We had the most fun

A funny thing became readily apparent while we were trying to launch The Catbird Seat during the early months of the 2014 season: I realized I was probably ready to quit. 

I started writing about baseball in 2010 in an effort to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, to put my energy for making jokes and watching long hours of sports into one box for efficiency's sake, and to keep myself in the habit of writing.

It worked. I eventually quit the monotonous job I hated, went back to school, picked a masters degree and a job doing something like Real Journalism, and married someone I wanted to be present and available for. Burning the midnight oil to follow a bad baseball team no longer seemed like an escape to what I really wanted to do for a living, but an increasingly unjustifiable distraction from real life; a real life I liked. The saving grace about The Catbird Seat was that I loved it.

Writing about baseball has always been and will continue be great, but more than that I loved this website. I'm proud of the work we produced and the perspective we provided, but getting to talk to Matt Adams, Nick Schaefer, Collin Whitchurch, Ethan Spalding and now Cat Garcia about baseball, the Sox, Chicago, and our work everyday was my reason to keep to going. I'm so glad I shared this time with them even if it didn't lead to anything.

But it did! We're shuttering The Catbird Seat because we've been given the opportunity to launch a White Sox local site with a Baseball Prospectus, an outlet that was beyond my dreams when I first started writing. It's a tremendous opportunity, where we'll have more depth of statistical research, more access and more resources than ever before. It will be a better product, but most importantly it will mean continuing to work with this group and having the chance to reward them for all they have done.

I hope you'll join us at BP, it's free after all (People keep asking), and it launches on Monday. I can't thank enough all the readers who reached out to say kind words about the blog, spent time to read our stuff, or felt that we were worth the time to and energy to get into with us about how wrong we were. All of it has helped make this blog and this group what it is, and what it is, is an essential part of my life.