Re-BORTing with a Word on Steve Melewski

BORT (aka Baltimore Orioles Round Table) was originally designed to be a forum for a few Orioles bloggers and preeminent posters from a smattering of message boards.  As quickly as the solid gold idea was created, it came crashing down.  The platform was just not very conducive to everyone who was interested in taking part.  The interest probably was a bit too directed toward increasing traffic on our home pages as opposed to making genuinely interesting content on the BORT site.  So, after a couple years . . . why do we, or maybe just I, wish to re-BORT.


For me, the idea arose one year ago and has been festering since.  Then, an upstart and prominent Orioles prospect website was caught in a brew-ha-ha about blatantly plagiarizing professional prospect sites.  It was a typical story of a teenager who wanted to have more pull than he had the ability to do so.  Often with upstarts we see a craving to be important instead of organically growing.  It truly does take a lot of effort and loads of criticism to be a decent writer (I do not consider myself a decent writer).  Anyway, the aforementioned plagiatizing blogger repeatedly refused that he was doing such a thing when his site was completely borrowing from PG Crosschecker and other sites the would be unfamiliar to the common fan, but stick out like sore thumbs for many of us.  He even was selling all of this borrowed information as a book.  After a bit of a tedious runaround, he realized he had no avenue other than owning up and writing about how much he learned from the experience.  Apologies mean nothing to me (well, almost nothing).  What means something is how people change their behavior.  I consider that blogger reformed.  He now runs a relatively solid and popular website that is a great repository for information about Orioles prospects.  He does very little analysis because he is not well trained for that, yet.  He does provide lots of interview, focused information from Orioles prospects, pictures, and videos.  It is a blog that was needed within our loose group of blogs.  Again, though, it was tedious to get this change to occur.  A few of us joke how much effort it took to get this guy to act responsibly and how the large sites, like Jonathan Mayo and PG Crosschecker, did not care.  I thought then that a website that operated as a meta-filter reviewing and pointing toward other articles would have nipped this one in the bud.


However, a site just bent on a Puritan righteousness of how awful we are and our writing, but oh how we love our Orioles did not seem like a particularly fun concept.  What does seem like a fun concept however is a site that not only questions what some people write, but also praises what others write.  It is in this new incarnation that I suggest BORT now becomes a place where daily we try to highlight certain Oriole centric articles by bloggers ranging from Orioles Post to Baltimore Sports and Life to the School of Roch to Peter The Schmuck Stops Here.  Our ideas may not be grand or interesting, but hopefully this little experiment will work out.  Also, with great hope, we will hold our own articles on pillars and thrash them with equal measure.  To add more, the goal here is really to add discussion and to be more engaging as a community.  I hope this is not taken to be merely mean-spirited.

After the jump, a word on today's feature: Steve Melewski's Blog entry over as MASN.

Introduction to BORT

Welcome to the Baltimore Orioles Round Table.

This is a forum consisting of several individuals who follow the Orioles. The present incarnation of the forum includes individuals from a wide-ranging spectrum in order to provide differing perspectives and seed potentially interesting conversation and analysis. Our goals are to challenge each other with aspects of transient issues pertaining to the club as well as providing a venue to share our own work with each other. With this forum, we hope to become better at doing what we do, which is to provide local and, sometimes, unique assessment.

The rules here are rather basic. This is a closed forum. The members of this forum are the only ones able to post and comment. Feel free to email any of us with comments if you so choose. If we find them applicable and interesting . . . we'll post them for you with proper attribution. If you have a topic or a link you would like us to discuss, we encourage you to contact us. We will also be steering the rudder in our own way. Each week, one of us will take a turn at moderating the conversation. A topic is chosen and we will sometimes keep to it. Expect a few posts each day and maybe some lively interaction.

Without further delay, here are the founding members of BORT:
Heath Bintliff - Brew Afficionado and Southern Fried Oriole Fan who operates Dempsey's Army;
Paul Bugala - Founder of the Bowie Baysox Blog;
Phil Finch, Novelist, Journalist, former BBWA member, and an intense Orioles fan since 1981;
Nick James - Raw, but toolsy, scouting at Camden Depot and daylights in law;
Lucky Jim - BORT's Poet Laureate and our second lawyer;
Daniel Moroz - Provides Frost King Baseball with statistical assessment and projection;
Jon Shepherd - Environmental Toxicologist and Jack-if-All-Trades over at Camden Depot; and
Jay Trucker - BORT's self-proclaimed witticist and a columnist for the Baltimore Examiner.

Thanks again to all the contributors and lets make this a fun year.

Regards,
Jon Shepherd
Camden Depot
BORT Founding Member