Thanks Bill Ferris

Bill Ferris of Detroit Tigers Weblog fame announced he's stepping aside today from being a daily blogger on the Detroit Tigers. KJ at The Only Colors briefly talked about Bill's impact on him and Kurt briefly did the same at Bless You Boys. If you ask Matt Wallace and Lee Panas, I'm sure they'd both echo KJ and Kurt's thoughts as well. So, I felt the need to write a few words about Bill and how much I'll miss DTW.

I found the site in late 2006. After the Series That Never Happened versus Kansas City, well, happened to end the regular season. Oh, and there was the World Series that supposedly happened but I've blocked that from my mind. I was 20 years old and looking for a place to discuss baseball because my dad and brother only marginally liked it and none of my friends could stand it. Moves too slow. Lacks action. No one's getting tackled or hit (unless Kyle Farnsworth is on the field during a brawl).

I somehow stumbled onto Bill's site in the latter part of that 06 season and shared in the misery that everyone else there was immersed in. It was theraputic.

At that time I was dipping my toes into the sabermetric pool as well. DTW was such a godsend because it was a Tigers-specific blog ran by someone else who knew more about sabermetrics than I did. I loved it. Anyone that doesn't like what I've written here or for Bless You Boys that comes from a big time math/nerd/saber angle can point their fingers to Bill. Had I not found DTW, who knows how much I'd like sabermetrics today.

Bill is also the reason I own the 2008 Hard Ball Times Annual. He gave the choice of three books to the three people with the most comments on his site. Yours truly won with over 700 in 2007. It's a fact that doesn't impress as many people as you'd think. Still, I'd like to think that he put that book in there knowing it'd be the one that I'd pick as my prize for him being a great blogger. Realistically, he'd written a big article examining Dave Dombrowski's career as a General Manager and it was likely a free copy he got for doing it (along with some coin).

Bill was also very accessible, as are most bloggers. He's responded to every email I've ever sent him and always in a timely manner. Hell, he even emailed me in 2008 to see if he'd pissed me off because I hadn't been commenting on his site that year. Truth was, I found RSS Feeds and just how amazing they are (this is pre-twitter explosion for you youngins' out there) and read all of his stuff but had other avenues to expunge my baseball talk, plus life was in the way for the most part. 2009 saw me try my hand in the latter half of the year as a semi-blogger and I've been at BYB sporadically this year. Unfortunately, I've kind of been unwoven from the community fabric that still exists at DTW, but it's still a big building block of me as a baseball fan.

Unfortunately with Bill semi-retiring from blogging and Ian's departure around the new year, we've lost two of the three out of what I used to think of as the "Big Three." This was Bill/DTW, Ian/BYB and Kurt/Mack Avenue Tigers. Kurt, obviously, took the reins at Bless You Boys and Ian does write for MLive.com and you can find him on a podcast over at the Daily Fungoes.

But the Tigers blog-o-sphere is shrinking. No disrespect to other Tigers bloggers (because there are others that I read) but we're missing two large chunks out of what I once argued was a top three independent, team-specific blogging circle.

Ian made his decision for the right reasons and now Bill is moving on to better things: spending more time with his family. Our "loss" is their immense gain. I just wanted to expand on something that KJ at The Only Colors and Kurt mentioned briefly when Bill made his announcement. 9 years is a hell of a run. In internet years, that's probably around 112, so kudos to him. Even blogging part-time -- especially the types of analysis Bill would do -- is a ton of effort. He deserves to be saluted for it. I like to think of him as a Mitch Albom of the Tigers blog-o-sphere -- you know, with out the contempt from most of his peers and holier-than-thou attitude -- in that he has directly or indirectly influenced every single person that blogs on the Tigers.

To Bill Ferris!