Back in my blogging days, somehow 10 years ago now or more, I made a rule for myself: I absolutely had to stop reading Jim Margalus.
Writing incisively to an informed audience and with an ideologically and tonally consistent voice, Jim's work was what I wanted mine to become. And man, I felt it was really starting to show. On good days I would merely notice a clever point he made, and would try to weld some facsimile of the same observation onto my work like a third arm. On bad days, I would read his article, conclude it was the only salient thing that could be written on the team that day, and try to see if I could find some extra profundity if I dedicated 10 sentences to what he had already said in three.
If I was ever going to find my own voice, or figure out what I wanted to say about anything, my process needed to start becoming my own. I tried throwing myself into advanced statistics, parsing video for mechanical details, and eventually going to journalism school to learn the ways of "damning quotes presented innocuously."
Maybe if I finished my work with suitable time left in the day, I could read a little Margalus afterward, as a treat.
So it’s with a great sense of accomplishment that we reach this point today where he and Josh Nelson are welcoming me into their fold with the belief that I bring something vital and complementary to what they have built here with the sharp and faithful readers of Sox Machine.
Margalus has always had some of my favorite compliments about my work. The line I quoted above, and that my articles are built on the premise of “This interests me, and here’s why it should interest you,” and seeking to understand the game and this peculiar franchise beyond the limitations of the box score. His and Josh’s repeated insistence that this work would be an essential addition to their project, through what has been a professional and personal nadir for me, is something I will always remember.
Insofar as three people constitute a company, we’re a modest one with modest goals. We follow the Chicago White Sox, seeking to understand how and why they operate. We want to understand the causes for their current struggles, understand their potential paths to improvement, and hopefully learn about the ever-evolving nature of the current baseball landscape along the way. We’ll probably crack some good jokes every now and then too.
Perhaps you the reader are just as well suited to define our goals, because this project is only as viable as your interest in supporting it. While the notion of a blog with a beat writer is radical, the costly practice of deep, daily coverage of anything beyond nationally renowned teams is growing antiquated.
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As much as I plan on mining the comments for story ideas and finding explanations for questions that vex our readership, the most direct way I am accountable to you is that I need to provide a product you feel is worth paying for, or this will not be able to go on. And I need to provide that product while writing about a team that lost 101 games last season, so my work is cut out for me.
But I hope that we can prove that deep and thoughtful daily coverage of this team is something that has value when we build it together.
