First off, a big thanks to everyone who congratulated me, whether by blogposts or dropping by to comment or on facebook or by e-mail or whatever. It all means a lot to me. For those who don’t now what I’m talking about, I just buried the lede. I won first place in the sports columns category for my work at Marquette’s newspaper, The Mining Journal, from the Michigan Press Association. It’s nice to win something, but I’m not going to make a big deal out of it. But thanks again to everyone for their kind words. Here’s my latest column if you’d like a sample.

Second off, anyone who visits the site to read it will notice a substantial cleanup of the sidebars. I’m not going ad-free. I’m happy to accept text ads. But you’ll notice I thought I’d simplify things. No more visual stuff. Just text. Simple, like a blog should be. I feel like things got a bit off track and I wasn’t seeing a lot of benefit for uglying up the site.

And finally, I guess anyone who visited the site will notice a substantial dropoff in blogging. It wasn’t that I only blog the good times. Lord knows, it’s easier to blog the bad times than the good. There’s just so much more content when you’re criticizing and looking for solutions than when everything is peachy. But it just started feeling like a chore I had to get done. With real-life work to do — the start of fall sports season is a busy time for a college/preps sports writer — and a few other things, I just didn’t find myself thinking a lot about Tigers baseball or having much to say. I know I wasn’t going to give it up totally, but for the time being, i had to take a break and recharge. I don’t know that I’m fully ready to jump in with both feet, but I think I can dedicate a bit more time to blogging so I’m going to try to do that and get back into the routine.

A message for my fellow bloggers out there: Don’t lose the routine! It is so hard to get it back!

Fortunately, there’s plenty of issues to blog about. The team was unnaturally awful. But was 2008 a fluke, or do the high number of injuries in 2007-08 point out to us a not-so-hidden flaw in the makeup of the team? How much blame should GM Dave Dombrowski and manager Jim Leyland take? How do they get the Tigers back on track? Who’s going to catch? Who’s gonna play shortstop? Why in the world is Carlos Guillen playing in left field and how long could that experiment possibly last? Who’s going to be in the rotation next year? Is anyone from that bullpen worth bringing back? And if so, in what roles?

I’ll try to answer a quetion every two or three days and keep up with any breaking news in the middle.

Let’s give this blogging thing a try again!

I thought I’d stick all the yardbarker stuff together and moved some sidebar things around. So a quick tour.

To your left you’ll see my yardbarker stuff. Heh.

To your right, you’ll find the recent comments and ticket-for-sale advertising.

And if you’re using internet explorer, you’ll find the page is too wide. I think there’s an open tag… somewhere… that I have yet to find and close.

Please let me know if anything acts up or you can’t find something.

Pay no attention to that ad to your left! I accepted an invitation to join the Yardbarker Network — at which Dontrelle Willis blogs … er… occasionally. Mack Avenue Tigers may see some additional tools added and hopefully receive a bit more exposure. And a big ad to your left.

And if I don’t find any real benefit to you, the readers, after a trial month or so, we’ll roll things back a bit.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Sorry for no updates in the past week, but really, it’s the end of December, so a little time away from blogging (and work!) felt pretty good. With the holiday ending, my new years resolutin is to post more, I promise!

Like Bilfer, I’ll thank everyone for making this the best year yet.

Of course, it was only the first complete year of the blog, but my daily numbers were terrific. Overall, I had 53,844 unique visitors and 216,001 visits and 465,187 pages served. Not a bad year I’d say! In fact, when I started my own little Tigers blog, I never even dreamed such high numbers were possible.  Tell your friends about the site, and hopefully we can make 2008 even better!

And 2008 Spring Training is coming up in only weeks, and the annual Florida Southern game is now less than 2 months away. Baseball is coming back soon and we have good reason to believe this could be the best year yet in the modern era of the Tigers.

I think the offseason is when we sports bloggers find time to catch up, figure out what worked and didn’t work during the season, and make some changes before the next year.

To that extent, I’d like your opinion on Mack Avenue Tigers. I have a few widgets installed around the site, from sphereit, which is meant to help find similar news, to snap previews, which shows you a preview of the page. On the right sidebar, I recently added a Schmaps widget, which combines schedules and maps. That looks pretty useful to me.  Below the ads, I have a service which lists all the recent articles the Tigers are included in from traditional media.

Is any of this stuff useful to you? Is any of this stuff going entirely unused? My goal this offseason is to clean the site up a bit, so I need to know what to keep and what not.

Also, any other suggestions of improvements are welcome!

Thanks ahead of time.

-Kurt

I either slept or worked through the big developments of the day, but expect a reaction early Saturday afternoon!

By the way, thanks for the well wishes. Feeling a bit better today, fortunately. As you can tell by a 1 a.m. blog post!

And hopefully Sunday I’ll get a chance to tidy up the sidebars some and catch up on everything from the past two-three weeks I’ve been slow to get to.

I’d just like to thank all the loyal readers and people who post comments. I’m thankful for all the great people I’ve met through this blog.  Whatever you are thankful for, I hope everyone enjoys the day! (I also hope maybe we can be thankful for a Lions win in a few hours …)

Site news/advertisement:

You may have heard about Amazon’s new wireless reading device, the Kindle. Basically, it’s an offline reader that can download books, newspapers and blogs for you to read. Pretty cool idea.

