Count Me In

Oh hi.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to take a whole season off, it’s just that the whole process of moving 14 years of stuff to a new configuration took a while.

15I sort of got stuck halfway.  As I mentioned before, the architecture supporting the MBTN database (that is, the gears generating the who-wore-what-when lists; and how they were set up to display) was in such need of renovation I felt the best thing to do was outsource its placement: So a year ago I donated all of my uni-number data to the Ultimate Mets Database and I have been updating the information there as it comes as always. I think it looks and works great. My friend at the UMDB helped set that up and all I do anymore is plug in the data, which given my level of tech expertise, is the perfect task for me.

Moving the remainder of the content to a more appropriate format was the next hurdle, but the sheer volume of it was intimidating and had the effect of chilling investment in the “old” site: Why contribute to a site that you know is doomed for eventual destruction?

At the same time I was also struggling a bit with defining the purpose of a web site about uni numbers when the “news” aspect of it has been slaughtered by the 24-hour news cycle and the data resides elsewhere. When I started doing this 15 years ago, there wasn’t a reliable source for this kind of information. Today, anyone who needs to know what number the latest Met is wearing knows it hours before I can update, and the context — who was the last guy to have worn this number for the Mets etc etc — is picked clean by Twitterers with gigantic followings, almost always without credit. I’m not mad about this so much: Just feeling a bit less relevant in the grand scheme.

Add to that the Mets’ own irrelevancy, demands of being a dad and having a job, and well, before you knew it I’d missed a whole season. I’m sorry about that, and I’m especially sorry if the abrupt lack of activity led anyone to worry about me or my family: We’re totally OK other than the fact we’re still Mets fans. Thanks for your concern!

So now what? Well, I’d begun having the urge to write about the Mets again and with a few days off around Thanksgiving began the process of transferring old posts to a WordPress format. I did all this manually, which took forever, and I tried to preserve all the comments since that’s where so much action took place. I re-imagined the tags and categories. There’s still some work to be done. It doesn’t look great all the time and some of the links you’ll find no doubt are dodgy, but I left the spam behind and you’re welcome to add to the conversation again.

How’d you guys like 2013? I’m sad that the injuries piled up and served to undo so much of the progress we otherwise made; and disappointed of course that our team’s two biggest problems (first base and shortstop) were things we hadn’t anticipated. That’s baseball.

More to come…

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4 comments

  1. Stubby says:

    You’ll never be irrelevant. This is my go-to source, and the only reliable one (since B-R seems to publish spring training numbers as though they were regular season numbers and Wikipedia is, well, Wikipedia). Post when you can and don’t worry about us; we’ll be here waiting any time you feel the urge. Now I gotta learn the new navigation and, oh, has anyone said what jersey number Miguel Socolovich will be wearing? (It’s funny cause its true.)

  2. Howie R says:

    Welcome back, I definitely missed going onto this website every time a rookie was brought up last year or when a trade was made. Was always good for a uniform number discussion. Happy new year and look forward to you posting the spring training numbers in a few weeks…..

  3. ShortyNJ says:

    Welcome back, Jon. We’ve missed you!
    ~ Shorty

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