Effective immediately, there shall be no stories or LTEs regarding politics whatsoever at this site. All LTEs that are political in nature posted after this entry will be deleted. Any user who persists in commenting on politics will be warned once and subsequent political postings will result in their accounts being deleted.
That is [...]

You may be asking, Why? Why, SBG, did you change the look of your site so much? What's with the colors? OMG, are you crazy?
Well, yes. Yes, I am. Glad you noticed.

Have you ever wanted to e-mail an SBG Nation Citizen just to chat about something, but didn't know their e-mail address? Well, I haven't because I have a list of email addresses that each of you gave to me when you registered to the site. But, I am loathe to hand those addresses [...]

I started this blog on July 17, 2004 and for the first five weeks or so I didn't have a counter on it. In that time I took the bar, went on vacation and didn't do all that much with it. Then, on August 23, 2004, I put a counter on the site [...]

The WGOM's server is acting up, in case you didn't notice. I don't know when it will be better, hopefully by gametime today. There's nothing I can do to correct the problem -- we're at the mercy of my ISP.

The WGOM's server is acting up, in case you didn't notice. I don't know when it will be better, hopefully by gametime today. There's nothing I can do to correct the problem -- we're at the mercy of my ISP.

I'm an old design engineer at heart. One of the first things I learned is that when designing a product, you get to choose two of the following three things: cheap, fast, and good. When I am working on the look of this site, I always choose cheap and usually I choose [...]

What's a Nation without a convention? We need to come together, set aside our differences, and work toward a common goal! I say that goal should be to watch, in person, the September 22nd game against the Chicago White Sox. It is an 11:10 AM start to accommodate the Goofer game that [...]

Three years ago today, on July 17, 2004, I started a blog that I called "Stick and Ball Guy". The url for that site was stickandballguy.blogspot.com, a site that I left and has now been usurped by a cybersquatter. All of the original posts have been ported over here, but any images that [...]

The Wordpress software is being upgraded today. If the site looks weird, that's what's happening.
Update: It appears that the upgrade was successful.

I've figured out that I have to adjust Big Mak's and AMR's accounts so that they can schedule posts with the new upgrade. Fudge!
Series Preview in Blog and Mugshot Purgatory are now up. Next week, we should be okay.
SBG

Lucy and I are heading down south this morning for a trip to the inlaws. I'm feeling like crap -- I've got a nasty cold and just about as lethargic as Barry Bonds running out a one-hopper to the pitcher.
The keys are handed over, enjoy the weekend. I'll be back on Sunday night.

Are you seeing the Mugshot Purgatory? It's published and should be showing up, but I'm not seeing it. If you don't see it, click here.
Note: Now that I posted this, I see it.
Update: The same thing is happening with the series preview in blog. Must be "the upgrade".

If the site looks terrible, by that I mean all jumbled up, bear with me. I have a unique problem that I can fix temporarily but it recurs until I have time to figure out what to do long term.

I'm working on the site, so if you see something funky, well, it'll be all right.
The music clip of the day will always be right where you see it right now.
I realize that the single posts have some problems and that it's blue, but I won't finish everything tonight.

A couple of notes.
I have a fix to the problems of the new upgrade. When I get a moment (tonight?), I'll incorporate them.
You'll note that there are now SBG Shorts. This is a spot for me to post little stories that I find interesting. Like having de.lic.ious, except you can comment on [...]

I attempted to upgrade to Wordpress 2.2 this AM. The upgrade didn't happen until right at the end of the game today. This upgrade screwed up the way things look on the site. I'll fix as I can, but things will look a little goofy for a while.
SBG

So, BabySBG is now just over eight days old, I'm trying to catch up on all the work that didn't get done over the past three weeks or so, and Lucy can't drive for up to six weeks because she had a C-Section (man was last Tuesday an extremely tough day). I have to [...]

Like a cooling salve, today's email brought me great relief and comfort.
Yes, my friends at B-P have announced the rules for the 2007 Hacking Mass Contest, and the deadline for entry is April 6, 2007 at midnight, PDT. The warmth, the soothing relief.
Yes, I'm going to sponsor the SBG Nation team. I mentioned [...]

Congratulations, CarterHayes, you are gonna get a copy of the 1987 World Series videos! Send me your contact information via e-mail and I'll get those out to you.

I am at home today and the 1987 World Championship Videos came in! I am stoked!
First of all, I want to thank everyone who entered the contest. I took the comments, removed duplicates and my own comments (and Rhu_ru's as he asked me to -- he's already ordered the vids). Then I [...]

1. It's Saturday morning and I'm brewing a pot of coffee. The pregnant wife is sleeping and we've got a big day ahead of us. We are going out with our realtor to look at some houses. We've been living in an apartment and I've been living in an apartment since [...]

There's a big deal about to happen at SBG, the WGOM. If you are not a registered user of this site, you should register. You are going to wish you had if you haven't. More to come.
Attention: If you are a registered user of this site, I am instructing you to [...]

