Happy Fifth Anniversary!!!

It is amazingly hard for me to believe that this little blog of mine is five years old today.
It is just as hard for me to believe that we have some dedicated readers that actually care what I have to say about mainly sports,but "other important items" as well.

If I had to do things over,I might have named the blog differently,but now we have raised our search engine profile to the point that renaming the blog would be counter-productive.

Readership has exploded over the past year to the point of setting our five highest months of hits ever over the past year and four of them over the last four months.
We have reached the point of considering advertising as we have been asked about advertising on the blog in the past,but only now is the point arriving of making a few dollars at this.
I did not start this to make money,but I certainly am not against the greenback dollar and if I decide to go with the ad's,this might be my chance to use the income to make the next step in the evolution of my vision for what I see for the blog.

It is funny how many readers stumble upon us via things that we do not cover everyday.
I get hits all the time from our post on the space program and the pic of the universe,the picture of rain falling and from around the world from our Forgotten Superstars post on Carlos Monzon.
I think that is kinda neat to pull in readers from different walks of life other than sports.

But our bread and butter is coverage of our teams,along with the minor leagues and the autograph circuit.
Most of our readers come here looking for one or more of the teams or the On the Signing Front stuff,but occasionally some of our most popular posts is the Cleaning out the inbox stuff that cover things that I find interesting from beyond the sports world.
I know that we saw a major bump from the average for the day recently,when we devoted an entire post to food issues in the inbox.
As much as I love to write about sports,I like to write about other things as well and I would not enjoy this nearly as much if I was confined to just sports.

I have heard throughout the life of the blog that if I focused on just the Pirates or the Browns etc that the readership would grow faster,but I have always wanted to comment on all of the teams that I love as well as things that I care about both now and in the past.
It has been a longer path to take in building the blog,but I am happier doing this the way that I prefer.

Time to thank a few of you that have been important in the building process.
Thanks to the lovely Cherie for the idea of this initially and for just being wonderful enough that tolerate me,this and everything that goes with the territory.
Thanks to Rachel for the special season of Devils hockey this season.
I love the team,but this season may be the most special and that includes the three Stanley Cup seasons because I have shared it with her....

Thanks to my occasional contributors that send me things of interest-Battlin' Bob and Big Don and my friends that hit the road with me on the signing front-Bill Cover and Corey Cunningham.
Thanks to Luke Erickson of NationalsProspects.com for his links to us and kind words on his site.
Everything that continues to happen with the Hagerstown Suns usually gets readers our way and many of them are by the way of Luke's site.

And finally,thanks to the people that read this and have stuck around.
Things have changed a bit,we had a very adversarial relationship with the Hagerstown Suns early on and things are very good with the current management.
We have revised things from the beginning and I am sure that we will continue to change and add more things to discuss.
With the ability to do more from work with the laptop addition (finally!),I have more time and more things that I want to add,I really believe that we are going to make a huge jump in readership over the next year just as we did this year..

Keep an eye out as the post that I have been working on is finished,but I wanted to wait until this was finished and I plan on working on the Pirates and Indians prospect series next week as the minor league season will get underway...

Thanks again and stick around,things just might get even better!!!