Its been a while, but the remains of BraveSoxTalk are rising from the ashes to rain some serious baseball minutiae on your poor souls.
I’m sure most of you know about BST, but for the uninitiated here’s a quick brief:
BraveSoxTalk was founded by Alan Wright and Matt Ankerson during the 2005 Baseball Season. They brought together old school and new school thought along with a healthy dose of alcohol fueled fanaticism and a healthy sense of humor.
The website was a HUGE hit, especially, and inexplicably, in Japan. The guys both hold high level jobs with a computer company and found themselves having less and less time to research and crunch numbers. That’s when they brought me on Board. I’m Eugene St. Athead. That’s right, its me, Eugene. The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
We worked together for the ‘06 and ‘07 season. When I say work together, I mean that I worked, and they drank. A lot. They dragged me everywhere they went, constantly yelling at me to “write that down” and “make our internet connection faster” and “why are there no good looking hookers in Bradenton?”.
We had a fairly good run in ‘06, but the train derailed pretty fast in ‘07. The guys were drowning in their day jobs and drowning at the local pub at night. They ideas and notes they sent to me were increasingly more and more illegible, and well, frankly, crazy. Here’s a typical day of messages while working for BST Productions:
- Look up last Sox player to hit into an unassisted triple play.
- Run predictions for Matt Harrison at the MLB level
- Find out if Jaeger and Koolaid really do taste like fruit loops
- Figure out how to remove blood stains from walls without destroying paint or having to repaint
- Run Pythagorean W/L records of all MLB Teams
- Prank call Tony Larussa
- Buy more beer
- Put together a list of whose hot and whose not, write witty comments
- Email the senior writers of every major baseball website and tell them they suck.
- Write a top 10 prospects list for both teams, explain in depth why each player is on the list
- Call John Schuerholz, apologize for the late night phone call, tell him I’m suffering from tourettes
- Figure out how to write a piece that explains why Alan likes Barry Bonds and thinks that everyone else is stupid
- Take a bath, you’re starting to smell ‘Gene!
Trust me when I tell you that was a short list. Eventually, the weight of their day jobs and own egos drove them into hiding. It was fun while it lasted.
They’ve achieved some kind of strange underground cult status in Japan, which they will NEVER forget to remind you of, and currently spend their free time in much the same way they did while running the website, which is to say, Drinking.
That pretty much brings us to here. One third of a once storied writing troika attempting to spend a little time writing about the Braves and anything else that comes into mind. I’m sure there will be the occassional guest spot from the guys, but for the most part it will just be me having some fun with baseball, and for once, not having to answer any drunken phone calls at 3:00am from someone wondering how to convince information to give them Scott Boros’s unlisted phone number.
Hope you all enjoy.
