’ve settled on the quick tags plugin. For those who don’t know HTML, using this plugin should help. If you want to use the gray box (or any of the other tags)

1. Click the tag (i.e. b-quote for the grey box)
2. Paste or type your text
3. Click Close Tags
4. Resume mindless rant about why Ryan Theriot is good / bad

Finally, here is a you tube video for your enjoyment that goes with the housekeeping theme.

Wait Until Dark dvd September Dawn video Escape to Witch Mountain

• The Passion of the Christ divx
  Princess Protection Program on dvd

• Toy Love rip

Abbott and Costello Go to Mars release

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest dvdrip

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A Quick Review of Commenting

Lately we’ve had some heated discussions of the merit of Jake Fox, the ability of Ryan Theriot and the reliability of rechargeable vs. non-rechargeable batteries (not actually, but that may be a good discussion).

As is the case when people have disagreement, words are said that shouldn’t be said. For example, instead of saying “Pablo, you’re an idiot saber nerd….Ryan Theriot is a god”, a better way to handle it is to simply continue to make your case without the ridicule against the commentor.

I really like the disagreements we’ve had over the players we’ve been talking about, particularly Jake Fox. Let’s just try to get along. As far as the language, I’m trying to be more lax with that. Just keep it somewhat PG. Don’t be dropping any f-bombs and things of that nature and we should be good. In the meantime, carry on.Herbie Rides Again release

• Lucky You dvdrip The Woodsman full
  • The Good Shepherd trailer
  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial movie full

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Rotisserie Baseball

I’d like to play a Rotisserie league this year with 10 teams and a live auction draft on ESPN.

If you’re interested in playing with me, let me know why you should be the guy for the league.

I’ll provide a prize for the winner of the league. Send all entry explainations to joe@viewfromthebleachers.com

Please include the following:

Name
Age
Experience Playing Rotisserie Style
AIM name if you have one
Reason why you are the right choice to play with

The Last Unicorn trailer

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We Want You

With the addition of diaries to the site, it’s apparent that reader interaction is our priority. Our readers are good thinkers and know this team. With that being said, I wanted to make the readers aware of a spot open for game recaps. I am looking for someone to write two recaps per week to ease the burden on me, which would allow me to focus on providing more editorial coverage, breaking news, and farm focus.

If you are interesting in pursuing this opportunity, send me an e-mail to joe@viewfromthebleachers.com

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New Website Features

Check out all the new things we’ve added to the View From The Bleachers for the 2008 season.

(more…)

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Fantasy Baseball Challenge

Being the founder of two separate blogs (Rays of Light being the second), I’m constantly monitoring which site is doing better. That being said, I decided that it might be fun to see which site had the better fantasy baseball players and have come up with a contest to find out.

This year we will setup a league on MLB.com’s Fantasy Open. There are a few reasons why I chose this platform to host the league.

1. As a user of Yahoo for all of my fantasy play, I have grown frustrated with the fact that a user has to pay to have the live scoring be part of the league experience. MLB.com offers that as part of the free game.
2. I have always enjoyed Fantasy Football because the decisions for the week can be made on one day. Fantasy Baseball has always required daily lineup changes, which can become cumbersome. MLB.com’s league uses the weekly lineup setting.
3. I can’t stand how people constantly add/drop starting pitchers each day to rack up K’s and Wins. This isn’t much of a strategy if you ask me. In this setup, a team does not draft individual pitchers, but rather a full team’s staff. For example, if you draft the Cubs pitching staff, you get the whole lot of them that week. It’s similar to the system used in fantasy football with defense.

The Fantasy Challenge this year will work as follows:

• Rays of Light will be represented by Scott Caruso, the site’s editor. He will choose five of his readers to compete for the Rays of Light squad.
• View From The Bleachers will be represented by myself. I will choose five of my readers to compete for the VFTB squad.
• Each team member will manage their team with the goal of winning the league. Points will be given based on order of finish with 12 points going for first place and so on down to 1 point for last.
• At the end of the season, the standings points earned by each team will be totaled up to determine which blog won. The winning blog will see it’s readers receive a book of their choice from the prize library.
• The league will begin with a live draft on March 24th (my birthday) at 9pm EDT.

If you are interested in representing our team, send me an e-mail and we’ll discuss why you might be worthy. You can contact me at

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Get Your Season Preview

In November, I was asked to participate in the annual preview book put out by the Hardball Times. I don’t make money on if you buy the book or not, but it would be nice to know people are enjoying what I wrote. Here is the post put up over on their site detailing what the book is all about. Feel free to let me know that you are buying it and what you thought.

About a year-and-a-half ago, I spent a good number of hours trying to convince Dave Studeman that publishing book a year wasn’t enough, that in addition to The Hardball Times Annual, our annual review of the previous season, we needed to publish a second book that looked forward to the next season, and so The Hardball Times Season Preview was born.

