Lifelong baseball fan. used to be able to tell you every lineup and roster for every team.
After the 2009 season I stopped following (Yankees fan, just burned out on the shitty old roster with Arod after winning in 2009)
Been casual follower since. Want to get back into it this year with the Baby Bombers. But I dont know a single fucking person on just about every team. yeah its been 7 years but seems like even as a casual fan I should know more players.
What are some good sites to follow? From 1994-2007 I basically watched every episode of Basebal Tonight until ESPN turned int oa shit fest. Was such a good show back then.
Any sites good for coverage of rosters, getting to know players, stats etc?
Honestly, the very best thing you could do as a baseball fan in my opinion, is pick up the MLB At Bat app. It's $19.99 a year, so that may not be something you wanna do (got mine free through T-Mobile & MLB.tv), but good God I love it. Very well designed app. Keeps you posted on the teams you want to follow, and even has very well done quick highlights with no advertisement so it's easy to follow all the action you might have missed league wide.
Huge Yanks fan here also, to sum it up: The Yankees are in the rebuild stage and doing so on the fly (with the trades of Andrew Miller & Chapman). Consensus is that we have a Top 2 farm system (Braves being the other), which is something the Yanks haven't had in a long time. The system is led by a 20 yr old short stop named Gleyber Torres (#3 overall prospect in the game) who has absolutely sky-rocketed up rankings and will probably make his Major league debut later this year. At the Major League level, as mentioned earlier, Greg Bird, Gary Sanchez & Aaron Judge are the big arrivals to the big club. Sanchez was called up last year and hit 20 HR's in 53 games and has all the makings of being the premier catcher in the game (sadly he just hit the DL). Greg Bird has an advanced plate approach and should be a very good first basemen for quite awhile. Judge is a massive RF who has some holes in his swing, but is surprisingly athletic and has huge power.
The "target date" for competing again is 2019. After this season A-Rod & Sabathia's some odd $50 million will come off the books. The front office will find what prospects work at the major league level, and then probably take left overs and begin packaging for a top level starter to pair with Tanaka (assuming they resign him this off-season). The 2018 Free Agency is the real event to look forward to. It's shaping up to arguably be the biggest of all-time: Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Matt Harvey, Clayton Kershaw, McCutchen, Pollock, Quintana.... The list goes on. Many people around baseball believe Bryce Harper to the Yankees is the obvious move, and the front office will have a ton of money to play with once that time comes. I think Harper & Machado is very possible.
Either way, it's an exciting time to be a Yankees' fan. Sadly it took seven years to get to this point, but here we are. Hopefully in a few more years they'll be back on the world stage. It's an even better time to just really be a baseball fan. The amount of young talent in the game is absolutely historic, and there are some fascinating teams around the league. MLB is about to hit a boon again.
edit: Oh and do yourself a favor watch that Mike Trout guy. He is special. Harper & Kris Bryant really have chances to be historically special also.
