Comments down
Sorry.
Update, 6:43: up
Big Board Updated
[Watch with wonder as Derek and Jason fight for top billing!]
At long last, the Big Board has been updated for the start of the 2006 season. Please see the link at left, under “features”.
Known issues:
1. Minor league links still point to BaseballAmerica.com, which as of this writing still shows player stats for the 2005 season. If they don’t get this updated pretty soon — their stats were pretty bad last year well into the season, if you recall — I’ll switch back to MinorLeagueBaseball.com links instead.
2. As a result of #1 above, there are no links for guys who didn’t appear in the minors last season. Examples include Kevin Appier, Dan Wright, and Adam Pettyjohn.
3. Teams have only played four games (three, in the case of Inland Empire), so it can be hard to figure out starting lineups. This is made worse by the fact that minor league teams often do things like rotate their players around, such that there isn’t a regular DH, for example.
4. Mozilla tends to freak out at Big Board updates. At least it does on my machine, getting the formatting all wrong. Hit refresh and you should be OK. By the same token, if you click on the link and see the old version, make sure you hit refresh. You probably have the old one stuck in your cache (which isn’t as painful as it might sound).
I’m happy to take feedback on other issues, such as incorrect handedness, misspelled names, bad links, and so on. Drop me a line or leave a comment on this post.
Last chance for the coolest shirt yet
The “Optimism” Limited Edition Shirt gets pulled this coming week. Buy now (which supports USSM to the tune of a couple of bucks and makes me and Jeff feel validated) or forever go without this hilarious thing. I promise that if I spot you wearing the shirt at a local watering hole pre-game, I will personally buy you a beverage.
Here’s the CafePress image of the back.
New USSM Limited Edition T-shirts up
“Top Ten Reasons I’m Looking Forward to the 2006 Season”
(go buy it now)
1. Increased ticket prices mean I no longer must choose between charities vying for extra cash
2. Medically speaking, I have to wake up from this nightmare eventually
3. Placed huge pre-season bet on Oakland
4. After achieving Nirvana, both winning and losing are equally satisfying to me
5. WFB a no-hitter threat every game
6. They thought I was left handed, now I’m signed to a guaranteed 3-year, $22m deal
7. Recently suffered blunt force trauma to head, believe it’s 1996
8. Can pretend baseball is like golf, where low score wins
9. Low attendance means less competition for airgun-fired t-shirts
The tenth one varies depending on which version you want to fit your marital status:
Spouse version:
10. Spouse stops complaining about me, starts complaining about team
Singles version:
10. I’m sure to do better with fans of the opposite sex with this cool USSM-themed T-shirt
Now, we also came up with a whole bunch of top ten items that didn’t make it. If there’s massive public acclaim, we might be able to work something out for a second set or something that’ll accomodate you. They were:
11. 132 losses in two years left some hope uncrushed
12. Ballgirls no longer at risk of being hit on, if you know what I mean and unfortunately I think you do
13. Hang on, give me a second, I’m sure I can come up with ten reasons
14. Masochism
15. Three words: high draft pick
16. More empty seats means fewer complaints about my body odor
17. Heard captain goes down with ship, not a big fan of Tannille either
18. Was big fan of Extreme, heard their guitar player now M’s shortstop
19. Missed the joy of nurturing intestinal parasites contracted from stadium food
20. Can’t wait to see new cutting-edge goatee and soul patch fashions
21. Bandwagon fans should finally be weeded out
22. I bought counterfeit season tickets to see this counterfeit team… with counterfeit money!
23. I’m a member of the ownership group — suckers!
24. Want my enthusiasm for football rekindled
Anyway, be the coolest kid on your block.
New T-shirt available
Hey, for those of you who were waiting for the popular Ambivalent Maybe shirts to be available in the USSM Swag Emporium, it’s up. If you’ve forgotten what it looks like, check it out:
Pretty cool.