This year’s effort includes 240 pages of team essays, player comments for almost 900 different players, projections, and other goodies. We’ve adopted Bill James’ “Team-in-a-Box” format for the essays and tried to maintain a similarly short and incisive style in the player comments.

The team chapters are written by bloggers and THT writers who follow their team every day, and the result is the kind of commentary you can’t get from just looking at the numbers or some news stories.

And if you want to look at numbers, we have plenty of those too. Chris Constancio and I spent thousands of hours revamping the THT projection system, and the results look really good. Besides projecting all the normal statistics, we’ve projected fielding performance for hitters and fantasy values for all players.

We also extended our projections three years into the future, so for each player (save for a few very old ones for whom projecting more than one year is an impossible exercise) we’ve listed their projected change in performance between 2008 and 2010. Reds fans will be heartened by those numbers.

By purchasing the Season Preview, you gain access to a spreadsheet with numbers for all the players included in the book, and many more. We’ll try to update that spreadsheet a couple times as the final free agents pick teams and spring training sorts out the depth charts.

We’ve also included a couple of essays in the back of the book. The first, by yours truly, attempts to predict career statistics and players’ odds of getting to various milestones—basically an attempt to improve on the Favorite Toy. We provide those predicted numbers for a few hundred players in the appendix, and purchasers can also download a spreadsheet containing that information for every player who appeared in the major leagues in 2007.

The second essay highlights prospective rookies, and makes for great reading for prospect watchers, fantasy players, and all those who just want to know which young players they should be watching in 2008.

And of course, since this is THT, we’ve scattered some graphics throughout the book. Tuck drew up a phenomenal series of his own predictions for the coming season in cartoon form, and we also have some graphs that will help fantasy players better understand which hitters provide value in which categories.

Since I’m afraid of leaving loose ends, I will also add that the book contains our projected standings and a player index to make it easy to track down which page your favorite player is listed on. Now I think I got it all, but honestly, there’s so much material in the Season Preview, I still might have missed something.

If this sounds all sounds like something that would interest you, please get on over to our publisher’s website, and pre-order it—the book will ship in a couple weeks (and please support THT by ordering from the publisher). If you feel like you want to learn more, go ahead and read my article previewing some of the more interesting projections in the Season Preview and see the sample pages we provided from the World Champion Red Sox’s section.

I think you’ll agree that two books are better than one.

References and Resources
In case you’re wondering who are authors are, here’s the rundown:

Jeff Sackmann of The Hardball Times
Ben Jacobs of The Hardball Times
Larry Mahnken of Replacement Level Yankees Weblog
Cork Gaines of Rays Index
John Brattain of The Hardball Times
Mike Pindelski of The Bard’s Room
Ryan Richards of Let’s Go Tribe
Brian Borawski of Tiger Blog
Bradford Doolittle of Kansas City Star
Will Young of Will’s Title is Too Long
Sean Smith of Anaheim Angels All the Way
Sal Baxamusa of The Hardball Times
Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing
Scott Lucas of The Ranger Rundown
John Beamer of Chop-n-Change
Craig Strain of FishStripes
Dave Studenmund of The Hardball Times
Jason Weitzel of Beer Leaguer
Chris Needham of Capitol Punishment
Joe Aiello of View From the Bleachers
Justin Inaz of On Baseball & the Reds
Lisa Gray of The Astros Dugout
Eric Johnson of Brew Crew Ball
Pat Lackey of Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?
Larry Borowsky of Viva El Birdos
Jim McLennan of AZ Snakepit
Brandi Griffin of Purple Row
Aaron Sapiro of Rockin’ the Ravine
Geoff Young of Ducksnorts

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Diaries: What you want to know but are afraid to ask.

What is a diary?

Diaries are the newest addition to The View From The Bleachers in response to the widely successful system piloted on the Sports Blog Network. Diaries allow the community to blog their thoughts in posts of their own on the site. Essentially it’s a blog within the blog.

Why should I care about diaries?

The addition of diaries will serve two purposes to make the site better:

1. They will increase the amount of new content on the site each day.
2. They allow you to not only have a voice, but also to hear the voice of other very intelligent fans that read the site, but aren’t currently on staff.

What do I need to be able to post a diary?

The only requirement to be able to post a diary is that you are registered as a user of the site. You can sign up by clicking the “Contribute” icon located in the right sidebar. This will take you to the sign up screen where you will choose your login and enter your e-mail address. From there, we will send you an activation e-mail for you to activate your account. Doing so will send me an e-mail saying that you registered and will send you an e-mail with your temporary password. We have it set to default to marking you as a subscriber, which means no diary privileges. When I get notified of your sign up, I’ll contact you to assure you are not a spammer. Once you reply back to me, I will list you as a contributor and you will be free to post diaries as often as you like.

