Just to hijack my own thread, I am really chuffed and amazed that our Hit Counter, which Kent installed just a couple weeks ago at 1,000, is already over 3,700. It's astounding to me that such a young blog with a specific focus has garnered so much traffic already. And it's only December; imagine what we could be looking at come spring training and then the regular season. Many sincere thanks to all who come here to read, lurk and occasionally post -- and those in the first two categories, please feel free to weigh in on a thread anytime!

Also, if any of our visitors frequent other Blue Jays sites and would like to drop our URL into discussions there, please do -- word of mouth is the best marketing there is!

We were pretty steady at just under 1,000 hits the first two weeks, but the Lopez trade stimulated activity, with 800+ "unique" visits in 48 hours. (The counter doesn't go up every time you return to the home page; if you close your browser and come back later, that's a second "hit.") It's not uncommon for me to drop by four or five times in a day, and I assume others do the same, but that still means we have a considerable audience already.

Nobody visits ESPN for fantasy advice at this time of year, but it heats up in January, and gets crazy in February and March. My column over there (which averages 20,000+ hits a month) will be mentioning BB, which could generate a lot of new traffic. This may not be an entirely good thing, as Craig B will agree -- he recently expressed extreme frustration at the infestation of "joke" posts at Primer. That's what impresses me more than our numbers; we seem to be very polite and thoughtful here, for a public forum.

To divert back to the original post -- if you wanted a "real" baseball job, you should have been at the Winter Meetings. Here's a link from Minor League Baseball.com for those who would relocate to Medicine Hat, or Pulaski, for a foot in the door. Reflecting the absence of news from Nashville, the Star did a piece on one such hopeful, a 27-year-old MBA who had been a jack of all trades, including backup bullpen catcher and part-time mascot, for an independent league team. (The guy got in trouble for slipping resumes under the hotel room doors.) The Marlins dumped their mascot because he was too good -- they take the same approach with their players -- so there's an opening for someone athletic and silly in Florida; I wouldn't fit into Billy's costume because I'm shaped more like a manatee.

To divert back to the original hijack - I am impressed by the quality of Blue Jays' related discussion on this bulletin board. Congrats to those responsible. I want it to be spring training already!

Let me happen to chime in with full agreement for Craig's distaste for incessant Piazza/Ackbar/miscellaneous pop culture jokes which rapidly lose whatever shred of intrinsic value they may have. I'm likewise boycotting Primer until this obnoxious trend subsides. I'm also in favour for any measures taken to eliminate such an epidemic here at BB.

Some of the jokes posts on Primer were funny- if a thread's going for 50 posts of serious dicussion, an occassional joke is healthy. But lately, its been out of hand. You see 60 posts on a topic, click on it, and realize 50 of them have been idiots amusing themselves by showing eachother their own feces.

I like this page a lot- the BJ fans on Primer seemed pretty fragmented, and its good to all get together, especially now that we have positive things to talk about rather than Gord Ash.

I post lots of jokes myself. Jokes, witty comments (even if they don't come off), quotes... this stuff is all good.

"It's a trap", movie quotes, "Mike Piazza" posts saying "I like to suck stuff"... these aren't jokes. Like dp, I think it's gotten monumentally worse, mainly because nothing has been done yet by the site owners to take care of it.

Sean Forman told me a couple of weeks ago that they will convert to slashcode by the end of the month, but since he's away until January, it probably won't actually be until then. I have to admire Sean, he does brilliant work... he's got a lot more to worry about than people posting as Admiral Ackbar, but he's working on it anyway.

I had heard the same news as you, Craig, in a more roundabout way. It's overdue, and Mr. Forman is to be commended considering all of his other commitments. I'm not altogether convinced that slashcode is a panacea, because I'm not aesthetically down with its format, but anything is preferable to the status quo where the white noise is overwhelming the content of Primer.