Happy Tenth Birthday, HBT!

Ten years ago today was Opening Day of the 2009 season. It was also opening day for this website. It launched, with our first post coming that morning and posts coming every single day ever since, on April 5, 2009. HardballTalk is now ten years old. In Internet years that’s like 100. Can you believe it?

The old timers among you will remember that it wasn’t even called HardballTalk yet. It was Circling the Bases. I think Gleeman came up with that, but I can’t remember. I do remember that we changed it to HardballTalk in February 2010, though, in order to have some on-brand consistency with both ProFootballTalk, which moved to NBC a couple of months after we launched, and ProBasketballTalk which started in early 2010. As I wrote at the time, it was sort of like how Philip Morris changed its name to Altria and how ValueJet changed its name to AirTran, except in our case we were doing it to foster positive associations rather than fool you into thinking we were something else after disasters and tragedies.

Not that it was smooth as heck in the early going. It was largely invisible to readers, but things were something of a mess on the back end of this site for the first few months. When we started we used a blogging platform that I’m pretty sure was developed by Soviet scientists in the 1970s in order to better forecast wheat yields. It was pretty sweet: you’d write something, hit “post” and then — and I am not exaggerating — your computer would sort of lock up for 10-15 minutes and, if you didn’t touch it or navigate away, it might appear on the website. It was replaced by a platform that had a nasty habit of simply disappearing posts into the ether after you’d spent a good while writing them. “Oh, you mean you didn’t want to navigate to the NBC Sports home page, losing all the words you’ve written with no effort to save them when you hit ‘save?’ That’s odd, but whatever,” the CMS would say to me, at least in my mind. That was fixed for good soon, thankfully, and now the worst thing that ever happens to us are typos. Many, many typos, almost 100% of which are made by me, often in ways that benefit society more than if they had not been made at all. You’re welcome.

An old friend of the site, looking back on an anniversary.