U.S.S. Mariner T-shirt challenge
Many of you fine readers have volunteered to help us make up some T-shirts to sell as Officially Endorsed USSM Swag. I hereby accept your offer.
Short version: as you’ve noticed, our poor server’s falling over pretty much every morning as our rabid readership gets to work and, instead of contributing to their company’s stockholder value, loads the page. We need to upgrade. Upgrading to something that’ll stand up through the 2006 season is going to be really, really expensive. Don’t worry about how expensive just yet, but obviously, it’s above the threshold of what we can continue to pay out of pocket, so we’re looking to try and scrape up cash.
Here’s all the stuff you can put a design on. Anyone coming up with a cool hooded sweatshirt design gets extra points from me (which I will repay in the form of beer).
Here are the design templates.
I’m sure you’re asking: “Derek, wouldn’t this have been a great idea to do, say, before the holiday season, when quality USSM merchandise would have been the perfect gift for young and old Mariner fans?”
Yes. Yes it would. But I would respond “Is the spirit of genorosity and giving really constrained by time? Isn’t a gift, and especially a gift that displays the intelligence and considerate nature of the giver, even more meaningful when it’s not given due to a sense of obligation?”
So here’s the process:
– Work out some cool idea. Do not, whatever you do, do something that infringes on the Seattle Mariners’ trademarks, copyrights, or anything. Beyond our respect for the team’s creative work and knowing they make quality scratch selling that stuff, we don’t want to get sued, and you don’t want to get sued either.
– Send us the design. Mention what you want it slapped on — don’t assume we’ll figure it out.
– At some point, we’ll sort them out, either in public or among ourselves.
– If we’re interested, we’ll send you some official-looking form with a lot of legalese on it so we can use your design.
– As compensation, you get the satisfaction of a job well done, all the publicity we can slide your way, free entry to a USSM event in the next year, and a year’s subscription to the site. Seriously, there’s no money in this. We’re totally leeching off your creative talents.
We haven’t decided if we want to do limited-run topical designs (“I can outpitch Jarrod Washburn — where’s my $35 million?”) or not yet. If we decide to try that, I’ll post details.
Registration’s up
You can register here. Once you’re registered, you can change your password and user info here. The site attempts to set a cookie so that you stay logged in. If you’re blocking cookies, you may find yourself in trouble.
On naming — we will be, as much as we are able, harshly enforcing naming conventions as outlined in the guidelines. You can’t register as someone famous, or a name which is close to someone famous or easily confused with someone famous, unless you are that famous person.
On tech support — we cannot offer tech support on user logins right now. If you’re having problems, let us know, of course, but there’s no 24-hour service level agreement with this any more than if you found yourself in the moderation queue because you’re out of AOL.
Comments up/down, new search
Commenting availability’s going to be erratic while I’m tinkering behind the scenes. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Update: tinkering continues
In other news, the old site search bar in the upper right’s been removed in favor of a Google search box, which you’ll see on the left-hand column. Among other problems, the site’s search was fairly good at finding posts, but if you wanted to dig up an old comment you vaguely remember as really interesting, you were SOL. So this tweak is dedicated to Rusty and Jim Osmer.
USSM Labs — we’re like a less-innovative 3M, if 3M only had four people and they were all Mariner fans.
Comment registration or something like it
When we allowed comments, people told me that leaving them open for anyone was a recipe for disaster, that eventually the level of noise would drown out intelligent discussion. I disagreed.
At first, I was right. Comments rocked.
Then for a long time comments were okay. In general, the first batch was okay and then the quality declined quickly. Some comment threads ran long and excellent, others short and brutally bad.
Today, I grant those who cautioned me against this that they were eventually right. Our growth has outpaced our ability to police the comments and try and keep them worth reading. We simply don’t have time or people.
In addition, the strain that comments and many people hitting reload over and over puts on our little server, compared to the value they add, makes this choice a lot easier: would the 90% of users who come to USSM and read the articles prefer to see a database error during peak hours but get the comments, or more consistently get a page served to them without comments?
Further, from our emails and talking to readers in person, there seem to be many people besides us who have been dismayed with the decline in comment quality. And at USSM, we’re all about customer service. Well, not really, but you know what we mean.