There's gonna be an upgrade to the software today and I'm gonna be away. When the update comes, the site'll probably go back to the default template. I'll fix it when I get a chance.
SBG
Update: Done! Long story, short... I was vulnerable to another hacker attack, but now all is safe. [...]

One of the things that has become a challenge for me with this site is to provide myself a focus for the content that I hope to provide. I have a goal to provide a certain amount of content every single day. I really enjoy this enjoy this site (probably too much, and [...]

It's been a tough day or so here at the headquarters of the WGOM. I woke up on Sunday morning, filled with a strange yearning to write a post on Rick Aguilera for our TOP40 VORP series that was only tangentially related to Aggie. Check it out. I'm pretty sure you won't [...]

I did something yesterday that was unintended and I'm a little embarrassed.
In the "What Are You Hearing", I linked to some blog articles at the Strib written by Joe Christensen, LENIII, and Howard Sinker. I also provided some of my usual half-baked crap... chiding LENIII for using "pick to click" and pointing out that [...]

All right, okay, listen up. Time for the first annual SBG Nation HACKING MASS team. Baseball Prospectus has an annual contest called HACKING MASS. According to BP:
HACKING MASS is a contest to try and predict the worst/most offensive players in the upcoming season. HACKING MASS stands for Huckabay's Annual Call to Keep [...]

SBG, the WGOM just passed 200,000 visitors. That count isn't quite accurate as the counter has been down a few times, but still it's a milestone. A "visitor" is different from a "page view". Someone who comes and looks at a couple of pages is one "visitor". As of right now, [...]

I added a comment avatar feature. You can add an avatar to your comments if you want. When you log in, go to site admin, to your user tab and upload an avatar in the "Your Avatar" tag. The avatar is 100X100, but other sizes work. The closer to square it [...]

I am currently available for a live chat. This is a test for future live chats.
Go here and start typing. The form isn't perfect, but you'll that the response is pretty fast (at least, I think it will be).
Update: Chat is closed. Thanks to those who stopped by.

I'm not much of a programmer, in fact I'm not a programmer at all.
I used to be able to do some programming back in the day, and I can tinker with code on this site a little bit, but I'm not about to become an expert in web site programming -- that's not happening.  I [...]

It's clear that someone is having fun at my expense. I have made some more changes to try to combat this. My message to the hacker who is playing with me is that my readers and I have fun with this site. It's hard for me to believe that hacking this site [...]

Top 40 VORP in Twins History:

Number
Player
VORP

40
Rich Rollins
95.0

39
Matt Lawton
96.3

38
Geoff Zahn
97.1

37
Jimmie Hall
100.5

36
Mike Trombley
101.3

35
Jerry Koosman
102.2

A while back, I posted a story on Sidney Ponson and it didn't show up on the main page. I couldn't figure out why at first, but now I know. This new template has a feature called "Aside" in which I can set one category as an aside and posts to an "aside". [...]

How does the new template look? I'm wondering about problems... I know that the comment paragraph break stinks and when I can figure that out, I'll fix it. Are there any other problems?
What else is on your mind?

I will be making some updates to this new template, but I'm going to go with it.
Why did I do it?
Well, for one thing, this particular template is actually supported so that if there are problems, they can be corrected by someone who knows more about programming than I do.
Secondly, it should be a lot [...]

It's been awhile since I sat down and wrote something for this site of any substance. I was thinking today that maybe tonight I'd do that.
I had planned to spend a lot more time writing about the Timberwolves this season, but I've found that I have very little enthusiasm for that. The team [...]

I found a trackback spam plugin that I have installed. It should eliminate the trackback spam from "users" such as Mr Smoking. I have turned on the "allow pings" and have eliminated the list of words that automatically flag comments. We'll see if it works. Meanwhile, feel free to use crapshoot [...]

I have been doing some work this morning, trying to find out why this site looks so bad in Internet Explorer. Through my research, I have found a way, I think, to fix some problems. I started laying some ground work and I saw that the big problem in IE, that the comments [...]

What a frustrating evening for the World's Greatest Online Magazine. It seems that my server host was having some "technical difficulties" all evening -- the worst night in a long series of bad days. They claim now that they've got things under control, but that there will be an outage sometime on Monday. [...]

The nesting of comments is bugging me a little. I do like that people are keeping up the conversations. There are some fantastic things being posted and it's in context, so you can see people's thoughts and reactions as the conversations continue. But, there is a loss of flow.
However, there is a [...]

On July 17, 2004, I started a blog. On August 23, 2004, I put a counter on the site. So, today marks two years since I began counting the billions of readers. I’ve found that billions of readers remain uncounted, for reasons that I cannot explain.
I’m not sure why [...]

Thanks to all who wrote to tell me that the comments were down. I was unaware that there was a problem, as I was doing some VORP calculations. Things look like they are working now.
I probably won't address the nesting issue until at least this weekend. You can collapse the comments by [...]

