Thursday, March 18, 2010

Be Gone With Wilpon? How blog titles tell you how a team is doing

We've been trying to spruce up Subway Squawkers a little by updating our blogroll. Baseball blogs don't exactly have the longest shelf life. As you can see by looking at LoHud.com's Yankee blogroll, new ones sprout up all the time, but many of the bloggers give up after just a few months, as evidenced by clicking on some of those links.

So we were adding some new Yankees and Mets blogs, and removing the defunct onces, and I noticed a rather obvious truth - you can tell a lot about a team's fortunes by what their fans' bloggers call their pages.

Yankee fans have names for their blogs like Pride of the Yankees or even It's About the Money. They also honor players with names like Respect Jeter's Gangster, The Girl Who Loved Andy Pettitte, or the new site An A-Blog for A-Rod. (An aside - can't you just hear John Sterling saying that? Hilarious!)

On the other hand, you can tell a little about the despair among the Flushing Faithful by checking out some of the Mets blog names. There's 24 Hours From Suicide...A Day In The Life of a Met Fan, which apparently used to be entitled Long Island Met Fan. There's also Be Gone With Wilpon, Disgruntled Mets Fan, MetsFAIL, and Pessimets. Alas, Depressed Mets Fan is no longer active. Geez, I hope he's okay - or at least got some Prozac!

Looks like the blog title "Diary of a Mad Mets Fan" is still available. Somebody needs to start writing that to complete the misery!

One other thing I noticed when looking at the Yankee-Mets blog names out there. Squawker Jon and I have been writing Subway Squawkers for four years, and we are still the only Yankees-Mets rivalry blog! Cool!

If you have a baseball site, and want to do a link exchange, please email us at subwaysquawkers@gmail.com
Thanks!

What do you think? Tell us about it!

2 comments:

Uncle Mike said...

Blogs are what magazines used to be. There was a joke back in the days between the rise of radio and the rise of TV that whenever three intellectuals got together, a new magazine was formed. All they really needed was the three (or more) guys with ideas on the same subject, and access to a printer. And it usually didn't last a year, because even then, paper and ink were prohibitively expensive. Today, Orson Welles' Charles Foster "Citizen" Kane would have to go out of business in a lot less than 60 years.

The idea of Met blogdom can be summed up in the title of perhaps the best of them: Greg Prince's "Faith and Fear in Flushing." He puts faith first (after all, "Ya Gotta Believe"), but fear is closely trailing -- which is more than the Mets have been able to do lately.

And therein lies the reason why this is the only Yankee-Met rivalry blog anybody notices: There IS no Yankee-Met rivalry anymore. It died with that long fly ball into Bernie Williams' glove at midnight on October 26, 2000. Since then, a lot of things have happened: Yankee Fans remembered that their real rivals are the Boston Red Sox, and Met fans finally got a real rival in both the geographic and competitive sense: Not the Yankees, not the Atlanta Braves, but the Philadelphia Phillies.

Then again, before October 2009, it was still possible to look at a blog titled "Scott Proctor's Arm" and think, "Oy vey, don't remind me" -- instead of, "Wow, glad those days are gone." (At least Proctor was a decent guy who was sorry he wasn't pitching better, for the team's sake. Unlike Kyle Farnsworth!)

Anonymous said...

Lisa, great post. I happen to think that your observation is extremely acurate, and is a reflection of the way a large sector of Met fans feel about the team these days. I am so glad that my site name caught your eye in this respect. Thanks for the post, and I have added you to my blog roll as well.

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