It’s a testament to the quality of our readership that comments were able to hold out this long: as you’re well-aware, other sites have seen their discussions descend into nightmarish pits of insults and ignorance and never recovered. This won’t happen here.
I hope (and believe) that this won’t be the destruction of the user community and, if anything, should strengthen it even as it makes it slightly harder to stop by and post: it will stop entirely impersonation posts, for instance, which you probably haven’t seen because that’s pretty much an instant site ban once I figure them out. But I’m getting off the point.
Right now, registration’s required to comment, and registration’s closed until we can figure out the best way to proceed with that. The outage should be pretty short.
We may not end up going to registration, I should note. I don’t know what happens yet. We’re acknowledging that the current state of things is not sustainable, and something’s going to change.
Comments, questions, requests for articles, as always, are welcome.
Meet-up Wrap-up
The book event with Baseball Prospectus’ Jonah Keri was last night, and was thoroughly enjoyable. It was good to see some folks again, and good to meet others for the first time.
— We heard about (and saw the table of contents for) the forthcoming BP book Baseball Between the Numbers, about which Jonah is enthused. If he’s excited about it, then so am I.
— Jonah brought photocopied handouts of the latest PECOTA projections for Jarrod Washburn. Unfortunately, he’s now facing federal charges for distribution of obscenity. [rimshot]
— I got a bunch of great post ideas from the attendees, including a summation of Bill Bavasi’s record so far and the role of “intangibles” in player evaluation.
— Guests Jon Paul Morosi of the P-I and Larry Stone of the Times listened in, no doubt preparing parallel features on myself and Jonah.
Due to the unexpected outburst of a Dixieland band, a brief softshoe did materialize. No karaoke, though. Many thanks to everyone who showed up.
Everett and comments
I’ve deleted 100 comments easily in the last couple of days. I know the other authors have done some policing as well. Some get notes, a lot just go disappear like a thief in a mazy of twisty passages, all alike. This has generated some complaints and a lot of numbering drift at times, and so I’d like to say this:
Maybe 5% were unreasonably foul, error-filled, or obscene
5% were pro/anti-religion (or bait for such), which, like several other topics, lead to huge flame wars
90% were of the “you [supporters/haters] are all [stupid/blind/moralists/apologists] whatever].” And that doesn’t fly*. Some of it’s survived, either because there’s some reasonable thought behind it (“I think one of the reasons we’re disappointed is we wanted more…”) and some of it because we’re unpaid.
I’ll spare everyone my standard self-flogging (ooooh it sucks to have to delete each one blah blah blah) and just say: the disclaimer by the submit button’s there for a reason. And as always, if you’ve got complaints about the way the site’s run, please email us.
It is my hope that having pretty made the case for not signing Everett, and said that I think it’s a terrible signing, we can move on to things that actually make us happy, and if that has to be kittens, baby pandas, and other things cute, well… okay.
* and yes, I know I say this as someone who once rabidly accussed Ichiro RoY opponents who argued against Japanese candidates of being xenophobes. It’s been a long path.
Site outage looms
We’re having hosting issues and things may get hairy here shortly.
On the bright side, we still haven’t ever run an ad.
Update: turns out that was fairly prophetic, as the site immediately started to crash. If you’re reading this, you may be really lucky or we’re back up for everyone.
Update: looks like we’re up. Go about your rumor mongering and topic hijacking as normal.
Periodic USSM comment update
Here’s the state of USSM commenting: Read more
It’s alive… ALIVE!
Funny thing happened over the course of the past two days — I updated the Big Board for the first time since April. If you’re new to the site, the Big Board is/was a full organizational depth chart, and one of the things I think made the USS Mariner unique among M’s blogs (and MLB blogs in general).
When we moved out to New York in April, I went without easy Internet access for about a month and just never got around to updating it. Baseball America’s lack of statistics didn’t help the cause any. So rather than have it be horribly out of date, I simply removed the link from the left nav. I’m pleased to report that both link and Big Board are back (and they’re baaad).
