Few times are as symbolic in the life of the average American adolescent as a person’s 21st birthday. You’re finally allowed to legally drink, which removes pretty much the last legal boundary between you and adults.
My 21st birthday was yesterday, and now I have the full rights of an adult. I suppose I can’t run for President at my age, but the prospect of me as President is nearly as terrifying as having a third term for George W. Bush, so that’s probably for the best.
It feels cool to be 21—it’s been a long 21 years, and now here I am. And yet, I’ve come to the sudden, terrifying realization that I now have to act the part.
Coinciding rather neatly with this sort of “watershed moment” of my 21st birthday is my ascent to lead writer of this site. Wally passed the torch onto me just a few days ago, and since then, I’ve been busy not only getting used to the job, but immediately overseeing the rather large project of moving Call to the Pen to its new location.
How’s that for a “welcome to adulthood” moment?
When Wally first told me he was going over to Twins coverage and leaving Call to the Pen to me, I was both excited and terrified. It’s always exciting to be rewarding for good, hard work with a promotion of some kind, but at the same time, I’ve never, ever had to deal with overseeing anyone but myself.
I’m grateful to Wally, co-MLB Director (and former CttP columnist!) John Parent, and the FanSided founders for putting their trust in me to lead CttP into an exciting new chapter. I’m also very grateful to them for helping me out with a lot of things behind the scenes and allowing me to focus on what I do best—writing good baseball articles.
As for me, I’ve resolved to grab the bull by the horns (yay clichés!) as best I can and do everything in my power to propel this site forward. I’ve had a sort of unique experience and role here for the past few months: while I’ve been Wally’s sounding board on a lot of issues with getting everything running smoothly with the staff, I’ve also been part of the staff he’s trying to get to run smoothly. So I have an intimate familiarity with the perspectives of the different roles of the staff here at CttP, and I spent a good amount of my 21st birthday weekend brainstorming for how to make everyone as happy as possible.
So, enough about my own personal “OMG I HAVE AUTHORITY!” moment. You, as a reader, probably can’t stomach over 500 words of that. Let’s get to what matters to you—the future of Call to the Pen.
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Since its inception in March 2010, Call to the Pen hasn’t occupied the mainstream platform that it was originally supposed to. It was supposed to be a sort of flagship, showing the best writing talent on the FanSided MLB Network while also providing unbiased coverage of the big MLB stories. Too often, though, it simply acted like a 31st team site. The writing talent’s been here, and the articles have, by and large, been thorough and excellent. Still, though, there’s been a looming feeling that Call to the Pen was just in its own remote corner of FanSided, rather than at the central location it was originally conceived to occupy.
The team sites at FanSided have been growing by leaps and bounds recently, so as they settled in, improving the general coverage and giving it a wider audience moved further and further up the priorities list.
And here we are.
Since I took over as site lead a mere four days ago, the MLB Directors and I have been in near-constant communication about improvements to make. At the top of the list for all of us was moving the site to a more noteworthy location. That’s why we’re now at fansided.com/baseball—we’re now directly linked up to the FanSided homepage, finally giving FanSided’s general MLB coverage the prominent location it needs.
With the relocation of the site comes a convenient opportunity to retool everything we felt could/should be upgraded. The biggest change is in our staff and article setup.
Unlike the team sites, we’re going to have three categories of staff at Call to the Pen. I’ll be heading things up as site lead (and the glitzy new title of “FanSided MLB Editor,” to boot!), and below me will be the positions of Staff Writer and Columnist.
If you’ve read CttP much in the past, you know about Columnists—they write once a week, on the same day every week. As it stands now, Erin, Alex, and Michael will be continuing their regularly scheduled columns.
Staff Writers are a different beast. They’ll be posting at least twice a week about whatever they feel like posting about—sort of like I did in my old CttP role. Having more committed hands on deck may even allow us to take yet another stab at wide-scale transaction analysis, but given the amount of false starts CttP’s had on that front, I’m not making any promises.
If you’ve grown attached to the old CttP staff, don’t fret—they’re all staying on (save Wally, of course, and even he may stay on in some role—that’s up in the air). As a matter of fact, both Justin Klugh and Steve Engbloom will be stepping up their coverage. Steve will be continuing his Olde Man’s Tavern column on Fridays while occasionally posting about other things on the side, while Justin will be spewing and ranting over twice as often now! What could be better?
We’re also on the lookout for adding more staff if we can. And hey, if you want to write about general baseball and think you’re up to the task, don’t hesitate to shoot me an inquiry email at no.more.quad.a@gmail.com.
Nolan Writin’ lead writer Stacy Smith has already agreed to come aboard as a Staff Writer, and I couldn’t be more excited about adding Stacy to the staff.
We’re also changing the categories used at CttP. Rather than sorting by column title, we’ll be sorting by topical area (stats, prospects, history, etc.) which will allow for related pieces to be grouped together and removes the nebulous titles about half the CttP staff were working under before. Since Staff Writers won’t have “columns” so much as simply covering whatever comes up, having everything sorted by column title simply wasn’t going to work with the new CttP. I’ll be attempting to do some nifty things with categories in the coming weeks, but I just want to get the site running smoothly as is before we go making even more changes.
Never has the future of Call to the Pen been more exciting for me and for the staff here. With the new platform hooked directly up to the FanSided homepage and a fantastic team of writers, several of whom are now more committed than ever to CttP, we feel like 2011 is going to be a huge year. I know I can’t wait for pitchers and catchers to report!