[August 11th] -- It's taken the Washington Nationals nearly two years to leave behind those last vestages of the "dead-from-the-neck-up" era of the Montreal Expos. Now, finally, the team is acting like a real major league baseball franchise. It will still take a few more years for the Nationals to catch up with the rest of their division, and few more after that to surpass them, but at least we now know that it's going to happen.

That said, guess what? In the two years that the Nationals' blog-o-sphere has waited for its team to become "first class," we have been "first class" while waiting for them. Striketwo.net, a website that "summerizes, discusses and observes" news from all of baseball's "792" websites and blogs, lists the Nationals blog-o-sphere as #7 in all of Major League baseball in terms of total number of daily posts. The twenty-five Nationals blogs make up the sixth largest team blog group, and the 15 posts per day average is seventh best among the thirty major league teams. Pretty cool, huh?

The Beltway Boys, for example is currently listed as #37 out of the 792 blogs. That makes TBB in the top 3.5% of all baseball blogs. This means we're one of the top National blogs too, right? Wrong. Of those top 37 blogs, a total of six, or 16% of them, are blogs that cover the Washington Nationals. The Yankees and Mets, the top two teams in terms on total blogs, comprise only 8% of those top 37 blogs. I'm a star in the total blog-o-sphere, but only average when it comes to the Nationals blogging world. Sigh .... :)

For months, I have been apologizing here at TBB for what I perceived as the small number of blogs covering the Nationals. I couldn't have been more wrong. The Nats' blog-o-sphere is one of the best and one of the strongest, and it will only get larger as the team continues to morph into one of the league's top teams.

Way to go bloggers! We got to the top while the Nationals were still trying to play consistent baseball. For those of you who have been thinking of starting a blog, now is the perfect time to start one. Blogging is kind of like multi-level marketing: it's best to get in on the ground floor.

To Banks, Capitol, Federal, 320, Mr. Wonk and Mr. Distinguished, Just, Morning Glories, Cheap Seats and all the rest, congratulations on what you've begun. Now let's see what we can do about growing it larger, and growing it better.

# posted by Farid Rushdi @ 3:25 PM