Happy First Birthday, Marinerds

I can't believe it's been exactly a year now that I've been writing this thing. So rather than talking more about how awesome the A's were this weekend and how lousy the Mariners were, I figure I'll talk about how awesome the blogosphere is and how much fun the last year has been overall.

I'm not sure exactly where the story starts on how Marinerds came to exist. I used to write about baseball stuff fairly often on my normal web journal, to the point that a lot of my friends were getting sick of me talking about baseball so much. Then in December 2004, I went to a USS Mariner pizza feed, and a bunch of us were standing around talking about the state of the blogosphere and whatnot. I don't remember who else was in that particular circle except Dave Cameron and Moira Koskey, although I think Conor Glassey was as well. I'd only been reading USSM for a couple months at that point and didn't know who a lot of people were.

Anyway, Moira said she'd been thinking of starting a blog because the Mariners didn't have any female bloggers, and Dave said something along the lines of "Hey, if some women decided they wanted to write a Mariners blog, we would TOTALLY love that. It would be really cool."

So, fast-forward to the spring, after my contract job out in Kirkland was up, and I had a lot of time on my job-hunting hands to either stay up all night watching Japanese baseball games, or just go down to Safeco a lot, and write things and read a lot and whatnot. I figured, what the heck, I'd separate out the baseball stuff from my normal web stuff so it'd stop driving my friends crazy.

I had a few vague ideas for blog names - I couldn't decide whether to go with something that evoked "female blogger" or with something that evoked "complete and utter dork". I got singled out a lot for being a giiiiiiiirl back when I was a computer science major in college, and it got old after a while. So instead, I thought up a few silly geeky blog names, and amazingly my first choice of "Marinerds" wasn't taken on blogspot, so I just went with that. (It's probably a good thing I didn't choose the female blogger aspect. I was thinking of being "Miss Swinganda".)

Since I didn't know whether I'd actually stick with writing it, I didn't really make a big deal out of it like "OMG CHECK OUT MY NEW BLOG!!1!1!!one" or anything. I did continue being a general smartass on the Mariners and Phillies blogs, only now I had an actual URL to link to my name with my comments. Somewhere along the line, I guess people started actually clicking on my name to see what the hell a "Marinerd" was, and for some reason, some of them even actually started coming here regularly to read my random goofy game reports and humor pieces and song parodies and whatnot.

The postseason happened. The offseason happened. Somehow I still managed to keep writing almost every day. And now we're back to the start of the season, and who knows what this year will bring?

Anyway, pardon me while I have a Dan Wilson moment and acknowledge a few people:

• The USS Mariner crew for being the best damn bloggers in town and just a group of awesome guys. I can't even begin to express how much they've been a help and an inspiration to the blogging experience. I've learned so much about baseball and writing and baseball writing from them. Simply put, this blog would not exist if not for USSM.
  
  
• The Lookout Landing guys for opening my brain to a lot of stuff like Win Expectancy charts. I learned over the last year that it's pretty hard to write witty game reports after just the games I attend, and Jeff writes 'em every day. The man's crazy.
  
  
• David and Jeremy over at Sports and Bremertonians for being the first M's blog that I know of that ever linked to me, back around Stitch'n'Pitch night.
  
  
• The Iron Tech for encouraging me to find my voice, as it were.
  
  
• Conor Glassey, for always reading my blog and running into me at games and telling me I was actually funny and not just on another planet.
  
  
• (Positive) Paul over at Mariners Morsels for photogeeking and putting up with me at Fan Fest, and always sharing the same weird sense of humor and the same appreciation of certain left-handed baseball players.
  
  
• (pdb) Paul at Nice Guys Finish Third for being the other half of the comics page in the metaphorical M's blogosophere newspaper.
  
  
• MSB for her fact-checking and providing endless webpage links I never would have found otherwise, and for being a fellow Jason Kendall fan.
  
  
• Moira, the aforementioned Mariner Housewife, for starting the whole M's blog-chick thing, and being even crazier than me (she named her son after Ichiro, after all)
  
  
• Bat-Girl for setting such a high bar for baseblog chicks to aspire to someday.
  
  
• Phloggers Jason, Greg, Tom and Tom and Tom (and others) for helping me keep up with my beloved Phillies, and giving me a place to drop in as a remote correspondent to Phlogadelphia from time to time. (The Phillies finally won a game today! YAY!)
  
  
• Gary Garland and Michael Westbay for being indispensable sources of Japanese baseball information; also Tokyo Sam for helping me look like less of an idiot when I translate things.
  
  
• Nick, Jeff, Oren, Brian, Josh, Megan, and any other number of friends who have had to put up with me at some games where I was so intent on scoring the game and scribbling notes for my game reports that I'd miss whole conversations like "Yeah. Mmhmm. What? He died? Really?"
  
  
• You. No, seriously, you, the person reading these words right now. I wouldn't be writing them if you weren't reading them. You guys have absolutely no idea how much it makes my day when someone tells me they enjoy reading this blog. So, thanks for everything. Seriously. Hopefully we'll still be here for a Marinerds Second Blogday.
  

See? Wasn't that better than reading about how the Mariners got owned by the Oakland pitching staff yet again? I thought so, too.