How do I post a diary?

Once you’re registered and listed as a diary contributor, you will want to login using the link in the navigation box at the top of the right sidebar. Once you login, you will be taken to a dashboard that looks like this:

From there, click on the option that says “Write a Post” and enter your title and post.

Once you’re all finished and have looked over the spelling and things of that nature, it’s time to post it to the site. Because we’re in the beginning stages of diaries, all of them are subject to moderation. By clicking the submit for review button, it posts it in the moderation queue for me to review, but it doesn’t send me any notification that it’s there. The easiest way to make sure your diary is review ASAP is to click the box that says “ready to post”

By checking this box, it sends me an e-mail instantly that a post is ready for me to look at. Once I approve the post, which is just to prevent spammers, it will be linked in the sidebar in the diaries section for all to ready and comment on.

Will my diary ever see its way to the front page?

Definitely. One of the things we’re most excited about is the ability to move high quality diary posts to the front page as featured posts. Consider it an audition for the show. Who knows, you may even find an e-mail in your box inviting you to join the staff.

Are there things I should focus on in my writing?

One of the best things to remember is to write things that people will want to read. For example, posting about something that is already on the front page may not be a great idea. Remember to keep the posts free of profanity and keep it focused on baseball or sports in general. The most important thing is to have fun with it. Talk it up to your friends. Get them to sign up and let’s start growing this community.

Do diaries show up in RSS feeds?

Yes, the diary entries show up in the regular RSS feed for the site. They also have their own feed which is linked in the left sidebar.

If you have any questions, send me an e-mail:

Happy Blogging!!!!

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We’re on Facebook

I guess that means you can be our friend. If you have a Facebook account, here is a link to our profile ID: View From The Bleachers ~ Become a Fan

Also, our friend Phil Zuber caught up with Len Kasper in the latest edition of his podcast as part of Cubs Obsession. – (Source)

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Good Things Are Coming

If you haven’t noticed over the past few days, things are slightly different here at VFTB. We’ve been undergoing a bit of an internal face lift. Nucleus, the system we were using to manage the blog, was not offering us enough of the features we wanted to bring to the table. As a result, we’ve been fortunate to have a very capable webmaster move us and all of our belongings to a new content management system called Wordpress. It’s one of the most popular CMS’s around and will allow us to bring you some cool new features. Here is a rundown of some of the things I am excited about bringing you in the next days and weeks in an effort to make this more of a community of Cub fans.

Reader Diary System – If you’re familiar with Bleed Cubbie Blue and other blogs on the Sports Blog Network, you’ve probably seen that the readers have the opportunity to create user accounts and then post what are called diaries. A diary is basically a blog within a blog, and allows their readers to post content of their own which is linked in the sidebar and available for other readers to read and comment on. We’re putting the final pieces in place to allow you guys to do that as well. In the next week or so, we should have the system in place to allow you to register for an account and contribute to the site. This has me excited because I know you have good things to say, but often no avenue with which to present them. You never know, you may even be featured on the homepage or even asked to join the staff.

Improved RSS capabilities – For some, this may not make sense at all, but if you are an RSS junkie like myself, you will probably be excited about this. We’re putting together the ability for readers to subscribe to a lot more content, but in a specialized way. You will have the ability to subscribe to individual authors (i.e. Rob, Matt, etc.), comments, individual categories, etc. It should make for good times. If you have no idea what RSS is, Problogger.net has a great explanation here. Go check it out.

Better Sorting Options – If you notice now, our posts are broken down into categories, which are hyper links. When you click that category, it takes you to an archive of all posts in that category. The “General” category is currently by far the largest, as most of our old posts were lumped into that one. Moving forward, we’ll be good about specializing them into correct categories. You’ll also notice that at the base of some posts are tags, which are certain hot topics contained in the post. These are also links that will take you to all posts containing those tags. This should allow you to quickly reference a post if you wanted to use it to refer back to a comment or something of that nature.

Misc. Other Additions – The other improvements are simple. Recent posts will be linked in the sidebar to eliminate the need to scroll down. We’ve also improved our comment spam filtering system.

One of the primary reasons behind these changes had to do with the reader survey we did late in the season. Your feedback is what prompted me to seek out a way to add the things you wanted to see. Feedback is very important, so don’t ever hesitate to give it. I hope you’re pleased with the new additions. I will be keeping my eye out for bugs, but if you notice something, let us know. Also, I am currently looking for a volunteer or two or three to moderate the diaries to prevent spammers from killing it. In addition, they would be our eyes for content that was either repetitive (i.e. 5 diaries about the Cubs trading Angel Pagan) or offensive. This is a person that is on the internet consistently. If you might be interested, let me know:

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