I'd recommend re-reading the Code of Conduct in the FAQ section linked above, particularly if you've joined the site in the last few months.

A few points I think deserve emphasis:

* Before posting ask yourself: 'Is this post contributing to the thread?' If the answer is 'No' or 'I'm not sure', do not post your comment. At Batter's Box we value quality over quantity.

* If you feel strongly about a point make it, even make it again. But don't return to the same point time after time.

* Keep threads on topic. There are appropriate threads to put everything in.

We try to strive to have Batter's Box be a place where the discussion level is high. In order for that to occur it takes everyone posting to be strong posters. You're only as strong as your weakest link.

Nope.

- Any changes in store for the new season? Last season chats replaced game threads and daily links (from newspapers) were removed for "game recaps".

Things are still being discussed internally but I don't anticipate any significant changes.

Please don't confuse Willy's opinion for that of a member of the management. However, I will point out that it is simple politeness to write in a fashion that visitors to the site can read. Unreadable comments add to nothing but everyone's annoyance level.

Someone who is not a native speaker of English, for example, is welcome to come here and post all the spelling and grammar mistakes that they want. But we can all tell the difference between that and sloppy cellphone-inspired gibberish written by someone too lazy to make their point clearly.

Writing something like "who cares if I post all lower case, full of spellign mistkaes, with a bunch of elipsis if I'm getting an intelligent point across?... does this really bring the tone of the conv down... hardly" means that all of the work in achieving communication has to be made by the reader, and none by the writer. Asking someone to put in the effort to read what you have to say, when you put no effort at all into writing it, is plain rudeness, and deserves to be smacked down with all deliberate speed.

By putting no effort into making your post readable you show that you dont care if anyone understands your point. You're putting all the onus for making communication possible on the reader. If you really cared if people got your point then you would take the time to make it easily readable. So if you dont care if anyone reads your post, then why am I reading it? Answer: Im not. Why should I have to take the effort to decipher your post that you dont even care if anyone reads anyway.

I dont care if people's grammar and spelling are perfect, mine certainly aren't. I care more about the content of your message than I do the syntax, which is why it bothers me when the syntax gets in the way. If there's too much noise, I can't hear what you're saying.

This is not a "board". Every time that you call it one, you insult the people who work hard to put this Interactive Magazine, this pena, together.

As NFH has pointed out, nobody is going to ban you from the site of you misspell "Schoeneweis." The point is that you should look over your post and try to make it clear. Just keep in mind that if you don't take your comment seriously, neither will many of its readers.

I like to think that this website is more mature than most websites on the Internet, so if the overlords ask the commentators to simply try their best grammar-wise, I don't really see the problem. but if u dissagre ten tahs ur perogitave.

Oh, don't worry about it!

I think it's quite likely that there's a group of people with all kinds of prior experience discussing matters on the internet who have, in the natural course of time, become accustomed to what we might call "internet conventions." It's natural for them to write in such a manner when they're ... on the internet, and natural for them to take for granted that they will be understood.

But here... not so much. The Box was started, and continues to be maintained, by a band of folks who generally come from a different type of background. I myself had never visited, let alone posted, to one of these places. I'm doubtless not the only one. When someone types "IIRC" I honestly do not know what it means. Which defeats the whole purpose.

It's not so much a warning as a heads-up. There's a somewhat different group of people here. If you want to be understood by them, you must proceed accordingly.

I don't mean to be nitpicky, but this thread topic is officialy over and we must now move on ;)

We need a Grammar Gestapo

As for new topic ideas, I suggest one to annoy Rob:

Re-ac-tor vs Trans.... discuss.

I'd rather Battersbox go the way of Sons of Sam Horn and exclude me from posting then have the level of discourse drop to the average internet site.

Batter's Box : changing the internet, one Borg-like assimilation at a time.

Snappy, eh? You should put that in the banner instead of the O-Dog.

How about this - this is a baseball place that happens to be situated on the internet. Rather than an internet place that happens to be about baseball?

Or - in this domain, it's more important to know what LOOGY stands for, or TINSTAAPP, rather IMHO.

In my never-been-called-humble-in-my-life opinion.

One should always be cautious about old rookies (Maas was 25 1/2, Charbonneau 25, Hamelin 26 1/2). The Edgar Martinezes of the world -- a fulltimer at age 27 -- are a rare breed.