If you haven’t already ordered a sweet USSM garmet, go on and get down with your bad self.
Those of you who ordered cool shirts — first, thanks, and second, when you get them, we’d love to hear how they look. Drop us a line or comment.
Also, we’re looking into ways to do logos on navy colors and stuff. This may involve using an alternate vendor, which might make this pretty complicated soon.
And remember — the part of your purchase that doesn’t fund CafePress’s continuing inability to offer different-colored T-shirts goes to our efforts to find better hosting, censor debate, and fund a buyout of the team’s current owners. We’re only $500m away from our goal.
First batch of USSM swag available
Makes a great uh… Valentine’s Day gift! Yeah! That’s it! Anyway, check it out, we’ve got a bunch of versions of the freaking awesome JoelE designs, and a couple of limited-edition shirts — every month, we’re going to try tossing out a couple of random cool shirts, and at the end of the month we pull the plug.
The shop
The February limited-edition shirts
I know we’d intended to try the logos on dark blue, but CafePress doesn’t have navy shirts we can use. Sorry.
We should have the Ambivalent Maybe designs up as soon as I figure out why CafePress refuses to accept the images.
And anyone wishing to take a crack at a better version of the limited edition Felix shirt and are willing to accept our standard pay rate ($0 forever but I do pay your way into a USSM feed), drop us a line.
All proceeds go to support our continuing efforts to censor open discussion and further our plans for world domination.
USSM 2006 Endorsements, Part 2
Officially endorsed car of USSM: Conor Glassey‘s* ride which not only has a “Please stay alert to balls and bats leaving the field” dashboard warning and Mariner sticker, but also has this license plate holder:
* yes, the noted gnome-napper and all-around cool guy
First batch o’ t-shirt designs
In our never-ending quest to move up in the world of servers (You catch that outage last night? Wasn’t that great?), we put out a call a month ago for designs. Here’s the first batch, for your consideration. Please comment if you like ’em, don’t like ’em, and as always, if you want to give this a shot yourself, you know our email address.
Designs below the break, as I didn’t want to try and serve even these modest thumbnails to everyone who visited. I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks — I’d buy some of these now.
Site outage, immediately
She’ll be up when she’s up. Emergency ship maintenence required.
Update: we’re up. If you see anything odd afoot, email us.
Short version is that black hats found a WordPress exploit and beat us up for a while. We look to be cool now.
Happy New Year, everyone
It was a fun year for the site, even as the M’s didn’t do so well. I hope everyone enjoyed themselves, learned something, or at least felt like part of a larger group, and I hope you hang around for the next year, too. Official USSM Endorsements will be coming over the next week or so, but feel free to send nominations. Or comments, complaints, thoughts for the new year… whatever.
Fun 2005 stats
972 posts by authors
~72,000 comments by authors and readers (74 comments/average article)
Comment Power Rankings
1. Me, with 2,860*
2. David J. Corcoran, 2,209**
3. Dave, 1,794
4. Jim Thomsen*** 1,592
5. (tie) Evan and msb with 1,559
7. eponymous coward, 1,361
8. ray 1,117
9. Jason, 1,058
10. LB, 787
* this was not a last-minute drive, obviously, and yes, that means I’m responsible for 4% of all comments
** and Corco is 3%
*** Thomsen, no ‘p’
Top searches not obviously people looking for USSM*
1. Kenji Jojima
2. Mariner
3. Jeff Clement
4. Lastings Milledge
5. Safeco Field
6. Felix Hernandez
7. Daisuke Matsuzaka
8. Andruw Jones contract
9. Cameron Maybin
10. Jennifer Pankratz**
* ie, overall 1 “uss mariner”, 2 “ussmariner” 3 “u.s.s. mariner” 4 “ussmariner.com”
Most annoying search engine
Yahoo! crawlers sucked 2% of our total bandwith this year. Way to be. People who came here through Google outnumbered Yahoo about 5:1