Moving Foward (The 9 Inning Know It All Story)

By Josh:

This was going to be just a short ‘check out our new logo blog’ but I guess I wanted to say more than that.

In a few previous posts I have talked about a few of the reasons why I started this blog and what my hopes were, but today I want to go a little bit deeper because I think knowing my initial plans for this blog will help everyone to understand why I’m in awe of what has become of this just for fun hobby.

In June of 2011 I began to seek ways to become more involved in baseball. I was starting my second season as an intern with the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and with the near completion of my bachelor’s degree in business; I was looking at the possibility of working somewhere in a sports, mainly baseball, related field.

I really enjoy Social Media Marketing and I knew that if I wanted to give myself the best opportunity to get a job doing something I enjoyed, in a field that I enjoyed I needed to start somewhere.  So my wife, who already had a blog of her own, suggested that I start a baseball blog. I jokingly said I would need a cool name and sarcastically said I am the ‘9 Inning Know It All.’ My wife looked at me and said that’s perfect and that is how the blog began.

I wrote a few posts, and at one point went a few months without a blog post but in the summer of 2012, my third season partnering with the Volcanoes, I became much more active writing posts. Norm began to read my posts and we would talk about them during the games. Near the end of the season I asked Norm if he would be interested in doing some posts as a guest writer just so I didn’t have to write as many posts to keep the blog active.

Everything began to change from that moment. Norm got addicted to writing for the blog and began to pull out some of his old contacts to do some interviews.  I then convinced my brother-in-law Kelly to write a post for the blog and got him hooked in.

Then after being a call in guest with Norm to the blog talk radio show ‘That Other Sports Show’ I had the crazy idea of starting 9 Inning Baseball Talk. The first show was just me and it stunk. Second show included Norm and it was a marked improvement but we still had a ways to improve. By the third show we were developing a flow and recently we have added Kelly to our mix of people on the show.

Throughout this I decided that we needed another viewpoint in the blog and asked Mike Murray, former minor league baseball player, to join the mix and he accepted the invitation. Then about the time I asked Mike, Scott Sepich asked about writing as well and with that the blog that began with only me now had a team of 5 writers who have some amazing stories to share.

Now things have gone even farther.  The 9 Inning Baseball Talk show has partnered with Gellar Sports Radio which is an exciting step for the show.  We had our first scheduled guest on the show last night with Alon Leichman, which was a lot of fun.  The 9 Inning official logo was created and officially unveiled yesterday for everyone to see, and here I am just sitting in amazement at where things have gone.

In all of this I even started a 9 Inning Know It All Facebook page that has been a lot of fun as well.

Now I have my MBA but I’m not sure what I’m more proud of. The fact that I have gone so far with my education or the fact that this blog has such amazing things. I started this blog to hopefully open a door so that I could get a job in baseball, but today I am excited to say that this blog has opened up dozens of doors that I never dreamed were even there.  So I now look to the future of the 9 Inning Know It All Empire all I can say is that I don’t know what doors will open next for us, but I am excited to see what happens. I may never get a job in baseball, but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am pursuing my dream of being involved in baseball at full speed.

I hope that the journey this blog has already taken and is still taking is one that all of our readers are able to enjoy and it is my promise that this blog will always strive to promote the game of baseball locally, nationally and internationally in a way that we can all enjoy and be excited about.