Sponsoring Joe Mauer (adventures in Baseball Reference)

Picking up a long discarded thread of this blog:  Last year I signed up to sponsor Michael Cuddyer, Terry Steinbach and Gene Larkin on Baseball Reference, that invaluable online baseball encyclopedia. When those one-year sponsorships expired this winter, I blanched at the prices for that trio and resolved to look elsewhere.

Joe Mauer's stats
are now sponsored
by this blog.

Things stalled there, largely because I was waiting to see what the price would be for Tsuyoshi Nishioka. B-R had a page for him, with incomplete stats from the Japanese league, but no sponsorship link. I had a couple of fallback notions in mind, but I was basically waiting for Nishi.

I checked on Nishioka on Saturday morning, a few hours after the Twins' first official game of 2011.  No sponsorship link. I checked on Brian Duensing, my primary fallback notion. Taken. Then, for no real reason, as I was pondering alternatives, I clicked on Joe Mauer's link.

Available. Really? I clicked on the sponsorship link, then backed out and took the dog for a walk and myself for a think. Do I really want to spend that much?

I'm not going to tell you what Mauer's price was. Suffice it to say that it far exceeded my $40 budget, far exceeded the January price of the Cuddyer-Steinbach-Larkin trio. I cannot defend my decision to buy the sponsorship on any economical or logical basis. It just felt like the thing to do.

So do it I did. The sponsorship went live on Monday. It is my expectation — resolution — that this is a one-year deal. Even if the Mauer page proves to be a major driver of traffic to this blog, come 2012 I will support B-R at a much lower price point.

But for 2011, I've got Mauer. (And, by the way, Nishioka is now available.)