The Double-Edged Sword of Baseball Blogging

As we prepare for spring training games to start (FINALLY!) tomorrow, I’m totally out of ideas/interesting things to blog about. I feel like I’ve been writing breakdowns of obscure relief pitchers since I came aboard this site earlier this month.

I’ve analyzed Ryan Webb, Greg Burke, Carlos Guevara, and Mike Ekstrom into oblivion.

The fact is, there isn’t a whole lot of new material during the offseason. All one can really do is analyze transactions when they come about, analyze last year’s data, and project this year’s performance.

My frustration got me thinking about an idea, which became the topic for this somewhat off-topic post.

If we rewind to late September, I was excited for the season to end.

My excitement had nothing to do with my fandom–sure, my A’s weren’t going anywhere, and neither were the Padres, but baseball’s great to follow and watch. Rather, I was excited as a blogger.

You see, as somebody who does a lot of sabermetric analysis pieces, it’s refreshing when the stats stop getting compiled.

Players add and subtract from their numbers nearly every day during the season (with the exception of starting pitchers). In late September, I was excited because the numbers would finally stop being compiled, and I could step back and look at season numbers as a whole.

Furthermore, my analysis would be up-to-date for the next few months. During the season (particularly early), one week can dramatically change a statline and render the analysis of the week before useless.

Another issue with in-season blogging is that if you’re anal about correctness (as I am), you’re on a really short time limit to write. If you write while a game is happening, for example, and you say a pitcher has a 3.60 ERA as he’s pitching, he might have a 3.40 or 3.80 ERA by the time it’s published and people read it.

In the offseason, there’s none of that interference. Just four or five months of data sitting there, waiting to be analyzed.

I had never been an active blogger in the offseason before this one, so like I say, I was stoked to get a ton of analysis out there.

But the problem I hadn’t foreseen was that, particularly when you write about one team for a site like this one, there’s only so much you can analyze, or at least, there’s only so much analysis you can do that anyone would really care about.

So here I am, five months later, and I seriously can’t wait for the season to get going again, so I can have some new things to delve into, position battles to be won and lost, and rosters to be optimized.

I guess the grass is always greener as far as the time of year to blog. There is no one perfect time. The closest thing there is to the perfect time is when you know someone out there is going to read your work and enjoy what you have to say.

Happy March, everybody! Let’s play some ball!