Tagged: All-Star Game
How did you vote? Share your ballot post
After you vote to decide starters for the 86th Midsummer Classic this summer, Blog the Ballot. We’re surfacing posts about the 2015 Esurance MLB All-Star Game Ballot at MLB.com/blogs, so please just leave your Permalink there so we can highlight and send more traffic to your blog. We’ll list yours among our ongoing rollout of posts. Spread the word about the all-new MLB.com/blogs…
Thinking All-Star Week at Citi Field
One of the coolest things about being a baseball fan is knowing your All-Star Game is light years better than any other sport’s…and that it matters. The National League has capitalized on three straight All-Star victories.
I spent Tuesday at Citi Field, partly for the big Clayton Kershaw-Jon Niese matchup and also to do some advance work on the All-Star Week stuff that is coming there for this summer. Here is my ballot launch story on MLB.com and here is the 2013 All-Star Game MLB.com Ballot sponsored by freecreditscore.com.
Just wanted to share some Instagrams I posted in the meantime, and making sure you are all set to blog like crazy now that the All-Star ballot is out. Make sure you leave comments here with your full URL and tell us to come and see how you use up those earliest votes, and we’ll promote some of them.
Hello from Kansas City!
Landed today in Kansas City and will be working our Major League Baseball All-Star Week here through Tuesday. Please be sure to leave comments here with any of your posts related to the Midsummer Classic, and make sure you checked out our June Latest Leaders in the previous post. It was immediately to the barbecue and keeping up with Final Vote…
Happy Social Media Day 2011
Social Media Day 2011 is a big official-unofficial deal around the world, and Major League Baseball is all over it. Go here for all the details on how to get involved and win cool stuff. And take a look at how 30 Major Leaguers are embracing social media today.
How are you celebrating Social Media Day?
In other news:
The new Latest Leaders for June will be out shortly. Good luck!
Latest Leaders update
For those of you eagerly awaiting the next installment of the MLBlogs Latest Leaders, it’s coming very soon. We’re switching things up so the rankings will be based on calendar months, so The Happy Youngster and Red State Blue State have a week to try to catch Confessions of a She-Fan…
On the subject of blog traffic, we’re noticing that the new ratings and related entries feature has helped introduce readers to new blogs around our online community.
Also, we’re always looking for new blogs to spotlight as the Featured MLBlogger on our front page. If you want to be featured in that space, you’ll want to make sure you have a profile picture up in your blog. That (along with quality blogging, of course) is a prerequisite for consideration for that spot.
And speaking of new blogs, we’ve got some new additions to MLBlogosphere who wear spikes, with new player blogs by Rick Ankiel, Matt Holliday and Derek Lowe joining Torii Hunter, all sponsored by Sharp.
And last but not least, make sure you’re voting for your All-Star Game picks!
Ballots and Blogs
Today we launched the All-Star Game Ballot and here is my MLB.com story with all the details. It makes for great baseball blogging material, and I look forward to frequent blogging on the subject between now and what probably will be another record-shattering voting finish during the summer. Just to get things started, below is the thank-you page for my first of 25 ballots I will submit, to show my votes. I have an all-Dodger outfield (justified because Kemp is having the best start, Ethier was just named NL Player of the Week, Manny is Manny to me and they look like baseball’s best club right now) and right now I feel like the left side of the AL infield, once a Yankee province, belongs to the Rays (sorry, Jeter fans).
Adding some Flair to the profile pic
Thanks for the memories, Mad Dog. Voting for you in five years. Now that’s a Hall of Fame career. Keep that in mind when all these wild debates continue and require exhaustive statistical comparisons and pleas (ie another righty who just retired). . . .
Thanks to our friend Vanessa over at Flair for the Dramatic for submitting the design used as our latest profile pic here at your friendly neighborhood community blog. We like how V captured the feeling of the entire planet (since MLBloggers are scattered worldwide) and the font and the overall coolness factor. Reminder that if you post a profile pic of yourself on your blog, like the dude at Rocky Mountain Way, you can be considered for the Featured Blog spot on our homepage at http://www.mlb.com/blogs. That way you can brag to all your friends that you’re featured on MLB.com.
We also want to give a special shout-out to our friend Jeremy Homer over at Homer, Blue Jays and MLB for submitting the design that you see below. We liked the left side better than the right side, but then again, that’s what All-Star voters say about the Yankees’ infield each year. Thanks, Jeremy, for going to the Photoshop trouble! And any MLBlogger out there who wants to try your hand at our next MLBlogosphere profile pic to represent this unmatched baseball blogging community, just email us a jpeg that you designed and include your URL, and it could mean some extra publicity right here for your own MLBlog!
Here’s some Random MRA:
- The Kevin Slowey Blog
- Newberg Report
- CastroTurf
- Baseball, The Yankees, and Life…
- Hot Stove Blog
- RedBird Post
- The 1 Constant…Baseball
- Red Sox Hen
- Rays Renegade
- Brownie Points
- metsfan
- Obviously, You’re Not a Golfer
COMING SOON: The 2008 MLBlogs Leaders!