A few notes: The Big Board represents, more or less, the way the season ended and is based on Baseball America’s team rosters. This means you’ve got wacky placements like Michael Garciaparra in Tacoma, despite the fact that he spent the entire season at Inland Empire. So please no complaining about that. I also make no guarantees about position players — I mostly just threw guys in where I thought they fit. Starting rotations are much better, listing the five guys who started the most games.
It’s not perfect, but at least now you can see all the players who are in the system.
I’m sure there will be questions and corrections, so away we go.
Ask your doctor if steroids are right for you
Hi all, Derek here. Given the horrible train wreck of a recent thread, I wanted to say a few words about the site’s policy on steroid posting and commenting, and how it’s not working.
It’s really awful. I want to open and honest about this: it doesn’t work. Starting years ago, we essentially had a line which was “no steroid speculation”. So Jamal Strong tests positive, that’s fine. Saying anyone is taking steroids based on appearance gets deleted. This becomes muddied quickly: we’ve been lax on Jason Giambi and Jason Giambi-related speculation though he has not openly admitted that he’s used steroids, because his apology (which did not include an admission) and other information, while I’ve killed Barry Bonds comments because Bonds has denied taking anything, accidentally or otherwise (I’ve written about what a load of hooey that is, too).
So Barry Bonds, until he tests positive or admits something, gets moderator protection, while Giambi doesn’t? That’s crazy. I freely admit this sucks.
The other big issue is that we’ve essentially tolerated what appears to be steroid speculation in some cases for one reason or another, and this has generated much hostility and resentment.
In particular, take Morse. Morse got suspended twice. A USSM author made some comments about how it was a personal thing and they weren’t going to say anything about it. Huge protests. Later on, stuff starts to come out, it’s a huge mess, and now we’re where we are.
Part of this comes from a question we asked a long time ago: if we know something but can’t reveal where it came from, or can reveal only partial information, should we say anything? The overwhelming response was “reveal what you can when you can”. But let’s say I know some Mariner player’s tested positive and his case is in appeal because (I don’t know) I’m on the arbitration panel or something. What’s my obligation now? What’s the tasteful thing to do?
And at the same time, there’s a great amount of hostility in those who do disagree with the “reveal what you can when you can” policy. Some, like Mr. Thomsen, have deep-seated fears about the nature of disclosure drawn from a journalistic background. Other people think we’re acting like know-it-alls and resent that. Both have good reasons, though obviously I’m a little more sympathetic to the first one, if only because they’re much more polite about it.
If we know something, we’re screwed unless we reveal everything or nothing, which is sometimes neither possible or appropriate.
Which leads to the second untenable situation, which is that Dave has said things I haven’t deleted whereas if some random passer-by left them, I’d have deleted them. This is entirely true, and a valid criticism of the way we (and in particular, the way I) have handled moderation and steroid speculation comments. And, given the conflicting demands, I have no idea how to resolve it. From my standpoint, if Dave wants to say “I think you’ll find that if you open up T.J. Bohn’s head you’ll find he’s a android made by a secretive cybernetics company in Korea” I’d take his word for it. And if he says “T.J. Bohn will never be injured in a normal way, but I can’t tell you why because cyborgs will kill my family” I’ll shrug and be okay with that.”
This leads to a bizarre set of site policies: if an author decides they want to stake their good name on something, that carries as much weight as a public admission of guilt by a player or a positive drug test. That’s clearly nutty, and I understand entirely why people see this as hypocritical, or patronizing, or arrogant. Because it is.
But I don’t know how we can resolve the problems. Given the basic parameters:
– No steroid speculation (with a pretty stringent definition of what that includes), for both site management and site existence reasons
– Steroid discussion of known positives/admissions okay
– Should disclose known information
– Would like to keep comments viable
I don’t see a way out of either of these problems. Anyone with a knack for puzzles, please drop me a line. In the meantime, until we figure out this Gordian Knot, please accept my admission that this sucks, and know that I know how fully it sucks. I hope that understanding why this sucks is in some way helpful in reconciling why USSM can seem badly screwed up when it comes to handling steroid issues, but (I hope, anyway) pretty reasonable on other issues.