The site is 10 years old!

On March 1st, this little blog of mine turned 10 years old!  I started it on a lark, with zero ambition, and to my surprise it became a modestly influential little site for a time.  It also helped springboard me into several outstanding writing gigs, most notably at Beyond the Box Score (thanks to Sky Kalkman) and Red Reporter (thanks to slyde).  I also had a summer "job" writing at Rotographs (thanks to Eno Sarris and David Appleman), and have done some spot pieces for Hardball Times (thanks to studes) as well.  Heck, I even had a piece in the wall street journal once. :)

This site has always been my home base, and in recent years I've preferred to mostly just hang around here.  The higher-profile places I've written were great fun, and allowed me to make a handful of small contributions to both Reds fandom and sabermetrics over the past decade.  But I've found that I enjoy writing about baseball most when it is done simply as my way of following and learning about the game.  And for that, this site works great.  I have complete editorial control, my stuff doesn't get buried by other (usually better) authors, and I feel zero pressure to put out content.  I don't get much traffic anymore.  But fortunately, thanks to twitter, most of the folks who I'd like to see my work do find it.

If you've been a long-time reader, thanks.  I appreciate your interest and support over the years.

For fun, here's the content of my first post:

Hi folks. 

Thanks for stopping by my little blog. My goals for this site are pretty modest:

• Provide a place for my Baseball Statistics Quicksheet, a brief compilation of some of the various "new," interesting, and valuable statistics for evaluating batters, pitchers, and fielders. You will find out what the different acronyms mean, how to calculate and interpret them, as well as (most importantly) where to find them on the web. The most frustrating thing I've found about the new statistics is that it can be really difficult to find the actual numbers on players. The quicksheet will be an ongoing project to help with these problems.

• Provide a permanent place for my occasional article on baseball statistics. This will range from analysis of individual player performance to perhaps even larger evaluations of player performance.

• Links to new baseball stat articles I see/read. I'm not good about staying current with all the various research, but maybe this site will help me to this end. :)

• Occasional posts and commentary surrounding big news in the Reds franchise or its players. Please note that I do not intend for this site to be a news blog site; there are many Reds' blogs that already do a fantastic job of that. But I may occasionally want to bitch or cheer here as well.

• Maybe occasional posts about my exploits in computer baseball games, especially Out of the Park Baseball.

That's it for now. -JinAZ

Happily, I think I've largely achieved those goals with this blog...well, aside from the quicksheet.  I did write it, but it was almost immediately obsolete.  Fortunately, FanGraphs' glossary is better than anything I could have ever hoped to produce along these lines.

Here's to many more years to come!