As Batter's Box Entry #1000 approaches, we decided to take an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back. Those of you who abhor such shamelessness should click the "Back" button immediately.


Craig writes:

When Jordan first asked me to join him on Batter's Box last December, I knew he and Kent only from their frequent and high-quality posts on Baseball Primer. I accepted with alacrity. (Does anyone ever do anything with alacrity except accepting, I wonder?) As I noted in my original e-mail to those guys, I had intended to start a blog for myself, but didn't have the energy, and joining a ready-made site seemed like a perfect replacement. Batter's Box had had a couple thousand hits, and was a couple of months old. It looked and felt like a "blog".

Within a week, Kent's masterful piece on Pete Rose wound up in my inbox. It's still the best thing I've ever seen on the implications of Rose's return, and it made me think "wow, something good is going to happen with this blog."

Little did I know that we were going to wind up, less than a year later, as far from a "blog" as it is possible to get, without falling over. We have a lively site, Toronto-centric but not exclusively. We are delivering the best baseball interviews in the country. We have an enthusiastic readership and "postership" -- in fact, we've become a baseball-lovin' community. We run the gamut of baseball from yesterday's game reports to ancient history, and from number-crunching to elegiac praise of Roy Halladay's two-seam fastball. And on top of it all, I have made two good friends out of guys I didn't know.

In terms of baseball websites in Canada, I'll borrow a famous metaphor from Rube Foster... We Are The Ship; All Else The Sea. All of this is thanks to our readers; but if we do something that keeps the readers coming back, it's all thanks to the leadership and hard work of Kent (it's easy to be fooled by the Kenny Rogers thing he's got goin' on... but this guy not only is wise, he's a visionary). I feel privileged to freeload off him and hog his glory.

Jordan writes:

Craig is, as usual, being far too modest. Kent and I had zeroed in on him very early as the natural third member of the Batter's Box team, and asking him to come on board was as difficult as asking Dan Shulman if he'd like to be anointed Blue Jays Broadcaster for Life.

But it's Kent that we're here to talk about, and the Blue Jays Website he created. Batter's Box had its genesis at Baseball Therapy, Kent's one-man blog at http://members.rogers.com/hinske11/. If you want to see examples of what he did on his own, go back to the BB archives and read posts #1-30 or so, mostly from last year's World Series. The tremendous quality of both the writing and the analysis just leaps out at you, as they did whenever I read one of Kent's posts at Baseball Primer. I'm an editor in the real world, and an extraordinarily tough evaluator of writing. Kent's prose is outstanding: very few people who write about baseball have the ability to present insightful commentary in words that just leap off the screen and take on a life of their own. "Vibrant" is the word that keeps coming to mind; it's an actual pleasure to read his work. That Kent isn't a writer by trade is one of those small shocking things in life, like finding out that your colleague at the office plays Olympic-level hockey down at the community centre.

But if he was "only" a writer, Kent's contribution to Jays insight on the Internet would be comparable to, well, mine. Happily, Kent is also a technical whiz, an Internet devotee, and as Craig accurately says, a visionary -- one of those people gifted with the ability to identify an absence and how to fill it. In this case, he saw that an online community for Blue Jays fans could be created and built from the ground up, so long as its architects stuck to a few ground rules: intelligence, integrity, dedication and love of the game. And work, lots of hard work, the vast majority of which has been his from Day One. Kent has taken care of virtually all the technical arrangements for Batter's Box, all the behind-the-scenes magic that you and I take for granted as we merrily post our musings day after day. I've told Kent before that calling me the "GM" of the site is a pleasant joke: he truly is the general manager of Batter's Box, in every sense that matters.

Batter's Box was essentially "born" late last October when I posted my first contribution to the site, making it a multi-author zone; Craig joined us soon afterwards, as eventually did the rest of the ZLC. But I guarantee you that on that day, we never, ever thought that less than one year later, the needle would be pushing past 180,000 visitors, that we would have feature-length interviews with JP Ricciardi, Keith Law and the entire Blue Jays coaching staff, and that we would be mentioned on radio and TV sportscasts. And I, for one, never foresaw what BB would become: a place where smart, informed, passionate fans of the Toronto Blue Jays would come, one after another, to share their thoughts, criticisms, compliments and experiences of this reborn organization. It has really become a community, one in which the whole exceeds its parts. And it's a community with a difference: invariably, the dialogue is respectful, considered and insightful, with less static and white noise than virtually any other baseball Website I've come across. And though I didn't see any of this coming, I think that somehow Kent did, and he deserves the full credit for it.

There's no telling what will happen next with Batter's Box: many authors will move on eventually, and new ones will take their place, dedicated I hope to the same principles that have brought us thus far. The three original Cultists all agree that the site is bigger than any of us. Hey, who am I kidding? Bigger than any of us except for Kent Williams. When he e-mailed me a year ago to invite me to post on his new blog, I was flattered and honoured; today, I still am. Thanks for asking me to be part of this amazing experience, Kent -- and happy 1,000th post.

Dave writes:

I am (I believe) the second-oldest of the ZLC (next to Kent, who predates the formation of many of the earth's leading mountain ranges :-)), and I have been discussing/arguing/ranting about Blue Jays baseball on the Internet since the mid-1980's. I can honestly say that, in all this time, I have never been in a more pleasant or more intelligent online environment than the Batter's Box. The quality of the writing and analysis here, and the breadth and depth of the passion for baseball and the Jays, never cease to amaze me.

I ran my own one-man Jays fan site for two years, so I know how much time and effort goes into creating a web site. Kent, and the other Zombies who have helped make this site a reality, deserve all the credit in the world for creating such an enjoyable playpen. I, for one, am pleased as punch to be one of the ZLC, and am grateful to have a forum in which to inflict my metaphor-laden text on the world.

Cheers, Kent, and happy 1000th - this one's for you.

Robert writes:

When Kent contacted me about joining the crew I was thrilled. But I wasn't sure if the type of analysis I do would fit into what was, even at the time, one of the best baseball discussion sites around. Kent hasn't told me to bugger off yet, so I can assume he thinks number crunching has its place in Batter's Box.

I've been amazed by the incredible growth in the numbers of people who read and post, and the quality and breadth of the writing.

We owe it all to Kent. He's pulled us onto the ship one by one and has been the driving force behind much of the original content.

Hats off to Coach!

So without further ado, we give you Entry #1000.