Eric Breier was kind enough to write a piece about MLBTR for the North County Times yesterday. We received four out of five mouses, which seems pretty solid to me.
Eric’s constructive criticism:
– There’s no readily available information on the site administrator. You can e-mail some guy named Tim, who presumably is running the site. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but since this person is giving a lot of opinion on the baseball rumors being posted, it would be nice to know his credentials. Is it some baseball-loving grandmother in Maine, or could it be Jack McKeon trying to relive his "Trader Jack" days?
– It would help if the time and date of the postings was a little more prominent.
Eric is right on both counts. I will have to work on his second suggestion, but the first one shouldn’t be too tough. I need to create an "about page" so people know who’s cranking out these rumors. In the meantime, here’s a few paragraphs about me and the site.
MLBTradeRumors.com came about in November of 2005 – you can read about its origins here. My name is Tim Dierkes. I’m 25 and married to a wonderful woman named Agnes (good story about how we met, maybe another time though). Agnes and I just bought a house in Roselle, IL. I have a full-time job outside of MLBTR.
I am just a regular guy who enjoys writing. As you can see here I prefer to do it in a conversational style rather than anything formal (I was a business major at UIUC, so I don’t have any special journalism or writing skills. Favorite book is Catcher In The Rye by the way). The one topic that I’ve always been obsessed with is baseball hot stove. As a lifelong Cubs fan it’s often been more interesting than the regular season. So I combined the two into a hobby, and accidentally helped fill the MLB rumor niche on the web.
While I’m always trying to grow my own network of sources, the vast majority of rumors here come from published sources. The breakdown might be something like 90% newspaper articles, 5% radio reports (only ones I heard myself or got from trusted readers), and 5% trusted blogs and my own sources. There are a handful of blogs that, in my mind, have established credibility for the occasional legitimate rumor.
So think of MLBTR as an aggregator of all worthwhile trade and free agent baseball rumors (and a filter of all the crap). I hope you will also find my analysis and the commenters’ debates and insight to be entertaining.