Who will be the MLBlogs traffic titans of 2008? Will it be a Cub like Mark DeRosa? Will it be a dog like Big Pupi? Will it be a very small person like Baby Paul? Will it be yours truly? (Yeah, right.) Will it be those Phillies Ballgirls who snag the attention at Citizens Bank Park, or will it be Zack, the guy who snags all those baseballs that the Ballgirls and others leave on the field? Will it be the guy who had the sweetest promotion of the entire year — October Gonzo? We aren’t sure because instead of doing this on Monday, we did a lot of MLB.com Shop and Winter Meetings stuff and wandered downstairs to buy a couple of blue-vanilla cupcakes instead of running the program. But we promise: It’s coming. You asked for it. We’ll deliver. The first, ever, mega-anticipated thrill ride is on deck: THE 2008 MLBLOGS LEADERS. There might even be a header graphic in it for the biggest ones, just like those little cool “I’m a Top 732,000 Blogger on MyBlogIsCoolerThanYours.com” thingies. Because one of you guys asked for one.
Discovering a discovery site
Tonight I got a tweet from @TechCrunch on Twitter extolling the virtues of LOUD3R, one of the newest discovery sites after Digg, Reddit, Techmeme and the like. It has a network of 30 topic-specific semantic search engines, and tonight I played around with one of them, PITCH3R. You can click a subdirectory there and find specific topics such as “All-Star Game” — and looking through there, Alyssa’s latest post just a few hours ago had ascended in the top 10. If you click the headline, you’ll see the lede and be prompted to go to the actual page for the full article. It will be interesting to see how many MLBlogs are “discovered” there. Their server was down when I went there a little after midnight ET but eventually I got in, and you have to register and after that, you are able to “Submit A Story” and “Submit A Source” from their main nav. Can’t hurt if you’re all about getting traffic to your blog. I like the mix of results so far, a really diverse blend of sources and voices. Worth tinkering around with, seems pretty cool if you’re a fellow Magellan out discovering. For each site, LOUD3R gathers and publishes content (including photos and videos) from blogs, news and editorial sites. Each site has a source list and a semantic glossary of terms that teach the engine how to identify the best content. The content is ranked with a point system, pushing the highest ranked to the top. The engine also learns from user behavior, community feedback and human editors. What ways do you discover information for your blogs?
Around the Sphere
Here’s to a great second half. Welcome to all the new MLBloggers who just joined us. Remember to go to Trade Talk
for the definitive blog about all things related to Major League
Baseball’s July 31 trading deadline. It is maintained by 30 MLB.com
traveling beat reporters who are in the clubhouses and on the phones,
and they post fast and often. And by the way, so much for that Joe Blanton player blog as an Oakland pitcher. That’s the thing with player blogs. It’s great to see them start, and it’s fun to follow along and comment with them, and it seems like a thousand reasons why they usually disappear after a while.
Thanks for everyone’s great All-Star Game posts. It was a Midsummer Classic like none ever before, and it was nice to be in 2008 with the capability for all fans to start a free MLBlog and post their own observations of what happened. We listed at least 19 of them with the panel on MLBlogs.com. One new blog with the simple title of Mom was like so many others in that the theme was “best All-Star Game ever.” What do you think? I got home at sunrise after working at Yankee Stadium, and will never forget walking out of there toward the subway, looking up at the sandstone facade of the old park and then at the new park hulking over it nearby, and it hit me then that this could be the last big event I see there. It will be up to the Yankees and whether they can extend their postseason streak. I am old enough to remember back-to-back years that provided great entertainment. It was 1970 in Cincinnati when Pete Rose barrelled over Ray Fosse, and even better, the next year at Tiger Stadium when Reggie and Hank and so many others went yard. For sheer All-Star entertainment, this is the best one since then. I think that when you factor in the nervousness you got hanging onto EVERY PITCH of this All-Star Game — that seem feeling you normally have at the end of October when each pitch could mean you have no more baseball for the year — that it is just fine to call this the best All-Star Game ever. Plus you had that incredible Hall of Fame Celebration. And besides, it’s your MLBlog, you have the luxury in 2008 of being Grantland Rice.
This is a good time to introduce you to Twins Confidential, a great example of another club blog that is providing unique behind-the-scenes access in an unfiltered, club-to-fan-to-club way. Check out that blog’s view of how things went for Justin Morneau, Joe Mauer and Joe Nathan, and leave them comments. Alyssa Milano, who hosted our MLB.com All-Star bash Sunday night/Monday morning along with Joba Chamberlain, just posted her unique view on how the week went. And here’s a traffic/self-marketing tip for you. See that new October Gonzo blog? If I was just starting an MLBlog, I would leave a comment there with my URL as one way for people to find me. You have already seen the first commercials — that is this year’s Dane Cook and everyone is going to find their way from everywhere to that blog.
All-Star Concert at Central Park: Bon Jovi
That rocked. Maybe my favorite new thing about the All-Star Game.
Nothing like filling up Central Park and then showing TWIB and Yankee Stadium highlights and nonstop baseball for 2 or 3 hours…and then MLB’s Tim Brosnan introducing Bon Jovi to the stage. What a concert and what a show of baseball force. Here are some more pics:
MLB.com Blogs Central 