Baseball in Fort Wayne

Archive for the ‘Baseclearing’ Category

• Baseball America’s Top Padres Prospects - A quick look at what Baseball America thinks of the San Diego Padres’s Farm system. Many former Wizards and a couple future TinCaps on the lists.
• Oliver Perez Staying with Mets - Not sure he even looked at (or had) offers from other clubs. Either way, he’s locked in with New York with a new deal.
• Bonine Staying with Detroit, Valentin Signs With Nats – Nobody put a claim in on Eddied Bonine after he was DFA’ed following the signing of Brandon Lyon. Veteran former catcher, Javier Valentin has sined a minor league deal with the Washington Nationals.
• Talkin’ Sports Moving to ESPN Radio 1380 - Jim had his first broadcast on hisnew radio home this past weekend. Great stuff. Tune in next (and every) Saturday at 9AM Est.
• Matt Bush Designated for Assignment and Matt Bush Update – Padres Career All But Over - The titles say it all.
• Jodam Rivera Leading Off the Lake Erie Crushers - Former Wizards is first to don the uniform of the new Lake Erie Crushers team. He was the first player introduced from the first three players signed anyway. So that makes him first OMHO.

Through Twitter, I started following OurSpaceFortWayne. Today, Baseball In Fort Wayne was featured as the blog of the week. A big thank you goes to OSFW. Check it out:

Each Wednesday, OurSpace will feature an area organization, business or group that share the values of innovation, ingenuity and creativity. To have your entity featured, please send an e-mail to ourspacefortwayne@gmail.com along with a link to your website.

Everyone else is doing it, so I guess I better too. Here are my top ten hit posts and top ten referrers of 1008. Thanks to all who have read and all who have referred. I’m looking forward to another great year in 2009!

Top 10 Posts:

1. First Round Pick Kellen Kulbacki Joining Wizards
2. Wizards No More? Fort Wayne’s 2009 Team
3. Mitch Canham is the Herald’s Man of the Year in Sports
4. 2008 Eric Wedge Baseball Camps
5. Matt Latos to Join Fort Wayne
6. Wizards Logo…The Best in Minor League Baseball
7. Cedric Hunter Making Good on Promise
8. Youth Baseball Thrives in Northeast Indiana
9. Jarrod Parker to Debut with SilverHawks
10. Nick Hundley to Join Padres’s Roster

Top 10 Referrers

1. padreblogs.com
2. whatsgoingdowntown.com
3. indiana.typepad.com/fwob
4. fwbaseballfed.org/links.htm
5. abeautifulcity.org
6. journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/Sect…
7. pittsburghpirates.buccoblog.com/bucs-…
8. jgwebblogs.typepad.com/wizards
9. gaslampball.com
10. neibaseball.org/links.shtml

Congratz to pepperwhiteboy for winning our first ever Twitter contest. Thanks to all who participated. I’ll try to put together more contests in the future. Be sure to follow fwbaseball on Twitter so you cat in on the action!

Special thanks to Vintage Blue for hooking us up with the prize.

The holidays are close. Are you looking for that perfect gift for the history buff or person who is proud of their local Northeast Indiana roots? One thing I have tried to do at this site is help point you to resources about or involving the game of baseball on the local level. One way I have done so is by creating an astore at amazon. I guess it could be used for gift purposes too

Right now, it is fairly modest, thought I am adding to it whenever possible (feel free to suggest items to include if I have missed them). Just today, I added two baseball related tomes by local writer, Les Edgerton.

As you might notice, not all the selections are purely about baseball, but they do in fact have some connection.

Tomorrow is the 2008 edition of the Rule 5 Draft. In addition to the large list of San Diego Padres players who will be up for the taking, many former Wizards are in the farm systems of other clubs. There are too many to list given that relatively few will actually get plucked from their current clubs (though many are predicting that there will be more action this year than in previous years due to the currrent economic climate).

If you are wondering about any players who might possible be exposed to being drafted, Baseball America has published a definitive list by team. Of course, I’ll do my best to report any selections that impact former Wizards or local baseball ties.

Among those local ties is Colorado farmhand, Jarret Grube (DeKalb) and San Francisco Giants minor league Simon Klink (Canterbury).

I know Thanksgiving was days ago, but shouldn’t we always be in the spirit of Thanksgiving? That being the case, I wanted to thank each and every one of your for reading, linking commenting on, and visiting this blog. I am thankful that I have this outlet to share one of my life passions with others. So, THANK YOU.

I also wanted to take a moment to say an extra special thank you to those folks who have linked to this blog and/or referred others to Baseball in Fort Wayne. As we enter the final month of 2008, I thought it would be nice to spotlight the top ten referring sites to display my gratitiude. I encourage you all to click on each and every one of them (at least once):

1. PadreBlogs
2. WhatsGoingDown(town)
3. Fort Wayne Observed
4. Fort Wayne Baseball Federation
5. A Beautiful City
6. LaMond Pope
7. BuccoBlog
8. GasLampBall
9. Northeast Indiana Baseball Association (NEIBA)
10. FriarForecast | Rattler-Radio | Ducksnorts (TIE)

If you are into the Social Media/Community/Web 2.0 thing, make sure you include Baseball in Fort Wayne in your hi-jinx! I’ve gotten around to creating profiles on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. I encourage you to add/follow this blog if you are on any of those networks.

Follow “Baseball in Fort Wayne” in Twitter

Join the ”Baseball in Fort Wayne” Network on Facebook

Add “Baseball in Fort Wayne” on MySpace

This blog started out as a way to promote my book, but has grown to a personal passion and mission. So I guess it’s already in it’s “2.0″ version, but there’s no telling where it might go from here. We’re successfully engaging folks from all across the nation and in many other countries, so hopefully I am doing my part to preserve and promote the baseball heritage of Northeast Indiana in some fashion. 

That’s pretty much what I set out to do in the first place.

Things will probably slow down here for a while now that the offseason is pretty much here. As news pops up and I am able to produce some interesting content, I’ll post. But probably not on a regular basis.

While I would be flattered if you were to visit this site daily, but I am also a realist. Here are some good ways for you to stay connected (or at least connect as I do).

If you are a user of RSS and RSS feeds, this blog has one. Simply click either of the links on the top of the right side of the page to add this blog’s feed to your preferred service (you can also click here).

Another great option is to have BBIFW posts delivered directly to your eMail inbox. Through a wonderful service called FeedBlitz, the process is simple. Again, the links are on the right side of the page, or you can click here to subscribe.

Whichever method you choose, I do you you will visit the site often and – as always – your comments are welcomed. You can either use my contact form to send me a private e-mail, or get some good dialogue going with all the blog’s readers by using the COMMENTS link that accompanies every post.

And, if all esle fails . . . follow me on Twitter.

A lot of people have been coming to this blog via this post in search engine results lately. Apparently, there are a lot of folks interested in the new name of the Fort Wayne baseball team. Unfortunately, I don’t have that answer.

Curious minds can find a few posts on other blogs that have done some domain registration digging and followed up on some “leaks” but I have chosen not to post anything until I hear it directly from the team and/or have permission to disclose the info.

For the record, I have neither of the two.

I’m anxiously awaiting the official word as much as you are. Personally, I hope they stick with Wizards and do another revamp of the branding much like was done in 1999 (I think that was the year).

Thoughts anyone?