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YFSF.org

Are you tired of mangled fingers from the trainwreck of a URL that was our former home? Thinking of suing attackgerbil for carpal tunnel when banging out the address on a computer where you don't have us bookmarked, or at least poking him in the eye with one of your RSI-crookedized digits? Fret no more. The new home of YFSF is:

yfsf.org

Links coming in from off site pointing to pages at our TypePad address still function, but all internal links point at the new domain. Let us know of any wrinkles you encounter.

One thing that will affect everyone: with the new domain, your "auto-remembered" name/email/url data used when commenting will have to be re-entered and re-remembered to issue a new cookie for your web browser.

Thank you from your yfsf authors.

Sidebar Schedule & Standings Module

I finally got off my lazy backside (figuratively speaking as I remain a practicing assal horizontologogist) and fixed the sidebar module to bring the schedules, results, and other whatnot back to life. Hopefully it will hold up. Please let me know if you see anything looking at you askance.

Changes at the Top: The New YFSF

Opening Day is a time for a new beginnings, and we're proud to announce one of our own. As our handsome new banner indicates, we've made a subtle change to our identity. Henceforth, this site will be known simply as YFSF. This is a lot cleaner than our ungainly our old locution, which was a bear to spell out and a challenge to other sites that link here. Regular readers know it's always been how we refer to ourselves. (Think of Trans World Airlines morphing into TWA.) We also feel a lot more comfortable with the "vs" out of our name. While the site originated as an email exchange and then public airing of debate between a Yankee and Red Sox fan, it has developed into something encompassing more than just baseball's greatest rivalry. We believe in the dialectic process, but the kind of debate we foster here transcends a tawdry "us vs. them" mentality in favor of an objective, open-minded, and thoughtful analysis. YFSF will still be devoted to the rivalry and its protagonists (though not exclusively; the change in title suggests the expansive purview that has always characterized the site), but we all write here and we hope you visit precisely because it is better than the typical zero-sum Yankees-Red Sox material found elsewhere on the web and in the broader media. So YFSF it is from here on. Welcome to the new YFSF, the same as the old YFSF, but not quite.

Incidentally, in order to see our new banner you may have to force your browser to reload this page and/or clear your history/cache.

The Editors

Subtle Change

Based on a request from reader/commenter Vic SF for better visibility of the links in articles, we've introduced a dotted underscore for links in the articles and comments (but not in the sidebars). We've tested it in several browsers but if things don't look right to you or if you have any suggestions or other feedback, please leave a comment or shoot an email to: yanksfansoxfan at gmail.com

Thanks for the spot-on suggestion, Vic! And we thank all of you for your feedback and always appreciate when people take the time to help us improve the reading experience here at YFSF.

The Hot Stove: Set to Broil

In his interview with reporters yesterday, Joe Girardi was asked to comment on the Yanks-Sox rivalry, and the fact that it's been so prominent this off-season: "I think it’s what makes baseball great. Sometimes it’s nice to pull back and just be a fan and say, you know what, this is what makes our game so great. It never really stops. It never takes a break." He's right, and the traffic on this site bears him out. You might be surprised to learn that we've had more visitors here in each of the past few days than we did on any day of the postseason. Are we really more interested in the soap opera of off-season maneuvering than we are in the actual games that matter? I doubt it. My guess: the discussion here acts as something of a substitute or surrogate for the games we're not watching. It's also worth noting that hot stove talk is purely speculative, and this draws at both the strengths and weaknesses of the blog form. In absence of any concrete information, every post and every comment becomes a work of opinion. And we all love to air our own opinions, to find them affirmed and reaffirmed in a public forum. The ironic corollary to this situation is that the less we seem to know, the more entrenched and intense opinions become. We all think we're right, and in the absence of any proof to the contrary, no opinion can be categorically refuted. And so the threads grow and grow and grow as we wait and wait and wait for something to happen. No other sport casts such a shadow on our imaginations; it's why baseball's literary canon far outpaces that of any other game. How long until pitchers and catchers report?

