"It's 4:18 AM. Go To Bed."

I am literally telling that to myself right now. Unfortunately for me, I don't really listen to myself so I decided stay up about two hours too many tonight and counting. I'm incredibly bored right now and the alcohol is wearing off so ripping on past co-workers for playing Farmville isn't really doing it for me anymore so I've decided to attempt to write this intro for my blog. I have often been told I have done my best work under the influence, such as every A paper I ever had last year (I was also kinda drunk for most of my C papers too, so maybe that doesn't count), so I thought I might as well give kind-of-drunk blogging a shot:

I have a rather interesting history with blogging. Its kind of interesting, at least to me it is. Then again, I find the highlight film of the 1946 World Series interesting, so maybe you should take that statement with a grain of salt.

Back when I was 15, the now incredibly popular MetsBlog.com, the #1 New York Mets blog on the internet, offered me a spot writing for them, which I found incredibly odd since I sucked at writing and I had absolutely no tryout to speak of. That was my first foray into blogging. After a few months the head writer there realized I basically was as good at writing as Lindsay Lohan is at not taking cocaine, which isn't a very good job. He then for whatever reason brought me back in a few months later only to fire me again a few months later.

At that point I thought since I was somewhat of a name I could start a blog of my own with a few friends and that it'd be somewhat successful. We started a blog called Nyjer Please, named after then Pirates outfielder Nyjer Morgan. Nyjer was basically a blog similar to other big named sports blogs where we would not only tackle the things a lot of the mainstream media covered but we also went into some of the stuff they wouldn't cover, such a a story I remember running about former Bears QB Cade McNown getting banned from the Playboy Mansion because he stole one of Hugh Heffner's girlfriends at the time. Sure, stuff like that is kind of tabloidy, but I tried going to route of actually breaking news and that COMPLETELY backfired on me. To kick the site off, I wanted to get the word out about Nyjer so I wrote an article about how I had a source very close to the Mets tell me that the players on the team were going through sort of a "racial divide", that the ringleader of the whole thing was Julio Franco, someone who was brought in in part because of his reputation as a great clubhouse presence, and that Paul Lo Duca felt he would not be back with the team the following season because he did not "fit the profile" of what the team wanted. My source told me that many of the non-latino ballplayers on the team felt that the team's hispanic general manager, Omar Minaya, wanted his team to mostly consist of latino ballplayers. Did I realize this would cause a huge stir and that many people would think this was complete bullshit? Yes, but at the time all I could think was, "Wow, this is a huge bombshell. If I drop this I not only make a name for myself in the sports world but I will forever have credibility and a successful blog". In hindsight, not the best idea. Now, I still stand behind my source on the story. He is around the team literally every single day and he is not someone to just make something like this up. The thing is when you have a source in the "journalistic world" you can't really let anyone know your source since thats "bad journalism". If you do you look like a dunce. After the post went up I sent it out to a bunch of the bigger blogs out there such as Deadspin and The Big Lead just to name a few. To my surprise, pretty much all of them picked it up. I remember I had a final that day and when I got back the post had almost 10,000 views. It had taken of pretty much a life of its own. It even got to the point that the head writer at MetsBlog had to refute my article. I was taking a beating pretty much everywhere. I'm sure of you goggle my name you'll find a handful of articles ripping me. Anyway, as time went on I kind of got vindicated. Lo Duca made a semi-racial comment (eh) and Franco was released and the entire team basically ripped him, something that was NEVER brought up before my article. I'm not defending my actions in any way, because I think I did a pretty shitty job with the whole thing, but as a seventeen year-old kid, I'm not really in a place where I can check with other sources on stuff. I had what I had from someone I considered a very credibly source and it didn't work out as I hoped. Oh well. Not a good start. Good thing for me though I didn't stop there since Nyjer had a lot more juice left in the tank.

You ever hear that expression "there is no such thing as bad publicity"? I guess that expression would work when it came to Nyjer. While it wasn't the best foot to get off on, the word was out and we got off to a great start. I hired a few more writers and we were actually becoming a pretty successful blog. We joined the YardBarker network, which gave us a partnership with FoxSports.com, two of the writers, one of them your's truly, were offered a spot writing for Epic Carnival, at the time (im not really sure what it is for sure now i just know it has tits everywhere) a blog that brought together a bunch of the writers of some of the most popular sports blogs on the internet and we were ranked in the top 20 of the BallHype.com Sports Blog rankings. Even though a lot of us were pretty young we had a great fanbase and we were pretty sure if we kept this up that I could be locked into a full salary by year's end. All was well till the end of August hit. It was then when I remembered what I did during my first stint at MetsBlog. I was a lame ass writer. I remember my last post wasn't even a real last post. I just said I was taking a week off and I'd be back next week. Thing was I never wrote again. We did try to bring Nyjer back a few months later but it never amounted to anything. We couldn't get enough of the original writers to write for us again and we were basically forced to close house. The sad thing is we don't even have anything to look back on in remembrance. Our domain name was bought out by some online ad sales company, so the only remains of our work is when we are cited on other websites.

So yeah, kind of a lame ending after the epic start. I just kind of didn't feel like doing it anymore at the end. In all it was a great experience and it really helped me learn a lot about journalism ethics and stuff. I'm pretty sure I could ace that class after what I went through.

Ok, that was boring. Sorry for that. Here's something to make it up:



And yeah, its 5:28 AM. I have to get up in five hours. This will not end well.