I started this by saying ‘This is not one of those “Oh it’s been a long time since I’ve posted but I hope to post more regularly now!” posts”, but lo and behold, it is one of those posts – shōganai. This site has been live since 2009, we went through long periods of not updating before, and this time we haven’t updated since middle of the 2018 season. I’m a realistic man, I can’t guarantee anything. Between work and going to live games (I’ve been to around 150-160 in the last two seasons..!) it’s sometimes hard to find motivation to write. Even in our most active days, Craig and I would post on a schedule, and yeah, it is a bit of work to blog a few times a week over the course over a long season so setting a schedule helped give us structure.
Much like with any other activity, getting out of the habit of writing regularly turns into a self-perpetuating cycle of continuing to not write. When this blog started, the media landscape was quite different, there was very little available on NPB in English and nothing at all on Lotte, so I felt sharing my thoughts was good for the small English-speaking fan community. Now there are very active communities on a variety of social media platforms especially Twitter and Reddit, so in recent years it’s seemed like much less of a necessity to keep people updated with news and good things. Hell, I’ve been averaging 5000 tweets a year the past year myself, getting plenty of interaction with other fans throughout the season so the gap in blogging hasn’t really felt like a gap much of the time.
What is the point of sports blogging in 2020, then? I’m not going to pretend to answer the question in a general sense but for me, I’ve noticed that I really miss discussing Lotte in a more expansive way than what social media provides. Tweets and Line messages are ephemeral, but I can still look at articles we wrote here 10+ years ago and remember so much about the teams and environment of those days. I miss having that record. I’m also optimistic (as always!) about this 2020 Lotte team and quite honestly I want to chat about that at length.
So I’ve got a few things in mind to talk about over the next few weeks. Let’s see where it goes from there.
Yeah! Missed reading your stuff, even if I didn’t read it all the time. Still, I don’t want to be the last one blogging about NPB, so it’s good to have you back, even if it’s just a post here and a post there.
Thanks! It’s going to be helpful to try not to do too much – like one year when we posted something for every single game, and when I used to edit and upload a bunch of pics a few times a week. That’s taxing! I’m just going to enjoy posting what and when I feel like.