New platform

This, so I am told, is progress.

I'll spare you the story of how the original "baseball blog" was set up on the Free Press Web site in the spring of 2007 without allowing comments. It's sufficient to say that there were no comments, and that was fine by me.

The powers that be now deeply wish that comments be included — and, I guess, that my blog have the same platform as the others offered by the Free Press — and so here I am, and here it is.

I peruse a number of baseball blogs — the blog roll to the right contains the ones I visit daily, plus a couple that I visit less often but find useful for keeping an eye on the AL Central — and generally find that the comment section is best ignored. I'm not going to ignore it here. I'm going to police it, and I'm going to police it hard. Profanity, vulgarities and obscenities are obviously taboo. But I'm going further. There are certain things that I see with regularity in, for example, the Star Tribune blogs that I will not tolerate here. A couple of examples:

*It's OK to criticize Bill Smith, the Twins general manager. Referring to him by his initials in order to make a barnyard epithet out of his name is not. Delete.

*It's OK to argue that Nick Punto shouldn't be the regular shortstop. Hoping that he breaks his leg is not. Delete.

I apologize if this seems overly combative. I hope that my readers are sufficently mature that this warning was unnecessary. The experience of the Free Press' original forum, and of other blogs I keep track of, suggest otherwise.