Blogging the San Diego Padres… established 1997

Yep, we’ve been here 10 years. That’s, like, 70 in Internet years. I was going to create a snazzy badge to commemorate the event, but what follows will be plenty self-indulgent on its own. Come, follow me…

Old Incarnations

I can’t find any versions earlier than 2000 (I probably have a few on a floppy somewhere, but I don’t have any machines currently in operation that can read a floppy). Anyway, here’s what’s still out there:

• Geocities (2000). This is me teaching myself how to build web pages in the mid- to late-’90s. Love the green background. Before Geocities, we were on AOL.
• geoffreynyoung.com (July 2001). You always remember your first domain. Especially when it’s your name. Unless, of course, you forget your name, which sucks.
• Ducksnorts.com (July 2002). The original tagline — “One fan’s take on the grand ol’ game of baseball” — seems quaint now. Remember that there weren’t really any baseball blogs back then. That’s why there’s an explanation of what a “weblog” is right up front. It’s not because I thought people were idiots or anything.
• Ducksnorts.com (February 2003). I’m especially partial to this version. I did the redesign as part of a class project. That class helped me land a job as a web developer. I didn’t use WordPress or any other automated tools here. I hand coded every line of the site in Crimson Editor (which I still use today for a lot of things) and FTP’d all the pages. If I needed to update a link in the sidebar, I used search and replace routines (hooray for regular expressions!) and re-uploaded the entire site via FTP. Always test your search and replace routines.
• Ducksnorts.com (January 2005). Shiny new masthead. The shot of Petco Park is from my wife’s old office.
• All-Baseball.com (January 2006). This is when I “sold out” and joined a network. All-Baseball.com was absorbed by Most Valuable Network shortly after I joined. I learned a lot about publishing software and the potential power of blogging. With slick new tools, we were able to add a great deal of interactivity. It’s easy to forget now that for years, we didn’t have comments at Ducksnorts. What a difference that made!

Old Entries

These aren’t necessarily the best of what’s appeared here (like I could judge that anyway), but they give us at least some idea of where we’ve been over the years:

• Be Careful What You Wish For (September 1997). The obligatory “first stab” at writing about baseball for an audience. I’m not particuarly proud of this one beyond the fact that it represented the beginning of something that has turned out to be pretty cool.
• Padres Farm Report: Mike Darr/Gary Matthews (May 1998). I compared Matthews to Steve Finley, Quinton McCracken, Devon White, and Brian McRae. I really wish that at least one of those guys had ended up in his top 10 comps at Baseball-Reference. I compared Darr to Todd Hollandsworth, who shows up at #2 on Matthews’ list; do I get any credit for that? Nah, I didn’t think so.
• California/Carolina League All-Star Game (July 1999). Wow, I’d completely forgotten that Marcus Giles played in this game. I also liked Kory DeHaan when he was still in the Pirates organization. Kip Wells? Mike Gonzalez? I feel old.
• Distant Early Warning: Rookie Ball Hitters (February 2000). I used to write for an outfit called Top Prospect Alert. Here I am, getting excited about Rookie Ball hitters. Some of them actually panned out to one degree or another: Josh Hamilton, Wilson Betemit, Carl Crawford, Wily Mo Pena, Hank Blalock, Ben Broussard, Alexis Rios. Ouch, Vince Faison. Did I really compare him to Kenny Lofton? Yes, I’m afraid I did.
• Thoughts on the College World Series (June 2001). This was the inaugural blog entry. I don’t think I called it “blog” back then; pretty sure it was still “weblog.” Again, I wasn’t just covering the Padres. There were, seriously, at most two dozen baseball blogs at the time, and I don’t believe any of them were specific to a single team. Then again, maybe they were; it’s hard to remember.
• Bozied, Barfield, and Other Prospects (April 2002).
  Brian Lawrence? Deivi Cruz? Tom Lampkin? Sean Burroughs? Kevin Jarvis? Maybe things were better on the farm: Ben Howard? Bernie Castro? Darren Blakely? Ben Johnson? Eric Cyr? Hey, there’s Xavier Nady and Josh Barfield. Whoa, there’s Justin Germano.
• White Stripes, Web Sites, a Little Bit of Baseball (July 2003). I used to play in a band. I used to talk about that here every once in a while, maybe to make it seem like I had a life or whatever. Anyway, there were, like, five people reading my stuff back then so I didn’t mind wasting time so much back then.
• Bittersweet (October 2004). From the entry:
  

  The Friars made a lot of improvements in 2004, but there are a lot of questions going into next season. Will David Wells return and if not, who will replace him in the rotation? Can Adam Eaton and Sean Burroughs take their games to the next level? Which of the sluggers who can’t really play the field will be back, and what do the Padres do with Xavier Nady if the answer is both? What do they do with Nady anyway?

• Fun with Numbers: Jake Peavy (February 2005). Again, quoting myself:
  

  Assuming offensive levels stay about the same, Peavy’s worst case ERA is about 4.00 or so. I’ve seen the reports that suggest Peavy was lucky last year, but I’ll set the over-under for 2005 at 2.70. It’s aggressive, but I don’t think he’ll slip as far as some folks might expect.

  For the record, Peavy’s ERA in 2005 was 2.88. I point this out not to make myself sound smarter than I actually am, but because I usually end up looking like a real idiot when I make these sorts of predictions.

• World Baseball Classic Recap: Semifinals (March 2006). This remains one of my favorite moments at Petco Park. Also, I miss Aki. Not enough to give back Adrian Gonzalez and Chris Young, of course, but still…
• Cooperstown Road Trip Photos (August 2007). I will never forget my drive to Cooperstown. Thank you for being a part of it.

And on that note, thanks for being a part of Ducksnorts, period. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: without you, this thing doesn’t happen.

Rock on…