Top Ten Baseball Blogs

As part of my day job, I do online analysis for sports teams, players, firms, all that good stuff. One side product of the work is attempting to find out what sports blogs are the most influential. Taking into account all kinds of different factors, here's what analysts (me with some help from the boys) at Sports Media Challenge have identified as the Top 10 Baseball Blogs on the internets right now...

1. Athletics Nation
2. 
   
3. Baseball Musings
4. 
   
5. MetsBlog
6. 
   
7. Bleed Cubbie Blue
8. 
   
9. Viva El Birdos
10. 
    
11. Lookout Landing
12. 
    
13. USS Mariner
14. 
    
15. Minor League Ball
16. 
    
17. MLB Trade Rumors
18. 
    
19. Baseball Analysts

Let me just say that it's kind of a pain in the butt to rank this sort of thing. These rankings weigh active community really heavily. It's not just a straight traffic ranking or subjective review, though all that was included. We also tried to get a good idea of what blogs had active communities and not just in terms of number of comments, but number of unique commentators versus how much back and forth the commentary there was. Like if you have a site that gets tons and tons of comments, then that's great, but if we're detecting that most of the comments are one off types of comments with little give and take, then that doesn't count as much as fewer commentators who are actively communicating with each other. Sites with Open Game threads thus got maybe a larger boost than what some might seem reasonable, but we're always trying to improve what we're doing.

What do you think? Is there something that I just completely missed? Just to let you guys know, Aaron Gleeman, Beyond the Box Score, Fire Joe Morgan, and Detroit Tigers Weblog where blogs that were just outside of the Top 10.

Also, I tried a bunch of different weights to see what it would take to get Gaslamp Ball in the top 10 and the only thing I could do to get us in among the top dogs was if I really graded hair posts, Canseco non-baseball posts and unicorn baseball posts heavily. Cest la vie. Maybe the world isn't ready for us yet.