Post any newsworthy articles that you found outside of the Twin Cities media in the letters to the editor. This can be anything from any source other than Twins Blogs, the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press or any other Twin Cities news outlet. You can post on the Twins, baseball, the weather. Whatever.

I've been swamped lately and as a result, when I get home I'm pretty tired -- no energy to write stuff. I will have a game log up for tonight's game and I should be around to chat about it. Maybe I'll even get a post scheduled for tomorrow morning.
Part of the territory [...]

Wondering if your "favorite" columnist has mailed in a column lately? Don't bother going over to the paper's website and checking it out. Click on the "Twin Cities Media" button on the tool bar above. There's an RSS feed with the latest ten columns. Plus, there are sub pages for each [...]

I have added a page in my maze of pages that has RSS feeds to all known Twins bloggers that link back to this page. I have the last 45 posts in Twins blogger world all assembled for you to peruse. Wonder if frightwig is posting? (He did tonight.) Go and [...]

As I drove home from the Twins game on Friday night I sat in traffic along the 35W corridor and barely moved. I thought about the game that I had just seen and listened to Dark Star on the radio because he follows the Twins on WCCO. Traffic slowly crawled to the cross-town and I [...]

I am sorry to have to do this, but I have to do this.
For a while, it seemed like I had the old spam under control. But, lately, the Spam Killer program has been chomping too many comments from long time readers and commenters. I cannot spend all my time sifting through advertisements [...]

I have further loosened the strings on the spam fighter. I had two people e-mail me this afternoon about problems and both of their emails went into hotmail's junk folder. Ugh! I'm getting close to requiring a login. In case you are wondering, I have been getting a lot of spam [...]

If you are having any problems commenting on this site, please e-mail me. I can try to help you.
I got an e-mail from a reader who was having a problem last night. I didn't think we were still having any problems. I went back and slogged through 1000 spam comments and found [...]

This blog turns two years old today.
I can't believe that I have been plunking away at the keyboard for two years, ranting about ScruFi, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, KG, and all of my pet topics for 730 days. But, it's true, I have.
A lot has happened in those two years. On July 17, [...]

SBG is taking an All-Star Break. I would really like to thank Andrew of Home is Where the Heart Is for his coverage of the World Cup for The Mag. He did a great job. Go over to his site and leave a comment to say hi and thanks. Andrew has [...]

I don't know what is going on, but I keep seeing my site looking different from what I expect. I have set up the site to have the red look. However, I have seen it with a different look -- a blue look. It's not me that's changing it. I don't [...]

I have learned a little bit more about the spam program that I have installed and I set up the program to be a little more friendly to letter writers. As a result, some spam is filtering through, but also, regular letter writers are getting a much higher "karma", which is separating them from [...]

I want to take an opportunity to plug a couple of my fellow bloggers. First of all, Seth Stohs has a great piece that breaks down the pitching matchup between Johan Santana and Curt Schilling last night. Seth's the hardest working blogger in the business and his effort last night was pretty great [...]

Just about finished with the top 50 Twins single season pitching performances when I realize that Jim Kaat's 1966 season didn't make the list. How could that be? Well, it "could be" that I had a little data corruption problem. Drat! So, I started going back and rechecking season by season [...]

SBG, the World's Greatest Online Magazine has been taking off. No, not taking time off, I'm posting quite a bit of stuff. I mean, readership is up. While I write this stuff for my own enjoyment, I certainly appreciate it when people read it and comment. Thank you for your readership. [...]

At long last, I have gotten the SBG bulletin board back up and running. The good news is that I'll have game logs (today's game is already set up), which should allow people a regular place to post comments on the game of the day. The bad news is that if you registered [...]

I am continuing to get absolutely hammered by Spam attacks. You may have noticed that, but let me assure that it is even worse than you might guess. I am getting about 10 comments an hour (or more sometimes) that are being directed toward my site and even though I have some plugins [...]

I've finally got an RSS feed set up for the new site.  It's also in the meta section on the left XML Link (updated).

I came across a new Twins blog through Will Young today.  It's called Coffeyville Whirlwind.  Check it out and say hi from SBG.

When I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2, I lost the ability to present data in HTML tables, one of my favorite things to do on The Mag.  I did a little searching this AM and found that there may be a solution.  I'll try tonight.  Apparently, HTML tables are so 20th Century.
Okay, I'm in full stream [...]

Today, I downloaded Word Press v. 2.0.2.  You probably don't notice much difference, but I do. 
For one thing, I've been able to upload my entire archive from the old site.  Everything that you want to look at there is now here, including the comments.  I think that's pretty darned cool.  The bulletin board is down [...]

If you come around here and find the site in disarray, that's because I'm playing with it and it may go crazy. I am trying to find the right look for the site. I thought that I had found something, but what I found was a "skin" that was full of errors and [...]

You may be wondering why I have moved this site. You will notice that I have my own domain name and not a blogspot name. I really enjoyed posting over at blogspot, but with my own domain, the underlying web tools, and with WordPress, I can do a lot of things. I [...]