Building A Community

I’m not sure if you are aware but the site does in fact have a Facebook page. I say if you are aware because we have a grand total 50 likes versus the near 500 views a day on the site. Take away Keith’s mom constant refreshing of our page and it puts our daily views closer to 62.

So, that said there are at least 12 of your that have yet to “like” our Facebook “page. No hard feelings, I’ll let you go- not even guilt trip this time around- just so long as you go hit the “like” button right now.

Now, you may say. “Harrison, this is kind of a bit of desperate and awkward plea. Are you that sad and pathetic that it just comes down to the numbers?”  Well, as a matter of fact I am only about numbers. It’s all I really care about, so get off my lawn.

But seriously folks, there is a purpose to liking the site than for the sake of overall numbers. Rather, we (Alex, Adam, Keith and I) want to start turning this site into multi-faceted community using Facebook with the hopes of being able to use social media as a way of interacting with those that read the site on a daily basis.

We’re not trying to compete with the likes Prospect Insider or Lookout Landing. We are our own site. I certainly respect Jeff Sullivan, Dave Cameron, Jason Churchill and you should even include Jon Shields and Conor Dowley in there too. But I, as well as the other writers, have always tried to give this site a different perspective than everything else available.

More of this is just coming from a modest enthusiast perspective, that in the effort we all grow as a community. As best as what we know and as well as we know how to communicate.

Facebook gives us a medium for ineracting outside of this site and it also allows us to share and distribute some of the media that we acquire. If you go out to the site you will see we have various pictures uploaded as well as some minor league video that is poorly shot by yours truly.

There is also a side project in which I would like to open for anyone that wishes to partcipate.

We can all go out to Prospect Insider and see what major league talent evaluators think, as well as individuals who do it for a living. But sometimes we just want information on a player and often with guys that aren’t in the Top 10 or even 20 there is just next-to-nothing available for a variety of reasons.

What pitches do they throw? What is their fastball velocity? What does their batting stance look like? Are they good defenders.. ect.

We need a location in which we can share these data points.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be setting up some various open forums and google spreadsheets in which we can share this type of data. My goal is to grow a comprehensive comunity in which we can freely share this data with the rest of the Mariner fans.

This isn’t an overnight project and it’s going to take some work and by plenty of people. But now that we have solid writers contributing to our large body of work, I can consentrate on spending on time on this.

In association with this side project I’d like to see pictures start going up on the site and being shared.

If you have pictures of a Mariner major league or minor league affiliate game in which you own the rights of the pictures share them out by tagging us in the picture on Facebook. It’ll be nice for other fans to be able to see various pictures as well as videos of other prospects.

Back to the point, this all starts with liking our page. I know it sounds corney but it helps us keep up with who is envolved in this project and/or interested in the site.

It also will help you keep up with what we do off-the-site. I’ll try to post something on the site with each step that we take forward and keep you all abreast of the updates as they come.

I hope you are all excited and interested about these coming updates, I know we all are!