Our friend Kelly at Hook, Line Drive, & Sinker sent us the following email:

There are people who want to leave comments on my blog, and on other MLBlog pages, but don’t want the email address that they registered with mlb.com to show up to the world. People would like to be able to use an alternate email address (or none at all) when leaving comments. Bloggers have the ability to delete inappropriate comments, and all commenters have to be registered, so I’m not sure why this isn’t already an option. There are other baseball blog sites that give you the option of registering under one email address and displaying another, or just displaying a nickname. Is there any way that this could be considered? If I had a nickel for every time somebody has complained to me about it… I’d have a couple bucks, at least.

I think if commenting were a bit more private, people would be interacting a lot more. Just thought I’d ask.

Thanks for asking, Kelly. And by the way, everyone, if you want to get a question answered quickly, it’s better to comment here because I check this a lot more often than the mlblogosphere@yahoo.com email account. Also, most of you know that I write articles like this or this that are  routinely on the MLB.com homepage and my email address is always at the bottom. OK, as for the answer: No, you can only edit your comment ID within your own comments, not on someone else’s MLBlog. If you know that person well, s/he could change it for you. These blog were launched in April of 2005 and are based on Six Apart’s Typepad 1.0 version, so understandably there is going to be an occasional function that seems Pleistocenic. That’s one, and so is the inability to pre-approve comments. But it does bring up two points:

1) We find that when email addresses are public as the comment, there are far less occasions of offensive comments, for obvious reasons. So it’s not a given that this is a bad thing. That’s actually one nice thing about the MLBlogosphere. Like at the ballpark, you can feel like you can click around with your kids and not fear for your life. But having said that…

2) The hope here is still that there will be a new environment using the latest software (and with the MLBAM touch that you expect) for all of this before the year 2007 is out, and definitely before next Spring Training. We obviously want it to be far more powerful for you.

Hope you guys are enjoying this finish to the most amazing season I can remember in a lot of years of watching them. There are obviously some ridiculous postseason possibilities, and I know that a lot of people (sorry to my Brew Crew bloggers here) are even wondering if this Magical Milestone Mystery Tour could end with the Cubs’ first title since 1908. I will be on the road for all three rounds and am curious myself. But I will say this, since I haven’t seen it pointed out anywhere: If you look at the Cubs’ record right now, they are practically right in the middle of the 30 teams. Seattle has a better record. Toronto is almost better. So to me, the Cubs would have to be even more shocktobering than you would think to go all the way. That’s a really average team according to W-L. But the Cards did just win it all with 83 wins. Having worked the Bartman game, I should just keep my mouth shut about possibilities, anyway.

Did I mention that I picked the Colorado Rockies to go to the World Series in a predictions article on MLB.com before Opening Day? You could look it up. (For full disclosure, I think I picked them to lose to the resurgent, Eric Gagne-led Texas Rangers.)

Welcome to Frank’s Fastball.

Pretty psyched for this next month. It is going to be insane. Besides working around the clock from now through someone’s World Series clubhouse celebration, I will get in as much training time as I can at hotel athletic facilities (battling plantar fasciitis) and my first ING New York City Marathon is on Nov. 4 — only 37 days away. Anyone recovered from the World Series who is in NYC at that time, feel free to come on out and cheer! Just hoping it’s not a Game 7 in Anaheim on Nov. 1.

One of my sons just did a high school sophomore paper on his "hero." He chose…David Eckstein. Don’t tell his teacher but I had to help on that one. My favorite Eckstein story was at the Cardinals’ last Winter Warmup. Other players came and went at their appointed times, sitting at the autograph tables for the long, long lines. One hour, two hour. But Eckstein stayed for two extra hours, at least four hours total, signing every last autograph until the very last fan was through. I’m sorry, but what is the issue about whether you re-sign Eckstein in St. Louis as a free agent?

Finally, you can look forward to eight players blogging right here once we finally figure out all eight postseason teams. That was fun last year. The best player post I have ever read was probably done by Barry Zito in the clubhouse immediately after he beat Johan Santana in the Oakland-Minnesota ALDS opener last October. Just wish these guys would want to keep blogging year-round!

