Hall of Fame project recap

A week has passed since I posted the results of my second annual project on the 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, and things are going well in these parts.

We have a new traffic record here with just north of 7,200 unique visitors for the month as of yesterday. More than 5,000 of these visitors came to read the Hall of Fame project, with it being linked to at the Sweet Spot blog on ESPN.com, Hardball Talk (the NBCSports.com baseball blog), Baseball Think Factory, and elsewhere. There’ve also been two cool original posts it’s inspired: an expanded case for Lip Pike and a list on the 10 best Yankees not in the Hall of Fame. It’s clear there’s an audience for our work and that it resonates with people, and I expect traffic numbers will continue to climb with next year’s project.

We can also expect a few thousand more visitors for the 2011 project over the coming year. We’re leading the search engines for this area, and traffic spikes both when the Hall of Fame voting results for the Baseball Writers Association of America come out in early January and again when players are enshrined in mid-July. I expect comments will keep coming, both positive and negative. Heck, the shanty Top 10 list I did back in 2009 (don’t judge me, but it sucks) still draws the occasional comment.

So what’s to come? I alluded near the end of my project’s results post that I’m already looking forward to next year. I plan to keep the foundation of the project the same, though there should be a few new wrinkles. I want to expand Super Ballot, get BBWAA members and former players voting, and automate the vote counting. I’d also like, if possible, to offer a free Baseball: Past and Present t-shirt to everyone who votes. I’m looking into options on this and am open to suggestions. Maybe anyone who’s done a mass run of t-shirts for their site can steer me in the right direction.

In the meantime, I want to keep improving this website. I’ve reached out to a few more people I’d like to write here, and I’ve started kicking around ideas for new content. If anyone has any ideas for posts or would like to write, please feel free to email me at thewomack@gmail.com. I welcome all feedback, good or bad, laudatory or critical. On a side note, a small project is in the works for the spring. I’ll announce what it is around the beginning of the season.

I want to thank everyone who supports this site, be it by reading, writing, offering comments or emails, or doing anything else to help things run successfully around here. This site has life in part because it seems to connect with people. I hope this continues.