Friday, March 31, 2006

readme

MetsGrrl.com is the home for the baseball musings and photography of your charming hostess, Caryn Rose.

This site started as a private Blogger blog back in the Spring of 2006, when I had just laid money down for a Tuesday-Friday plan at Shea, and wanted to keep a diary about my first real year as a baseball fan. At the time I knew very little about baseball, and had taken the step of purchasing a plan (as opposed to just going to games whenever) because I wanted to make sure that my Mets-fan-from-birth boyfriend (referred to on this site as TBF) had some kind of priority in the new Mets stadium. I had started going to games regularly during the 2005 season, and liked it pretty good, so I figured, hey, why not?

This is what Shea looked like the day I drove out to Flushing to pick out my seats for the 2006 season:

At some point during the spring of 06, some of the sites on my blogroll noticed hits coming to their site from mine, and they came over to take a look around. To my complete and utter surprise, they liked what I was doing, and started telling their friends. By the end of the year, I had been interviewed for Mets Weekly, had gone to my first road game, started photographing baseball, and had to figure out how to move the blog off Blogger because it wasn’t my little private project any more.

As they say, it’s been a long, strange trip.

My family are not baseball fans. My father, who was born in Flatbush, is one of those guys who stopped following baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn. He used to cut Hebrew School to go to Ebbets Field. (I never knew any of these things until very recently.) Like everyone in Seattle (where I lived for 9 years), I sort of jumped on the Mariners bandwagon in 1995 and went to a handful of games a year. I had plenty of baseball-loving friends, but no team of my own until 2005. (You can read more about all of this here.)

By day, I’m a technical project manager who’s been working on the web since 1995. By night, I am a writer, currently working on her second novel (she says, waving at her agent. I swear.). I also write about rock and roll (with a focus on Bruce Springsteen), and New York City.

I’m also a photographer. Almost everything you see on MetsGrrl.com is my work.

This site is called “MetsGrrl” because I’m a cranky punk rock feminist. (The ‘grrl’ part comes from the Riot Grrl movement.) I wanted people to know right away that this site was written by a woman, but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t mistaken for one of those girls in the pink hats that screams every time David Wright brushes dirt off of his uniform. I write from a feminist viewpoint, and yes, I favor baseball blogs written by women in my blogrolls and will do so until we have more of a majority. Deal with it.

I’m not a historian or a statistician, and although I have learned a tremendous amount since I started this site, I am completely transparent about what I do and don’t know. If you came here looking for a statistical argument, however, you’re in the wrong place, and there are plenty of fantastic sites that do that.

What I write about is what I know, and what I know is what it feels like to be at a baseball game, what it’s like to live in New York City and watch a New York City team and be a baseball fan in the greatest city in the world. There’s also a lot of attitude and a little rock and roll and from time to time, you get a picture of my cat. (It is a chick blog, after all.)

The beautiful thing about the internet is that if you don’t like it, you can start your own, or read one of the dozens of other fantastic Mets blogs that are out there.

Email me at MG at metsgrrl dot com. [Remove words, add symbols.]

Thanks for reading.

xo,
MG

LEGAL DISCLAIMER:

Metsgrrl.com is in no way affiliated with, condoned or given any notice by the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc., or Major League Baseball, who have their own websites. Similarly, we have no association with the ownership group or any businesses related to the Mets. All article text is written by the authors, all pictures are taken by the authors, who retain copyright to their works. No copying or reproduction of any content here, photographic or otherwise, is authorized. Please email us if you wish to reproduce our work or put these photos on your blog (the answer will, most probably be no. Sorry.)

In other words: If you think this is the an official Mets web site, you need help. Don’t take the stuff that’s on here, especially without asking. Play nicely with the other children.