So much has happened over these past eight months, all starting with Madison Bumgarner smashing two home runs against Zack Greinke and the Diamondbacks — remember that? — and ending just last week with baseball crowning a brand new World Series champion.
In this season, we at Bat Flips and Nerds have seen a lot of action. Here’s just a short list of the things we have achieved or experienced in the last season, in no particular order:
- A brand new website
- A bunch of guest writers and fantastic pieces
- A semi-regular podcast
- The season previews all manned by UK fans
- Having Blog Talk Radio approach us, host us, and then for us to subsequently receive some revenue from adverts
- Interviewing a bunch of fantastic guests such as Colin Murray, Josh Chetwynd, Carlos Pena and many many more
- Multiple appearances by the excellent GB Head Coach Liam Carroll
- The pre-MLB Battlegrounds meetup (leading into publicising more meet ups by the fantastic Baseball By Committee, Leon Boyne and Sandy Shipley & Mark Blakemore)
- The Erie SeaWolves becoming the Official MiLB UK Affiliate. Remember, a Minor League Baseball team ran a promo night for us, us in the UK!
- Working in partnership with MLB UK, including great giveaways and access during MLB Battlegrounds
- MLB Battlegrounds
- Tom and Ben joining Colin Murray on the first Facebook Live MLB UK event
- Tom and John featuring on the Nat Coombs TalkSport2 show
- Ben getting the job at MLB UK
- A Red Sox spinoff podcast “Brit Sox and Nerds”
- 14,000 website hits and approximately 20,000 podcast downloads/listens
- A couple of mentions on the FanGraphs Effectively Wild podcast
If you had said to us 12 months ago, “which of this list will happen?” We may have picked half of the list. To have achieved all of it is still mind blowing.
What we didn’t do but still want to do:
- A “Soccer Saturday” style stream where we all watch a game together
- A live event with all the team together
- All the team actually being in the same room together (We realised John is the only team member who has met all others)
- Broadcast live from a Major League game
All of our achievements this year have been possible thanks to drive and effort from all of the Bat Flips and Nerds team, but also because you — our readers and listeners — want this content. When John and I (Tom) first started we decided to produce what we wanted and see who came along with us. Well we will continue to create and record things we enjoy doing, hopefully you will continue to enjoy them too.
From the bottom of our hearts, thanks for joining us this season. We hope you will continue to follow us during the offseason.
Please tell a friend about what we do, retweet our tweets and review the podcast. It helps push us to produce more content and open more doors for you guys to come with us.
Ben, Darius, John and Tom
Sadly my engagement dropped away a bit this year and I’ve just been too busy to keep on top of things, especially with both the Mets and Giants having dreadful seasons. Well done on all you have achieved though and hopefully I will re-engage over the winter and into next season.
Steve, do not fear, baseball will be back next year and so will we. See you when you’re ready!