DockoftheRays came into existence in July of 2009 when the former Fanball group decided to grow their own blog network and finally allow me an avenue to be more opinionated and biased with my writing about the Rays. Up until that point, I had simply been an active member of communities such as RaysBB (formerly raysbaseball until the club asked for the domain), and DRaysBay. DRaysBay had originally asked me to do more in 2008, but my contract at the time did not permit me to do that and that same contract forced me to turn down an invitation to join Rob Neyer’s SweetSpot network at ESPN more than a year ago. So, when the opportunity came back around to be involved with both again, it would have been foolish to turn it down a second time because opportunities like that do not often repeat themselves. After all, DRaysBay is currently ranked 27th in Technorati’s Top 100 baseball blogs and a site that both of us here as well as many others have leaned upon heavily in the past to increase our own knowledge as Rays fans.
Throughout the years, both Jason and I have worked collaboratively with DRaysBay on season preview guides in 2008-2010 and this past off-season, worked with them and TheProcessReport to publish TPR11 (have you purchased your copy yet?). Along with the work that we’ve done together, we find that DRaysBay has been our most frequent source of incoming traffic as many of their readers found our stories worth reading from our longing for the Royals to trade the Rays Joakim Soria, some fun Rays-related trivia, and our reactions to the Matt Garza trade. Besides, when Peter Gammons tweets your work, you know you are doing quality stuff. Those stories, as well as the others we have written will be migrated over into the DRB archives in due time but the links to them will stay up here for those that have linked to them in their research for the entire 2011 season.
The last four months of traffic to this blog exceeded any monthly total during the regular season which is both exciting and humbling. Exciting in that a fan base that is often made fun of by the national media is still cares that much about the team in the off-season and humbling in that you found our work this off-season enjoyable enough to continue to come back with that amount of regularity.
Jason and I are both looking forward to bringing our writing skills to the best online community of Rays fans on the series of intertubes and one of the best baseball blogs in existence today. We have both been fans of the work Steve Slowinski, Bradley Woodrum, Erik Hahmann, FreeZorilla, CBJones, RZ, PGP, and others have brought to the table so we are thrilled that we can now call them co-workers. We will be hitting the ground running with new stories up at DRaysBay this week including a season prediction piece and the first official live event will be the Ballpark Event on April 17th before the game (likely Ferg’s) and in the Party Deck for the game. If you’ve enjoyed reading our work here, we strongly encourage you to purchase a ticket in our block for that game and join us for the fun.
Thanks again for your patronage over these last twenty months and we hope you will continue to follow us as we travel in a new and exciting direction.
