Parte Une:

You have to admit that Baseball-Reference is one of the very best websites there is for statistics. You have to or I'll come to your house. You don't want that.

There are sites with more specialized, high-end sabe calculations, but for general purposes B-R takes the cake when stacked up against the Yahoos and Sportslines and MLB.com-in-your-mouths.

The internet is a tough neighborhood and it's hard to stand out in the search results especially on Google. If you don't know already, the algorithm that determines how search results are ordered is highly complex, but one of its key components is how many other sites link to a given site or page.

Why care? Sean Forman, the guy who runs B-R.com, strikes me as being the real deal, passionate about baseball and accuracy and trying to keep a good service in front of the user. And it's annoying as hell to want a player's page off B-R and have to scroll through the crap results of junky sites in Google to find it.

Yeah you can go to the B-R home page and search or browse, yeah you can install the B-R search plugin for Firefox... But a quick Google search is how I roll and so do a lot of other people.

So? So, if everybody who blogs or posts would just for a month or two make a point of hyperlinking to a player's page on B-R (particularly new and obscure players) the first time you mention him in a post (example to follow) pretty soon Google would start ranking that player page at the top.

Not only does it make it easier to search, but there's a knock-on effect: more new fans and new internet users will find out about B-R.com, B-R.com will get more traffic, get more money for their ad placements and Sean in turn will reinvest it in the site (he's got a very good history of that.)

Yeah, B-R.com is a business but it's not an evil one. Sean's always struck me as a decent dude and we can help ourselves and help him at the same time. I'm not Sean Forman and I've never met him. It just seems to make sense a/k/a enlightened self interest.

Pass this note or I'll kick your ass after gym.

Parte Deux:

I hereby declare my manlove for Fred Lewis and I'm giving him my sig virginity.

Baby don't hurt me.