Anyway, Amazon asked to use Mack Avenue Tigers as one of the first baseball blogs as it launched the product. Sure, I say. And I’m one of the few non SportsNation blogs to be in the baseball section, so I feel pretty honored that they asked. I can’t say I have any special insight into the product or anything else like that, but if you happen to own a Kindle, or plan to get one, you can help support one of your favorite baseball blogs by using the above link. Plus here’s the link directly to the Mack Avenue page. Hopefully soon I’ll have something in my sidebar.

In case you’re wondering, our friend Ian’s blog, Bless You Boys, is the only other Tigers blog. Like I said, I don’t really know how I was selected, but I’m honored and hopefully it’s something Tigers fans find cool. I know I do.

*cheesy thumb’s up sign*

Non-site news/advertisement

Long as I’m touting products, Bilfer of Detroit Tigers Weblog wrote a profile of Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski for the Hardball Times annual.

A tip of the cap to Big Al for e-mailing this link. I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.

Journalist/blogger Bruce McLeod of the Macomb Daily put forth a good defense of blogs (that’s the above-linked… er… link), and not just because he is a blogger. Well, that’s not entirely true. Because he is a blogger, he understands blogs. Maybe that’s not entirely true, because it sounds exclusive, like those who aren’t bloggers couldn’t understand blogs. More on that later.

In any case, he writes:

Blogs are a collection house of information and links to primary sources. Nothing wrong with that, in fact that allows me to get more done with my time on the Internet than if I never read blogs.
And blogs do offer commentary and that’s a good thing too. I’ve read dozens of newspaper columns this year about the Red Wings from columnists who haven’t been to many — if any — of the games. I’m not sure what the difference is.

But what he says, and I think shows he really gets it, is

Blogging is a community that sells its own wonderfully just by starting and continuing discussions.

I don’t mean this post to be too meta, or sound like it’s directed more to bloggers or readers. I mean, thinking of the Chris McCosky incident later, maybe what we all should have done is pointed out he was wrong with his assertion about Joel Zumaya and left it at that. I hesitate to give it a name, because it doesn’t deserve a name, but I needed something to reference for a link.

We don’t have to explain ourselves to our readers. You’re reading, right? You understand blogs. That’s why you’re here. We don’t have to explain ourselves to fellow bloggers.

So, why exactly are we explaining ourselves?

Now go check out Bruce’s blog. He’s addicted to hits.

While I was busy not blogging, much went on but nothing actually happened. A sketch.

• The Detroit chapter of Baseball Writers named Magglio Ordonez the unanimous Tiger of the year.

This was expected and the right thing to do. I mean, you could make an argument for Curtis Granderson. 20-20-20-20, great center field play, all that. But really, Maggs deserved the top billing and he got it.

• Kenny Rogers is a free agent, but assumptions it was Detroit-or-nowhere may not be true.

Well, it’s not really Detroit or NOWHERE. But the assumption kind of was, if the Tigers want Kenny Rogers, he wants the Tigers. Now his agent, Scott Boras, is doing what any good agent does: making crap up trying to get the Tigers to pay more. I would play the game right back if I were GM Dave Dombrowski. Who says the the Tigers need, little lone want, a pitcher who missed nearly the entire season with problems in his throwing arm? If I’m going to bet a chunk of cash on the Tigers future, I’d bet more of a chunk on relief pitching than injured-40-year-old-plus pitching. Not that I don’t like Rogers or respect what he did for the club. I’d be happy to have him back. But not for more than $5-6M or so for a year guaranteed.

• Todd Jones could return.

Freep’s Jon Paul Morosi reports Atlanta has no plans to pursue free agent pitchers. If this is true, Jonesy could be back for another year as Tigers closer. The ideal solution? Possibly. For all the interest in Francisco Cordero or Mariano Rivera, both of those are going to be high-priced closer options. We know setup men and other middle relievers tend to cost less and they’re really not that different than closers in the first place. In Moneyball, Billy Beane created closers to trade, if I recall. So maybe a lower-priced Jones could help the Tigers bulk up their relief corps across the board. But if Jones dares ask for as much as those other guys desire, no way. 1 year deal. 8M. That’s my thinking anyway.

• Same article: the Tigers aren’t afraid of the trade market for relievers either.

While I may be a bit afraid of the trade market myself, not wanting to give up too much of the system, I do repeat 2008 is a BIG year. So it’s nice to see the Tigers looking around, checking to see if the price is right. Dombrowski knows the teams deficiencies and is willing to do something about it. That is always a good sign.

• And some other stuff. A-Rod = no!! Miguel Cabrera = no thanks.

I combined these points. Alex Rodriguez is just not going to happen, even if the Tigers sometimes get mentioned in the same breath.

Second, Miguel Cabrera, as great as he is (should be anyway) may be fun to envision as a Tiger, but I don’t want to see it happen. Simply, he costs too much to trade for and he’s a free agent too soon. Maybe that’s why Florida is selling. Pinto (also webmaster of Baseball Musings) is right to note Florida is nuts for not locking him up long term given they have the money to.

Quick hits:

• Ian and Bilfer voted in the SportsNation postseason awards polls. Scroll around Bless You Boys for the full results.
• Curt Schilling re-upped with Evil Empire, New England Division.
• Lee is saber-ing away at Tiger Tales. No surprise, Brandon Inge needs to produce more at the plate.

And finally

Like Bilfer, I would just like to note the official response from the Detroit News and Chris McCosky was no response at all. Can’t say I’m surprised that he talks about being answerable to those who he criticizes and then doesn’t answer them. I’m a bit more surprised the sports editor didn’t bother to reply about McCosky’s alleged factual mishaps. But whatever. I’ll just be careful about what news sources I choose to consume, as McCosky recommended.