Lefty Specialist

Definitely #3 for me.

Ditto. I think we have a winner.

And I agree with the directional arrow!

I would think there are MLB restrictions on using that official logo.

The blue lettering needs to be more 'Met cap blue' rather than navy.

Another vote for Grand Central Mets. The 7 train even stops there.

This.

Well, I would think the forum name would be the overall site name. If it's, say, 'Mets Journal' then the forum would be 'Mets Journal Forum'. That seems pretty clear to me. You wouldn't name it the Crane Pool Forum any more than you would name it the Spanky and Our Gang Forum. It's all part of being a piece of the bigger entity.

Or maybe instead of Amazin' , they use Amazon'.

To maximize the SEO, I think it should be called the Amazin' Metropolitan Lindor Soto Mets Citifield Seaver GaryKeithRon Piazza Krane-Pool. Or the AMLSMCSGKRPKP for short

So we've been batting this around for 9 days and 8 pages. Most people who frequent this forum have weighed in by now one way or the other. Knowing that this old place won't be totally going away and will be a refuge if things go sideways is a BFD, as Joe Biden would say. A banner indicating the address of the new place would be needed, but that's sitemoving 101. It'll be easy to screen out BatMags if he decides to sneak in- we all know his style of writing and abuse, so he'd be picked up pretty quickly. It'd be nice to try to contact those who've fallen by the wayside over the past few years but i don't know if that's possible. I'm ready to load Granny, Jethro and Elly Mae into the truck at this point. It won't be what we had, but what we had is slowly dying, and there's at least a puncher's chance the new place will be better. It'd be nice to get things up and running by Opening Day so we can bitch and moan over things Metly at the new place. Again, just my .02.

So, Buzzfeed?

Oh well, not a cheapie. 3-0 Cards.

Tong looked sharp in the first, a little less so in the second., but two scoreless. Tong still looks like he's 16.

Gary Cohen and Kaity Tong announcing, with Mr. G as the sideline reporter. "Those winds out of the northwest at 16 miles an hour really held that ball in the park, Kaity"

Bleh. Nice to see a Tauchman HR. I think he'll be a useful addition. I know most of the pitchers today will never see the najor league roster, but jeez, those walks. It was like a horrifying replay of the second half of 2025.

I have a 1 pm appointment with our accountant to discuss our tax return. I will DVR it, however.

They're standard team sites. Articles, analysis, I'm sure there's a game preview and re-cap in season. They look to be clean and well-run. Yes, there are ads, but they don't seem overly intrusive. The forums are....eh. Of course, what can you talk about if you're a Marlins fan? We could probably provide a little je ne sais quoi if we were the Wal-Mart greeters at the new forum. It's inevitable that the CPFishness would get diluted over time. That's life.

I'm glad I taped it. I fast forwarded until there was a hit. So I was done in about 5 minutes.

I belong to a very esoteric collectors organization. They have a website and had a forum that had grown moribund after a few years. I'm also a member of a forum run by an outside group who was a little more 'out there' than the organization. Over time, the organization realized the worth of them and brought them into the tent. The forum link from the main organization's page linked to the outsider forum as they got far more traffic/engagement. It was a win-win for both. The organization didn't have to run the forum, and the outside group benefited from more eyeballs. The outsider group retained their name and you can access them totally separate from the organization. Now I can pretty much guess the answer here, but is that a possibility in this circumstance? Name changing would probably be neccessary, but does this kind of hybrid solution work?

I think BatMags chased away more than a few people all by himself over the years. Just saying.

Ben Rortvedt. Ahead of Senger on the depth chart and Alvarez and Torrens are bound to be hurt at some point in the season. Plus, I chuckle at the thought of Ralph Kiner trying to pronounce his name.

It's a fair point about growth. How does that happen? How did it work with TalkSox, and especially the Padre site you stood up from scratch? Do you staple fliers to telephone poles over faded pictures of lost cats? Or is there a process for stable growth? It's one thing to build a nice, shiny site, but it's another to populate it. The 40 or less of us will not keep the clicks coming. You seem willing to lose money on the site at least initially, so I gotta ask, who are your 'angel investors'? Online media is a money losing business, generally speaking. I know of sites much larger than DiomondCentric that are constantly begging for money or hiding things behind a subscriber wall. Now if you're doing this all on your own, kudos. But usually there's somebody with deep pockets somewhere. Again, no disrespect intended. But you're asking us to move from our old comfortable house where the plumbing leaks on occasion and the sidewalk is cracked to a new over-55 community that promises pickleball and a nice clubhouse. We wonder about the Homeowner's Assocoation and where the hidden pitfalls are.

Brock, you would have loved BatMags (not). I share some of Cowtipper's concerns. We've tried over the years to increase our numbers with little to no success. But giving control over to someone, no matter how well-intentioned, whose aim is to drastically increase the numbers necessarily means that the few dozen or so of us will be drowned out. You mentioned TalkSox as a comparison. They have an off-season discussion that goes for 165 pages. I mean, that's great engagement but it's an awful lot. I understand it's a business, but for us that's like going from a swimming pool to the Atlantic Ocean. It's still water, and you can still swim in it, but it's orders of magnitude bigger. Ben Grimm and Edgy are far too modest. This place would have died long ago without them. And yeah, pretty much anything is tolerated, but we're all adults here and we self-regulate pretty well. There are no teenagers or mouth-breathers here because they wouldn't be able to keep up with the bon mots and witty banter. That said, I'm not overly concerned about mods and admins, as long as they're not on Trump's payroll. However, every year our numbers do get a little smaller. I'm fully aware that it's not sustainable forever. I'm just not sure what's better; slow death by attrition or marching into something that can't be 'ours' by any definition. I'd probably go there if it comes to that but I also expect I'd eventually drift away because it just won't be the same.

Looked at some of the other sites including TalkSox and Fish on First, and I have a few questions. There's obviously a lot of articles being written on a daily or almost-daily basis. I know we have a couple of talented writers on this site, but that's a lotta work. Where would those articles (and videos) come from? I see that some general baseball articles appear on multiple forums, which is stretching your content wisely. I assume you're paying your contributors (and no, I'm not looking for a job). Does Raptive give you the ability to fund this site or are you eventually going to have subscriptions to access all content? I saw an uncomfortable number of Dulcolax ads, but at least they're not pop-ups that obscure content. You mentioned that the Blue Jays site is a revenue drag. Any thoughts of shutting it down? Are you willing to tolerate relentless snarky comments about 'Building the Ultimate Baseball Team with Anime Characters'? Because, dude, seriously... Back in the day I was on Mets Online. It got taken over by MLB, which turned it into one of its cookie-cutter sites and all the good people fled. I've also been on a Mets site that started promisingly but gradually withered away as fewer and fewer people participated. This site in its current incarnation has lasted a really long time- I've been here 15 years and I'm a noob. Folding it into something bigger (or using it as a base for something bigger) would inevitably dilute what we have here. Maybe if we all put asterisks next to our usernames we could find each other in the bigger Pool. So I don't know what the right answer is. Might just be my inbreeding.