Housecleaning

First of all, The Common Man and Bill want to offer our hearty congratulations to the San Francisco Giants and all of their fans. Having lived through a couple World Championships of our own, TCM and Bill remember the euphoria that comes in the afterglow, and don’t begrudge anyone that.  Go nuts.

So ends the first season for us at The Platoon Advantage. And, frankly, it’s been a rousing success. Traffic is up. The SweetSpot Network has made important strides. We've made terrific friends, including our euphoric Giants blogger pals at Bay City Ball and 8th Inning Weirdness, our pal Jason Rosenberg and his band of merry bloggers at It's About the Money, Stupid, our fellow Twins-wonk Nick Nelson and the terrific Nick's Twins Blog, and all the other terrific guys on the SweetSpot Network (including our proud papa and benefactor, Rob Neyer). 

And the content has been, if we may say so, excellent. We've expanded the site, posting more often about more topics.  We've branched out into podcasting with our good friend Larry Granillo, of Wezenball.com.  And we've debuted new features that have generated a lot of excitement on excellent sites like Rob Neyer's Sweetspot blog, HardballTalk.com,  Baseball Think Factory, and others.  We are proud of the work we’ve done, and plan to keep providing you with excellent analysis of baseball’s past, present, and future on a regular basis. We’re going to keep posting, so we hope that you’ll keep visiting.

There is one quick programming note for this offseason that is important to keep in mind, however. We’re scaling back The SweetSpot Roundups until Pitchers and Catchers report. Reflecting what we think will be fewer posts around the Network, starting next week we’re cutting back from five days a week to two, with an option to increase to three if it looks like we’re missing things. This will make our wives happy, for one thing. For now, the Roundups will occur on Tuesdays and Fridays.

We have a lot of thanking that we'll want to do individually for all the success, but most of all we want to thank the readers who have continued to visit The Platoon Advantage for the fresh, reasoned perspective, historical context, and occasionally obnoxious third-person rambling that it brings.  We built this thing they call blog because we wanted to connect with smart, funny, and active readers, and I think we've done that.  We hope to do it a lot more this offseason and all through the 2011 season and we want you to be with us the whole way.  So if you have suggestions for improving the site, we're all ears.  Send us an email or a tweet, and we'll look into it, steal your idea, and maybe give you credit if we're feeling generous (though we'll definitely each send you a personalized thank you email that you can print out, frame, and put on your wall).

In the meantime, sit yourselves down around the old Hot Stove, because we’ve got at least 142 free agents to pour through, and God knows how many trades to make fun of over the next four months.  Everybody back to work!