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Well, it has been 19 years & 1 month since I started this WordPress Blog in October of 2007, the year my beloved Red Sox called up CF Jacoby Ellsbury, whom I dubbed “the human spark plug”. After 2,679 posts/articles published on this site (this being 2,680), I have personally written 741 (742 including this one), we are moving the site to Substack within the next 3 weeks.
We saw our most submitted articles between 2008-2012 when we were publishing between 20-35 articles per month, we started adding part-time writers as early a 2008 to the point where we had over 20 contributors a month (some were fellow baseball bloggers looking to increase their readership … and I wanted the material for the site). I thought this would free me up to writing more in-depth research material, but that never materialized. Instead, I became an editor and content manager and began to actually write less.
In December of 2015 there were no articles published to the site for the first time since the site was created. The following year saw 2 months without publishing an article, but that didn’t happen again from May 2016 through March of 2018 (the only month that year that didn’t see an article published. We maintained publishing articles every month once again (albeit at a lesser number than we use to) until May of 2024 – we had 5 months of o’fers that year. Then the wheels starting falling off in 2025 and we went o’fer7 of the 1st 8 months of the year (we published 2 articles in May). 2026, while being better for me personally, saw the site hit rock bottom and I seriously considered shutting it down for good after 19 years … just 1 year shy of the 20 year mark!
Instead, after some serious thought and some inspiration from a former contributor (who posted 17 articles with us during our heyday), we are only leaving WordPress after 19 years. The move to Substack will allow me to add features I couldn’t pull off on my own! I will probably only post 1 or 2 articles per week there, but I will add features like a forum, called Chat, it has it’s own version of a social media feed (much like X/Twitter) called Notes and I will likely start a video podcast once a month after I get more familiar with Substack. You should still be able to find me at www.baseballreflections.com as I am bringing my domain with me! These feature are all included in Substack and should connect me to readers like never before which is what excites me the most!
I will be joining the likes of Baseball Substackers such as Joe Posnanski, Will Carroll, Molly Knight, Doug Glanville, Craig Calcaterra, Sam Miller, Andrew Parker & Staff from Beyond the Monster, Will Leitch & Rob Bradford’s Baseball Isn’t Boring. Not that I am to be spoken of in the same breath as these writers, but just to say that I am in good company moving to Substack. Other notable baseball blogs & bloggers have already made the move to Substack’s baseball community like Craig’s “Cup of Coffee”, The Newberg Report (by Jamey Newberg), Nats Journal, from SB Nation, Down to Black and The Bandwagon; not to mention my friend’s site C70 at the Bat.
As a heads up and in full disclosure, most of my archives & possibly the podcast may be only accessible by a tiered subscription, but we will have to see. It may be the only way for me to generate some income from the site without accepting ad-based articles which use to help pay for the site to remain open (it use to pay for annual web hosting & domain fees).
Hope to see you at my new home on Substack soon – look me up at www.baseballreflections.com starting in December or just look up Baseball Reflections in the Substack Baseball Community!
