Ducksnorts

We celebrate two anniversaries at Ducksnorts — one for when the site launched in 1997 and another for when the blog launched in 2001. Today marks the five year anniversary of the blog, and I thought since a lot of folks haven’t been here from the beginning, maybe now would be a good time to bust out a brief history of Ducksnorts.

Scratch the Self-Publishing Itch

In the early-’90s I’d made my first venture into the world of self-publishing with a humble literary zine called nerve (complete with affected all lowercase spelling). We had a small but loyal following, with subscribers and contributors all over the country. People sent poems, stories, essays, artwork, and the like, and four times a year I published the ones I thought were best. Over the 2 1/2 - 3 years of nerve’s existence, thanks to word of mouth and a listing in Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, we ran some excellent pieces by some surprisingly big names.

It was a labor of love, but eventually, due to printing and mailing costs, the overhead became too much for one person of modest means. We had a great ride, however, and I learned a lot from the experience. One of the things I’d learned about was the World Wide Web. Just before nerve said goodbye, I built a rudimentary web site for it on GNN; I didn’t know much about the web, but in minutes I’d created something that could be seen around the globe — at least in theory — and I was hooked.

Message Boards and Ugly Web Sites

Meantime, GNN was swallowed up by AOL and I discovered their STATS message boards, which I frequented and contributed to as much as possible. After a short time, I found myself wanting/needing a larger audience and so I built the hideously designed Geoff Young’s Baseball Pages. This consisted of things like a directory of “minor league teams and the newspapers that cover them” (I know this seems quaint now, but such things didn’t exist back then), a web page for one of my Scoresheet Baseball leagues, and a “collection of general baseball articles” I’d written called Ducksnorts in honor of a humorous term I’d heard on a WGN broadcast.

Blogs didn’t exist at this time, or if they did, they certainly weren’t called blogs. The articles I wrote ran the gamut from profiles of Padres prospects (some of which were more accurate than others), to comparisons of Andruw Jones and Barry Bonds, to coverage of the California/Carolina League All-Star Game held at Lake Elsinore in 1999, to — well, you get the idea.

Basically I would write whenever the spirit moved me, which was about once a month or so. Even though publishing on the web was much easier and cheaper than traditional print publishing, the tools that existed in the late-’90s were nowhere near as sophisticated as what we have today, and it was still something of an ordeal to build and maintain a web site. (For example, updating the blogroll involved writing and executing search and replace routines across hundreds of static pages and then uploading those files manually via FTP.)

Then at some point I remember reading about blogs in a newspaper article. I checked out some of the sites they listed and thought, if these guys can do it, then so can I.

And I did.

A Blog Is Born — And Grows

I started writing almost daily on June 12, 2001, with a rant about ESPN’s new center field camera angle. Subsequent entries saw me talk about the Padres, because I watched them fairly often, but I talked about other stuff as well. Remember: There were maybe a dozen or so baseball blogs in existence at the time and all could be read in one sitting. Niche baseball blogs weren’t even yet a twinkle in some Apache server’s eye, so pretty much anything went in terms of content.

Later in 2001, I redesigned Ducksnorts as a class project while studying under Thomas Powell at UCSD. There’s a lot that I would do differently now, but I take some pride in the fact that this design still holds up fairly well even after so many years.

The blogging and redesign project ended up opening doors for me that I could not have imagined. I started writing for Baseball Think Factory and also launched a career as a web developer/project manager (to this day, Ducksnorts remains on my professional resume). Later I was approached by media outlets to discuss the blogging phenomenon, and other organizations extended opportunities for me to do more on the baseball writing front.

For various reasons, I turned down those other opportunities, but in March 2005, Ducksnorts moved to All-Baseball.com, where we resided for a year. We gained an even greater following there and I got up to speed on all the latest blogging tools. I had the chance to interview some fascinating folks in the world of baseball, discuss the Padres with many devoted fans, and even found myself doing radio and television appearances. It was a great experience, but after a year, I found that I missed running the whole show and returned Ducksnorts to its indy roots.

This has turned out to be a good move. I’ve enjoyed developing my web skills again, and recently I’ve started doing some blog consulting work for people who are getting into the world of blogging, which is very exciting for me.

Built for the Future

The other exciting development in all this is the proliferation of baseball blogs. It’s no longer possible to read all of them in one sitting, but with so many now to choose from, we all win. Sure, there’s a lot of garbage out there, but there also is some amazing work being done by people who just a few years ago would not have had a way to make their voices heard. From a reader’s standpoint, this means better information is available, and from a writer’s standpoint, this means we all have to take our games to an even higher level.

I cannot begin to tell you how thrilled I am to see the likes of San Diego Spotlight, Gaslamp Ball, and Friar Faithful producing solid content that we all can enjoy. The San Diego Padres deserve quality coverage as much as do many other, more high-profile clubs, and the presence of each one of these sites pushes me even harder, which again means we all win.

Five years is a long time in the world of blogging, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. Assuming folks are still around to read Ducksnorts, I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. Thanks to all of you for helping to make this site a great place to hang out and talk Padres baseball. I couldn’t have done it without you. Here’s to another five years.

Go Padres!

Picking up where last year's version left off, the Ducksnorts 2008 Baseball Annual provides in-depth analysis of and commentary on the San Diego Padres. Get your copy today.

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