We’re not 10 (yet), but We Are 9!
Hi. Today is OTBB’s Birthday. I don’t want to write some sappy, self-congratulatory thing in our own honor, but I do think that it’s worth taking a second to recognize that a blog that started literally because a friend said we couldn’t do it is now 10 9 years old.
(Editor Sean’s note: Max wrote this originally thinking we were celebrating a decade on the internet. Math has never been Max’s strongest subject.)
Sean and I started OTBB in our sophomore year dorm room at Vassar College in mismatched puke yellow and dark green recliners we bought for a dollar at a thrift shop. We didn’t have anything to do because someone took our TV; writing a blog seemed like fun.
(Editor Sean’s Note: Naming this site involved re-using a piece of paper and more than one beer. If we knew that we’d still be dedicating hours of our lives to this website 9+ years later, we probably would have overthought the name, run some sort of polling, and settled on something immensely stupid.)
Since then, we’ve graduated college, moved to different states and different countries, had professions ranging from teacher to semi-pro athlete (neither of which we’re still doing), wound up as roommates again briefly, and smoked an alligator with a Bud Light can in its mouth. Yet OTBB has somehow endured.
It definitely hasn’t been smooth sailing. We’ve had periods of nearly daily posting and times when we didn’t write for weeks. We sold most of the blog, bought it back and sold a piece of it again. We redesigned the site, twice. We had a Facebook account, Instagram account, and probably a Snapchat, but none of them stuck. We brought on interns for a while.
(One thing we’ve never done: Used money from the site for anything not related to the site. Every dollar we make goes back into the site. Max and I don’t make any money doing this. We’ve never put any real thought into how to make this a business, or to turn our corner of the internet into something of a full-time role. We’re not really long-term planners by nature, instead opting to learn as we go, keeping the spirit fostered on those yellow/green recliners.)
One unequivocally good thing we did was formally include Ari, who had been an unofficial editor for a while and is now a part-owner and unofficial editor.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve published more than 1,800 posts. A little less than a thousand of them were written by Sean or I, which is an accomplishment in its own right, but is probably more amazing in that it means that about half the site is thanks to our awesome team of writers, some of whom write a lot, some rarely. They’ve been carrying more and more of the load as Sean and I spend more time at our real jobs and less messing around on Baseball Savant. Thanks to all of them for helping to keep the site growing.
(No really. Dan, Joe, Jim, Bobby, Bryan, Alex, David, Kevin, Nick, Pat, Trey, Mike, and Tyler have all become important parts of something I’m proud of despite the fact that we’ve never met in person.)
And we are growing! Our last two years have been our biggest ever, by far! Thousands of people read OTBB now and for that we are incredibly grateful. OTBB host a podcast on our site now! And have a store that somehow works!
I have no idea where we’ll be in 10 9 more years, or even if we’ll still be publishing this site at all (kinda doubt it), but even though this post was super self-indulgent, we did a thing! for 10 9 years! and for that we are proud and happy.
(We should all be proud and happy to have editors. Who else would lightly FireJimBowden their own partner for being so bad at math that he wrote a 500 word post celebrating something that hasn’t happened?)
Thanks for reading.
