Fantasy Baseball Crackerjacks: 2012 in Review
By Clave Jones
This website is barely over a year old, so if we do a “year in review” we’re really picking up the story from the beginning.
Nash and I have been buddies for years, spending a lot of time working with teenagers back in the day. Nash and Dixon were friends from growing up, but Dixon and I hadn’t (and still haven’t) met face-to-face. I share this because we’d both consider one another great friends now and it’s a story of how a simple fantasy baseball website can build friendships.
We’ve certainly made many friendships in 2012. We’ve connected with other fantasy baseball writers via Twitter and Facebook, many of which have gone from professional acquaintances to legitimate friendships, if not of the face-to-face variety. I think many of you understand what I’m talking about if you spend a lot of time on Twitter.
We’ve also become acquainted with many of our readers, as several of them had a question to “Ask Nash” or shared their thoughts in the comments. Thank you, readers, and your numbers are growing by the day! Look out, 2013.
We’ve given you plenty of fantasy baseball words to read in 2012. We’re coming up on 450 posts, which met our goal [Achievement unlocked!] of posting at least once daily, even if we often take it easy on the weekends.
Many of those posts were player profiles, fantasy baseball rankings or projections, but many of them were strategy pieces, and we hope you felt like they made you a better fantasy baseball player. Remember, we’re writing for you so please know that you can give your suggestions for future topics any time.
We also released our Fantasy Baseball Draft Kit in 2012 and plan to do so again in 2013. It was downloaded over 1700 times and we’re pretty stoked about that, considering we had just barely turned the key on the site. Again, let us know what you’d like to see moving forward.
There isn’t really a “middle class” in the world baseball blogging. You have the upper class giants. Everyone knows those sites and there is no competing in that space. Then you have literally tens of thousands of sites that are updated about once a month, if that.
To build an audience in the middle class in the baseball blogging world you have to make friends. We did that with the guys from the Dear Mr. Fantasy Baseball Podcast. We’re excited to be partnering with them. It’s a great show and we’re happy to point our listeners to it. We also joined the Yardbarker Network. Yardbarker let’s you play among the giants, without feeling like you have to give up too much of who you are or else you’ll get stepped on. These partnerships have helped us jump into the middle class of baseball websites and we’re thankful for that.
Finally, we added a contributing writer in 2012. Mims has been cranking out great stuff for us and we’re glad to have him on board. It’s been a great first year for us and we’re thankful for each and every reader. We get to write about fantasy baseball, which is something that love to do. Look out, year two.