January 1st, 2007 → 2:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
It’s been quite a year. And in these first hours of 2007, there’s not much going on in Boston, save for the never-ending search for a closer. (Call me an apostate, but I’d love to see Julian Tavarez in the role. Some guy gets a hit off him in the ninth, and bam — he’s laid out flat on his back. Good times.) Two thousand and six was another year in which the Red Sox proved they own Boston (and New England) — even the Globe ranked the signing of a pitcher who has never played an MLB game as bigger news than the death of Red Auerbach.
But let’s talk about what’s really important here: me. A lot has happened since this site went live on June 5 (the first post was about Albert Pujols and steroids). Feeding the Monster was released on July 11, and it hit #8 on The New York Times‘s best-seller list a week later, making my grandmother eternally happy. (Other people liked it too: Time said it was a “Moneyball-style triumph,” the St. Pete Times compared it favorably to The Da Vinci Code, the Washington Post said “residents of Red Sox Nation will gobble it up, as may others who are interested in the inner workings of professional sports,” and the Lowell Sun said that FTM was a “must read for members of Bosox nation.”)
In those first, heady days, I learned that Joe O’Donnell didn’t much care for the book, that the Sox were rumored to be instructing staffers to disavow its contents, and that Terry Francona hadn’t read it but knew it was inaccurate. Grant Hill, on the other hand, is a fan, and I’m still waiting to hear what Curt thought of it. Also, FTM was mistaken for a fictional account of the rapture, people tend to get excited when talking about No. 24, and (I can’t help myself) … Murray Chass.
What else? There’ve been 457 posts, the site’s had 1,530,182 page views (and 894,008 unique visitors). December was the busiest month (313,463 page views and 206,358 visitors) followed by August (309,466 and 201,182); June — when this whole party got started — was, not surprisingly, the slowest time (148,469 and 94,172).
Outside of generic pages like the blog’s home page, the most popular page (with 26,062 page views, worth 1.7 percent of the site’s total) was the one where I posted the transcript of Denis Leary’s Mel Gibson rant, proving yet again that the Jews control the media, the entertainment industry, and baseball. (The least popular had to do with race, gender, and succession battles at the Times.) Other popular posts: Nomar’s rants about Boston (16,950 page views, 1.11%) and a pair about Johnny Damon’s departure to the Yankees and Scott Boras’s role therein (16,201, 1.06% and 15,077, .99%, respectively.) Much to my surprise, the throwdown with Bill Simmons was only the sixth most viewed blog post, although it got far more comments — 56 — than anything else. (Don’t worry, folks: we made up.)
So there you have it. Now shake off those hangovers, return The Seven Pillars of Health and pick up a copy of Feeding the Monster for just $17.16 (cheap!). And don’t forget: signed, personalized bookplates are still available.
Happy New Year!
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