Mark

For anyone who wants to blog about Major League Baseball’s fourth consecutive year of setting the overall attendance record, this belongs to each of you so here is the PDF link:
Download mlb_breaks_singleseason_attendance_record_for_fourth_straight_year_092407_2.pdf

Welcome to all the new MLBloggers, like Frank’s Fastball, Let’s Go Tribe, This is next year! and The Birds Eye View. And of course we have all those President of Red Sox Nation campaign blogs in the house, from
people like Jerry Remy, El Guapo, Sam Horn, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Cindy Brown (head of Boston Duck Boats!) and Big Pupi (who is giving the Yankee squirrel a break). Since we started doing this way back in April 2005, there are always waves and waves of new MLBlogs, and some of them stay around and some of them let their free trials lapse. The regulars in the house know that MLBlogs is a year-round proposition. There is no offseason in baseball blogging, only a stretch without actual MLB games to watch. An MLBlog is the best way to chronicle your thoughts on free agency and everything that happens after this weekend’s final regular season games are played.

OK, we just looked at some interesting MLBlogs traffic numbers. Congrats to our friend Jake over at Bucco Blog, as he finished the July-August period as the most popular fan blog here with 80,869 page views over that two-month stretch. Those are big numbers considering (a) he is not linked from the club’s homepage as with most of the other especially high-traffic MLBlogs, and (b) the Pirates’ record. It shows mostly how resourceful Jake continues to be in employing techniques of creating inbound links from around the overall blogosphere. Leave him comments and maybe he’ll share some pointers with you, because he has been around a while and he gets eyeballs. Frequency = following. Following him among fan MLBlogs during that period were The Baseball Collector, Pick Me Up Some Mets!, Yankees Chick, Thurman Munson Should Be In The Hall Of Fame, ‘Baseball is Heaven’s gift to Mortals’, Bleeding Pinstripes and Diamondhacks.

Our friend Steve at My Brewers has done the computations in case anyone is wondering how the Brewers might pull off what increasingly seems like a needed miracle if they are to get to the postseason instead of the Cubbies. You can see from the math just how unlikely it is at this point (3 1/2 back in the NL Central). Geoff Jenkins and the Crew are back home for this final week, but that will include the final four games against a Padre club battling for its own ticket to October.

Here’s a great use for your MLBlog: Season Review. Write a post divided with subheads for each month, and analyze key developments throughout the season from start to finish. We might want to package a bunch of these with a Season Review promotion here, perhaps tied in with our MLB.com review coverage whenever that happens. If you do these, please leave a comment with URL.

Recently Updated Photo Albums (create yours today!):

• Stadium Rising:  The Complete Gallery
• Stadium Rising:  The Latest Pictures
• Cubs vs Pirates 9-23
• Dana Brand Mets Fan book party
• DODGERTOWN
• Cubs vs Reds 9-18
• El Guapo, Man of the People
• My Red Sox Photos
• 9_16_07 Coop and Zoe do luxury. Mets play ugly.
• me

First of all, Happy 80th Birthday to our friend Tommy Lasorda on this day. Tommy is the trailblazer here, having saved the first-ever MLBlog post on April 18, 2005. If you are wondering how to find his first post with so much time in between, then here’s a tip you need to know. Just click the title at the top of any MLBlog. Then, in the URL field, add the following to the end of that address that you see: /archives.html

So here are the campaign blogs that have been populated so far for President of Red Sox Nation, and more are on the way from the likes of Peter Gammons and Jerry Remy. No matter which team you root for, you have to like a Doris Kearns Goodwin joining the MLBlogosphere.

http://doriskearnsgoodwin.mlblogs.com
http://samhorn.mlblogs.com
http://bigpupi.mlblogs.com
http://mikebarnicle.mlblogs.com
http://royalrooter.mlblogs.com
http://imamemberofredsoxnation.mlblogs.com

More to come. In the meantime, enjoy Yankees @ Red Sox. It should be quite a weekend around Fenway, not to mention anywhere that an NL Central, NL West and NL Wild Card candidate is campaigning. Don’t forget to try out the brand-new MLB.com Chat, which should be an absolute zoo with The Rivalry under way again. Can you imagine separating Yankee and Red Sox fans who are in the same cutting-edge chat rooms? (See below.) Relax, anyone can just use the Ignore option and the loudmouth next to you is muted. Looking forward to the weekend blogs!

