Gaslamp Ball is 9 Years Old! Pottery and Willow for everybody!!!

9 years ago, on this date, February 14th... YouTube was founded. (and so was Padres Fans Since '76, which eventually metamorphed into Gaslamp Ball)

YouTube was founded with the goal of making it easy to upload and watch videos.

Padres Fans Since '76 was founded with the goal of seeing what would happen if three guys just started randomly talking about things kind of, but not related to, the San Diego Padres.

Our style was irreverent and irrelevant. Poorly written. Our readership totaled in the single digits and if, in any given hour, we managed to hit that magic number of 10 people on the site at a single time, it warranted several telephone calls because we knew that, between the three of us, we only knew 6 people. Who was that seventh person? It had to be somebody we did not know.

The telephone calls were made exclusively on landlines. I owned a pager. JBox did not.

There was no concept of carrying the internet with you in your pocket.

By September of 2005, a revolution in sports coverage happened and Deadspin was founded. Bill Simmons wrote his first book. The Red Sox had won the World Series. Soon it would be time for the Padres.

In the time since 2005, Deadspin has become something of a cultural force and then settled into something else that I kinda don't read any more. Bill Simmons' Grantland has become a hybrid sports and popular culture hit for ESPN and YouTube is one of the most trafficked sites on the internet, serving billions of videos a day and acting as defacto "TV" for a whole generation. Everybody hates the Boston Red Sox.

All this is to say that I for one am surprised that we're still here. It's a good thing that we found a bunch more people who like to talk about baseball the way we kinda talk about it. And we're glad that you, Dear Reader, are still here as well. When you get the chance, you should look back at the archives. We were funnier then (because people hadn't yelled at us yet about stupid things we had yet to say). We were also angrier (because we hadn't started hobnobbing with various executives and celebrities). But overall, things have pretty much stayed the same (in that we haven't become a cultural force nor one of the most trafficked sites on the internet).

And that's probably good. If we stick to it, maybe we're next!

Patience, Willow! Courage, Willow!