YFSF Contact Info

It recently came to our attention that we had left a non-functional email address in our contact information; apologies to anyone who tried to get in touch with us, and couldn't. We'd love to hear from you, and you can now reach us at:

yanksfansoxfan at gmail dot com

Apologies for the confusion!

Who am I and Why am I Here?

Well, Paul is back and, if not totally happy, at least happier.  As for me, well, it looks like the week I missed held more of the same (a team that is terminally incapable of putting together any sustained offense) and more of the new (Eric Gagne: Mole) .  I am glad to have not been watching; my time with the wife and kids had to have been a hell of a lot more enjoyable then watching our wonderful Canuck channel Calvin Schiraldi and "BK Kim: the Arizona Years™". 

But now my time is up, and I am back in the fray.  And in a new way, as well.  After spending the week off the blog, I realized that my anonymity held nothing of substance, really.  So it's gone, along with (hopefully) obsessive-compulsive game-thread posts revealing non-stop annoyance and the resultant touch of surliness when the games end poorly.   A little background - my name is Andy, I'm 38 years old, grew up in Newton, Mass., and practice architecture in New York City - I have now lived amongst the enemy for 13 years.  I am married, have two kids, and am training the youngest to root for the Mets.  I figure he's a New Yorker from birth, so trying to get him to love the Sox is highly unlikely.  The Mets are my hedge.

So now, the rest of the season.  Second place rapidly approaches.

YFSF: The Family Grows

Just when you thought things were all fair and balanced around here, or at least balanced, we've decided to go and retip our scales with the addition of a new YF. Now, before you hit "post" on that nasty comment, let me introduce the newest member of our masthead, someone you already know if you read this site with any frequency, and someone who has earned respect from both sides of the aisle: Trisk. Unlike the rest of us here, Trisk actually is a leader of men on the ballfield, and the perspective that gives him has been, and now will continue to be, a big bonus for readers here. So, we can only now hope you will welcome him with open arms, and treat him with the same lack of respect and dignitude afforded the rest of the authors on this site.

Trisk is a great addition, and we just wanted to call your attention to some other fantastic changes around here—changes you may have noticed over the last month or two, changes that make YFSF a far more user friendly site, and really a place for 1-stop-shopping on all of your information needs on the Yanks and Sox. Thanks to the programming genius of our very own Gerb, we now have schedules, newsfeeds, standings, and team stats all live on the YFSF home page. These features are a real revelation; in our opinion, YFSF is now the most sophisticated and information-dense independent team blog on the internet.

Yes, we do think we're pretty hot, and we hope you agree. If you do, we encourage you to vote for us in the Best Sports Blog category of the Blogger's Choice Awards.

YFSF Introduces: Josh SF (aka desturbd1)

As we hit the dog days of summer and the pennant race heats up (face it, SFs, we're in an honest-to-goodness pennant race, seven game lead and all) we've decided to add another erudite scribe to the roll of authors here at YFSF.  Today we "introduce" a familiar name, desturbd1, to our readership.   Josh is his given name, and his handle from here on out will be "Josh SF (d1)". Though  most of you know d1 from his numerous comments on the site here's a little background, a short bio.

Josh was born in Massachusetts, but raised in lovely Manchester, NH. He'll be a junior at BU this fall after transfering from American University.  He's been a Sox fan since childhood, but according to him "didn't really go rabid until middle-school", at which point he immersed himself in the vagaries of sabermetrics and all things Sox.   Josh is also the proud owner of three Bob Zupcic game-worn jerseys, the only such Sox fan around.*

Welcome aboard, Josh! 

*this is a joke. I have no idea if Josh owns a Bob Zupcic jersey.

Features Update

Thanks for all the contributions made by you as readers and commentators here at YFSF. We are working on some new (well, at least to us) ideas for added content and support material that will hopefully make your visits to YFSF more enjoyable and informative. Our most-recent addition is a League Standings section on the right side column, with embedded links to the incomparable baseball-reference.com. Shortly, we hope to add more dynamic datatypes, such as recent scores and relevant feeds. If you have an idea about something that you would like to see, or comments and recommendations about the material currently available, we encourage you to comment in this article and/or contact us at yanksfansoxfan at hotmail dot com.

Thank you again for making this such an enjoyable site.