9 Inning Know It All Empire part 1 of 3

By Josh:

The Beginning

Most people don’t realize the truth behind what sparked me to start the 9 Inning Empire.  Although I love baseball and do enjoy writing my thoughts, the real reason was to prove that I could effectively do social media and blogging better than another individual.  This person’s level of ineffectiveness and baseball illiteracy seriously irritated me.

Nothing frustrates me more in the game of baseball than people who disrespect the honor of the game, and this individual had done that on more than one occasion. So I took a stand by starting the 9 Inning Know It All in July of 2011.

The name of the blog actually happened by accident during a brainstorming time with my wife. I joked around about being a baseball know it all and made a statement that I was a know it all, all 9 innings of a game. The light quickly went on and I asked my wife what she thought of the 9 Inning Know It All.

She approved and so the blog began.

The First Year

Not much happened the first year. Initially I did some pregame posts about some of the Volcanoes baseball games and had a few fun posts, but my frequency of posting began to slow posted pretty quickly.

I wrote a few posts each month, but they were so irregular that at times, I completely forgot I had the blog.  I tried to write things that were interesting and fun, but with me trying to complete my bachelor’s degree, I didn’t always have time. I did have some fun posts, like my ‘5 Most Underappreciated Jobs in Baseball’ series. I still enjoy reading that series myself.

I didn’t have a plan or a lot of motivation. I knew what I needed to do to make the blog successful but I really was too lazy to do it.

My twitter account had all of 2 tweets over a 6 month period of time, I didn’t have a Facebook page for the blog, and I sure as heck wasn’t thinking about an online radio show. I was just like the countless others who thought about how great it would be to write a blog and then realized they would have to put in a lot more hours then they initially expected.

The Second Year

Almost one year to the day that I started the blog something happened that would change the 9 Inning Empire. Chris Stratton took the mound for the first time as a professional baseball player. Loving to take photos and get them signed I thought that this would be an opportunity to take a photo that would be special for my autograph collection.

Just for fun I wrote a paragraph about Stratton’s first outing and posted the photos of his windup and release of his first professional pitch. I then just out of courtesy tweeted it to the San Francisco Giants, who then tweeted it out an hour later.  What occurred over the next three hours was something I had never seen in even a month’s worth of time.

1,500 hundred people landed on my blog in a matter of three hours and suddenly I was getting traffic from message boards, Facebook, twitter and a dozen other websites.  Suddenly the light in my head went off again and I realized that something was happening that I had not expected. My blog was something that people were reading and talking about.

My motivation suddenly became revived and I realized I could actually be successful in the blog world.

That same year I came across a young ball player who shared the same first name as me, as well as a common faith. I interviewed Josh Parr of the Yakima Bears (now Hillsboro Hops) and watched as that interview began to take off and bring me even more traffic. Even to this day his name is searched for and his interview is read at least once a day, and often 5 to 10 times a day.

Continue to 9 Inning Know It All Empire part 2