Hello Goodbye

If you've been redirected from my mlblogs site, Welcome! I sincerely appreciate the effort you've made to get here, and will try to make it worth your while.

Here you will find Diamondhacks goodness (is that an oxymoron?), while mlblogs scrambles to figure out how to get Alyssa Milano (and eventually, hundreds of zero priority blogs like mine) back online with something resembling post 2004 functionality.

How can you take seriously the customer service intentions of any organization that would roll out an entirely new software platform (as opposed to enhancements on an existing structure), on the eve of peak user interest - then instruct long time users to patiently partner through these self-imposed technical nightmares during the sport's historic Opening Weekend?

Nightmares? Well, they took my site completely down for sixty hours with absolutely no advance warning, even though this was obviously in the works for some time. When the blogs gradually came back up (I use "up" advisedly), there's no means by which a surfer can even find most blogs (icluding mine, of course), either through MLBlogs homepage, or through each other's blogs, because the sidebar functionality (where we've linked to each other for years) is currently inoperable on the new platform. So, after three years of networking and crosslinking on MLBlogs and building a small but loyal readership, the only way anyone can now find me on this grand network is by googling Diamondhacks, the same as if there was no network at all and if I had never blogged a word in my life.

If MLB is sincere in their stated intention to build a viable customer base of bloggers, let's be honest. In the real world, in any reasonably competitive business environment, clowns responsible for pulling the rug out from underneath the existing base in this fashion would be fired for gross incompetence. So either a) these clowns should be fired, b) MLB doesnt operate in the real world, or c) these stated intentions should be called into question.

To be clear, this isnt a reasonably competitive business environment - MLB, while hardly a monopoly, enjoys some embarassingly huge advantages in the baseball blogging world. That's a big reason I've stayed on through the horrendous customer service, in hopes MLB would eventually exploit those advantages to build a stronger network than the empty space between Alyssa Milano's boobs. And maybe someday they will. Maybe this is the start of that 'something big' we've hoped for and been led on for three years now. Where a lone voice (better ones have long since left) whose only inside connection is the internet hookup in my den, and who's fresh enough to occasionally be picked up by national publications, could maybe enjoy just a morsel (envision Alyssa Milano's pinky toenail ) of MLB's huge promotional promise.

At some point, months and months - indeed years - of non existent promotion and lousy customer service cant be separated from MLB's larger strategic intention to provide just that. I'll keep an eye on the new platform, but for now I'll prefer to be lied to as an outsider.

I'm so sick of talking about this garbage. Tomorrow is Opening Day and I'm going to talk about baseball. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Here.