PS: Assuming you could have any player blog this October who is on a clinching team, who would you want? Of course, we don’t know the clinching teams yet, but it’s never too early to throw out some desirable bloggers for those teams in the running…and explain why. Thanks!

Congratulations to longtime Cubs MLBlogger Paul Dzien, the proprietor of Crawly’s Cubs. He just became the latest in a long and growing line of MLBloggers who also have MLB.com bylines! Above is the screenshot of the current panel on the Cubs.com mediawall. No. 2 panel placement, especially in September with the Cubs on top, is pretty heady stuff. Paul reviewed the Cubs Legends DVD set, as other MLBloggers have done for various DVDs sent to me by MLB Productions on the floor above us here at our Manhattan HQ. (Asking for more!) Paul’s tagline links to his MLBlog. It’s also prominent on MLB Productions‘ site, which is a part of MLB.com (you can find Zoe Rice’s Mets DVD article and John Nemo’s Twins DVD article prominently displayed at the top there, too). Just another example of what could happen if you subscribe to MLBlogs; scroll down to see all the other reviews. For those who have asked, we are going to be aggregating all of them on the MLB Productions index page at MLB.com so stay tuned for that to appear.

You’re going to be seeing a lot of new high profile Red Sox blogs soon,
so a warning in advance to all you Yankee bloggers. That’s because one
of the perks of being a candidate for President of Red Sox Nation
is getting your own candidate MLBlog. There already are a handful of
these out there. You’ll see one for all of the 10 finalists once those
are named. Looking forward to seeing if Peter Gammons (in the top 25)
makes the top 10 so he’d become an MLBlogger. Actually there are 26
now, if you include Big Pupi, a dog. Personally, I’m hoping Big Pupi
makes it to the top 10 (I think it will happen based on all the love)
so we can have a dog blogging here. Voting ends Sunday to narrow it down to 10.

I don’t know if any active player can tell a better story than CJ Wilson.

I wrote this story for MLB.com about golden opportunities, and frankly I’m blown away by how many World Series contest prizes there are around our world at BAM. Everywhere you look. It means you have a lot more opportunity to win some big things, and more good blog fodder on entering those!

Congrats to our friend and fellow MLBlogger Alyssa Milano for landing the new role on NBC’s "My Name Is Earl." The attention that Alyssa has brought to MLBlogs because of touch ‘em all (cited as one of the best "celebrity blogs" by Entertainment Weekly) has been very appreciated, and it just funnels that much more views to others here as we continue to grow this community.

Recently Updated Photo Albums:

• Wesley Gullett
• Arvest Ballpark:  The Announcement
• Cubs vs Dodgers 9-3
• More Pictures
• 09/02/07 – Field of Dreams
• Cubs vs Brewers 8-31
• Baseball People I have met
• Buchholz No-hitter
• Metsblog at McFaddens 8_31_07
• 10 Frisco Rough Riders August 26 & 27

Welcome to Jessica Robicheaux and her new MLBlog The Cold, Hard Truth. Jessica interned on the Astros beat this summer alongside one of the best baseball beat writers in the business, our own Alyson Footer, and now she has a new way to share her thoughts going forward. We wish her luck in her career and welcome her to the MLBlogosphere.

Everyone get ready for an insane finish to this magical 2007 season. It will already be unmatched as the Year of the Milestone, chock full of (three) no-hitters and guaranteed Hall of Fame plateaus. It’s going to be incredible at the end of this month, and maybe this is the year we get hit with a Monday tiebreaker or two. I was glazed over today by the coin-tossing for scenarios. I still haven’t written off the Rockies, who you might remember that I picked to be in the World Series when I wrote the MLB.com article on Opening Day about all the preseason prognostications at the magazine stand. They are hanging in there and now they have a big home series against the Pads.