s-rod

Obviously we're just getting started here at s-rod.com; apologies for some of the incomplete/placeholder articles.  The Player Ranker is also undergoing some fine-tuning, so don't be discouraged if your pet player is getting dissed.

I'm not going to write a long preamble (yet), but would like to start a discussion about what this site is.  First and foremost, it's a community site:  anyone from the general public can create a username and begin posting today.  Want to be a prospect guru a la John Sickels?  You can do that here.  Make up Sports Pickle-style funny stuff?  Knock yourself out- we've created the "News" content type for you.  I still don't know myself what all I'll want to write about, which is why we've got the wide array of sample stories posted.  (That Baby Name Applet's just what you came here looking for, right?)

Two things will make s-rod.com different from a typical blog-esque site.  One, technology.  You can see that the Player Ranker will be pretty slick when it's ready (you'll be able to completely customize rankings to your categories, # of teams, etc.), and we'll be adding other interactive tools in the coming months--some of which you'll be able to embed in your posts.

Two is this idea of "content types."  Rather than just give users diaries or blogs, we are really going to focus on defining types of contributions:  Prospect Reports, Player Projections, Velocity Readings, Injury Reports; as well as (depending on community interest) non-baseball stuff like Book Reviews and Political Rants or whatever.  As you can see if you try entering a Prospect Report, I haven't built out all the fields (ERA, WHIP, IP, Ks ...); but soon you'll be able to input all the relevant data for whatever you're writing about.  Then, using some of the slick technology, we'll be able to do stuff like feed projections back into the Player Ranker/TradeEval tool, or display community projections, or rank pitchers based on velocity.  Whatever:  the point is that s-rod.com will be a place where users can come to see categorized, consolidated information from the community, rather than wading through a lot of chaffe.

 I'll stop for now and throw it open for anybody who'd like to comment.  Any feedback is appreciated:  what content types you'd like to see, is this a good idea at all, does the mascot look like a fourth-grader drew it on an Etch-A-Sketch (not far from the truth) ... really, anything.

Thanks for stopping by.