Bloggers on MLB.com

First of all, our friend CJ Wilson just posted and as usual, you gotta see his latest bloggage. The Rangers’ closer definitely is one of a kind among blogging athletes. In some cases, athletes get a hand with this stuff. In CJ’s case, he’s out there in the wilderness with his computer, just your average blogger who happens to pitch in the ninth in the Majors.

Now comes yet another reason to pay $4.95 a month for an MLBlog. If you look on the bottom of a typical MLB.com news article page now, you will see "Sphere Related Articles and Blogs." I went to my colleague Anthony Castrovince’s article about the two writers who voted for Maggs as AL MVP, and at the bottom I clicked the new Sphere link. Here is what it showed me:

What this means to you as an MLBlogger is that you now have even more opportunity for visibility. Sphere’s algorithm is going to look for other MLB.com articles that are related to that topic, and it is going to look WITHIN the MLBlogs.com community only for related blogs. I don’t know exactly what the search entails for those MLBlogs in terms of keywords/etc, but I will pass along more info as I find out, in case there is anything specifically that bloggers can do to increase their chances of showing up in this feature. I can tell you that we did in the billions of page views again in 2007, and that no other blogging community can derive the same concentration of baseball-interest only.

Try it out. Click on a ton of MLB.com articles off our homepage, and then Sphere it on the bottom and see what happens.

Elsewhere around the MLBlogosphere:

It was really nice to see all of the warm tributes left as comments by fans on the Reds MLBlog we created after the passing of beloved broadcaster and former pitcher Joe Nuxhall this past week. If you haven’t already, scan those comments and you are reminded about what exactly people love about the national pastime. They love people like Joe who loved the game.

"Baseball never has an offseason anymore." So begins the first post of a new MLBlogger named Richard at SoxNation Rep…I’ll hold nothing back! Welcome to Richard, and remember to start your MLBlog if you haven’t already so that you can start opining and spreading gossip about the Hot Stove League. An MLBlog is a 365-day thing, after all. And now it might show up on the bottom of a typical MLB.com article page read by millions of fans.