A Very Important Announcement Concerning Your Internet Browsing Future

by The Common Man and BILL

Once upon a time, there was a blog. It was a small site with few visitors, probably because the proprietor of said blog wrote in the Third Person a lot and some people find that off-putting. But others don’t, and these others, including Rob Neyer of ESPN.com, Larry Granillo of Wezen-ball.com, Craig Calcaterra of HardballTalk.com (formerly of Shysterball), and Jason Rosenberg of It's About the Money, Stupid began linking to it and helping it carve out a small following.

That blog, of course, is this blog. And that proprietor is The Common Man. And if you’re a reader of this blog, you’re probably also familiar with The Common Man’s good friend Bill, and his site The Daily Something. Bill and The Common Man once had a blog together on LiveJournal, then went their separate ways. They got back into the blog game a couple years back, and Bill made the big leap to Bloguin in September of 2009. And now, Bill and TCM are together again to announce the start of a new venture: this one.

Recently, TCM and Bill were each approached by the aforementioned Rob Neyer to join The SweetSpot Network on ESPN.com. Rob is a pioneer of baseball writing on the Internet, and has been a champion of new writers for a long time. His work in the late 1990s (such as his player A vs. player B comparisons) helped shape The Common Man and Bill as skeptical baseball fans who tested, rather than accepted the widely held truisms of the game. So when Rob asked them to join up, TCM and Bill were very interested.

Because they had been looking for a way to collaborate more closely for a long time, TCM and Bill realized this offered a terrific opportunity. So we have allied, Avengers-style, to create a new blog in which, together, we can do...well, pretty much the same things we've been doing separately. This will allow us to post more often about more topics, and inspire you to click over more often. In light of this change and reflecting our partnership, this very site, The Common Man.com, has been reborn as The Platoon Advantage. This will be a general baseball blog dedicated to the ideas that Bert Blyleven was better than Jack Morris, Dwight Evans was better than Jim Rice, and Pete Rose should never be allowed within 100 feet of the Hall of Fame with or without buying a ticket. The Common Man and Bill believe that steroids are bad, but not any worse than what Eddie Harris used to throw in Major League. We aren't math geeks, but we believe strongly in the power of the math geek, and love baseball history. You can read more about us in our bios here. Also, we have two new posts up for today as The Common Man picks an all star team of players who should never be allowed to grow facial hair again, and Bill argues that the pitiful Pirates remain in good hands with Neil Huntington. For now, you will be able to find us at the old address (www.the0common0man.blogspot.com) or at our new address (www.theplatoonadvantage.com). You can also follow TCM and Bill on Twitter and/or become a fan of our brand-new Facebook page and get direct links to these articles along with other assorted hilarity.

We are incredibly excited about this new opportunity and want to thank Rob for having faith in us and you for reading. We’ll see you in the future. Excelsior!