Goodbye from Pitchers & Poets

The title of our most recent post was Hello, Goodbye. We talked about old favorites like Lance Berkman threatening to leave the game and new favorites like Bryce Harper entering the fray.

We didn't realize it at the time, but there was something prescient about that conversation. Or maybe it was in our heads to begin with and it ended up on the proverbial page because it had to come out somehow. You see, both of us, for our own reasons, need to take a step back from Pitchers & Poets. To say goodbye for a while, and direct our attentions elsewhere. To watch baseball through a different lens.

So we're taking an indefinite sabbatical from the blog.

This is a melancholy decision. Pitchers & Poets has exceeded our wildest expectations in every way. We've become great friends, and made a bushel more. We've read great stuff and met brilliant people. We've engaged in the great broiling Conversation that is life as a human being. P&P was the ocean-going vessel that connected our islands with your islands, and at full sail she was a pleasure to helm. She hasn't been at full sail for a while, though.

So as we haul in our sails (is that right? We are hardly Westish Harpooners when it comes to nautical metaphors) on this project, we want to reiterate how important this blog has been for us. And more than that, we want to wholeheartedly thank all of you for reading and commenting, for telling your stories, for hearing out our often unwieldy ideas and for sharing your own. Thank you to all of our contributors, who wrote for no other reason than to join the conversation, thank you to the vibrant community of baseball bloggers who do such great work themselves and  who pushed us to be smarter and funnier and generally better. Thank you to baseball, and especially first basemen of the 1990s, for being awesome.

A specific thank you to Patrick Dubuque, who has lent his stellar work to the blog even as our own has flagged. He's as grok as grok gets. And he's going places (NotGraphs, specifically), and until then he's on Twitter @euqubud

In the meantime, the blog will stay up, and hopefully one day we'll get the Rogue's Baseball Index back up too. We'll keep adding the weirdest baseball pictures that we can find to our Tumblr, we'll be on Twitter, Eric will be at The Classical, etc.

Peace,

Ted & Eric