Good Afternoon Everyone,

This right here, happens to be my 10,000th post on SBR which gives
credence to the phrase, "If you build it, they will come." SBR,
in one form or another, been around a lot longer than people will
admit.

Since I started posting here, I've seen some good things, some bad
things and some ugly things. Right now, in my opinion SBR is in a
downward spiral with many newbies recently joining. Some of the
recent additions are trying but it seems a large portion want to
be spoon fed. Is that the direction SBR is and wants to take?
The flip side would be some the fossils of the site who think they
can water on water and talk 'at' people - not exactly the friendly
types. There is also another set of posters who are low keyed and
fly under the radar of many since they rarely hit Players Talk.
All of them have value to SBR.

A few of the good things would be the Newbie Forum (a great place
for rookies to learn about SBR), the mods (if/when a problem comes
up, it gets resolved and most times PDQ), the points program (mind
blowing concept that is second to none). Go visit each sports
forum and look for people who have seasonal (or monthly) threads -
read them, learn from what they're doing (or not doing). If you
see them making money, put a little something on the game a well.
If/when it hits, give them a thank you to let that person know
their time and effort was worth it. By the same token, if/when
their play loses - learn from it. See why it did not win (check
against other wins from the person). Try to remember, each sport
is a marathon, not a sprint, and their will be highs and lows
along the way.

The ugly. Far to many squabbles about some of the dumbest things
one could imagine. Yes, I was involved in a a few of them but
then something clicked and reminded me, that's not who I am, what
I'm about and not the person I want to be - so it ended. People
at times over react without knowing everything about a situation
which is equally as dumb. The open racism needs to be addressed
better - they finally removed the 'N' word from use and those who
believe in it, say "we're being realistic" - the sooner everyone
learns to get along better, and not just here, in the real world,
the better we'll all become on planet Earth.

Out of fear for not including anyone in a special thank you, I've
chosen to go another route. I'd like to thank my family and friends
for helping out with the various functions when I've asked relating
to this board. Speaking of which, those who helped mine for me
some M.L.B. data, please contact me with your favorite team as I
have something for you.

Thanks for reading this long post. I hope you've learned a few
things to enrich your lives. As you see, this was posted in the
Baseball Forum, not PT, since I want to be able to look back at
this thread in a few years, after retiring from doing this year
round, to see how things have changed. After all, if you really
wanted to know what a person is about, capping wise, find
their sports threads.

May we all be here next year doing better than we are right now.

Terry