Hello, blogosphere! I have thought of joining your ranks for the longest time, and I’m very impressed to learn that you’re recognized as a real word by Microsoft.
Anyways, I’m not going to do a formal introduction of myself personally. I think that those details will probably come out throughout the summer, and that’s fine with me.
The hope is that this will become something of a ‘beat blog’ for the Mississauga Twins’ Intercounty Baseball League season this summer, as they kick off their inaugural campaign representing Mississauga after moving from Stratford and I cover them as their first ever e-beat writer (representing Mississauga at least, I can’t speak to what the situation was over in Stratford).
I would be lying if I pretended to know enough about the team to write anything meaningful about them right now. I plan to get out to a practice as soon as possible and meet with the manager and hopefully some of the key players, and by then I’ll have done some homework and I should be able to write pretty fluently about the team.
I can tell you that they won their first ever game (representing Mississauga, to be exacting) against the usually-impressive-to-the-best-of-my-knowledge Hamilton Thunderbirds at Bernie Arbour Stadium on May 3rd, and they open their season this coming Saturday at the Meadowvale Sports Complex on the 23rd, against the perennially competitive Brantford Red Sox. The win, by the way, was by a count of 10-9 and of the come from behind variety, as they put up a 3 spot in the top of ninth. Until I do some homework, I really can’t tell you what (if any) significance there is to that outcome.
I just started a paragraph about what I envision this blog looking like once it gets rolling, but I actually have no idea. A lot will be improvised, and it’ll depend on how much access I get to the team, how easily I can attend road games, how much time I have and a lot of other things along those lines. The thing is, I’ll be primarily covering them for the Twins’ official website – pre and post-game stories, occasional feature pieces, administrative stuff in newswire format (injuries, suspensions, personnel decisions) and so on – so I’m not sure what’ll go here.
A lot of the MLB beat guys use their blogs to post supplementary stuff that either isn’t appropriate (on a number of levels) for the general website, or is too random to fit into an actual story. I’d like this one to have a bit more substance, so I might do the Mike Wilner thing and give my own analyses of individual games, long-term prognoses and stuff like that. I’ll probably make a point of getting feature content exclusively for the blog at different times, as well.
In short, I really have no idea where this will go or what to expect – but I think if it’s a chance to do some meaningful sports journalism and spend summer nights at Christie Pitts and places like that, it sounds good to me.
I’m hoping to attend a practice tomorrow night (which may or may not even be happening) and do my preliminary stuff to start putting together my understanding of the team, and then maybe cover the home opener on Saturday afternoon. Worst cased scenario, I probably go to the home opener without having been to a practice and met anyone – which could make for some really ugly journalism. Like I said, we’ll see where things go!
To keep things from getting dead if there’s a lull in Twins news – and just because I want to, too – I’ll definitely be writing about the Blue Jays this summer, and, if all goes according to plan, be covering a pennant drive.
I’m a bit wary of writing about anything political or social or cultural, given the, umm, permanent nature of the things you write on the Internet and the way that that can be exploited down the road, but if I have an opinion that I’m pretty sure I’ll still want to defend in 30 years and I think I can express it without saying anything too politically incorrect, I’ll probably go for it.
Look for something up between now and the home opener – even if it’s just an update saying I’ve failed to get to a practice and a reminder that the game is on Saturday – and keep your fingers crossed that I’ll be able to provide some real analysis by then!
I’m also not sure what I’ll do about the way-over-my-head problem of making this page physically (graphically?) appealing. Bear with me!
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