Welcome to the Pond!
By Wally Fish
Welcome to Puckett’s Pond!
FanSided’s Minnesota Twins coverage has finally relocated from it’s former location at Twinkie Talk (http://twinkietalk.com) to the site you find yourself on now. So, you already know that we have a new site name and a new URL to go with it. If you had visited Twinkie Talk in the past then it is readily apparent to you that we also have a bit of a new look with a slightly different color scheme.
Those are some reasonably big changes, but the biggest change is … well …
Me!
That’s right, I’ve jumped from the ocean that is FanSided’s general baseball coverage on Call to the Pen to the cozy confines of Puckett’s Pond. A place where I can cover my beloved Minnesota Twins for the network just as I did many moons ago.
It’s only been 20 months since I left this site but it seems like it has been ages. If you have a really good memory and happened across this site in 2009 during late February, March, April or early May then you may recall that I was the original writer for Twinkie Talk.
My first post, and the first ever on that site, came on February 27th, 2009. Between that day and May 5th I published 42 articles before having to reduce my workload due to a broken hand that I suffered during a mid-April softball practice.
That reduction of workload forced me to choose between our Royals site Kings of Kauffman and Twinkie Talk. I opted to go with our Royals coverage because I live in Kansas City and my wife’s family and my circle of friends here are by-and-large Royals fans. Not knowing what type of readership or following I was going to get, I felt that writing for people I was around made more sense.
The success I found on Kings of Kauffman gave me the confidence to help launch Call to the Pen the following year. I’ve missed writing about the Twins, and to a lesser degree the Royals, ever since. In the last 10 months I have learned that I am much better suited and much more comfortable writing about baseball on a team level.
Coming to that realization made returning to Twins-based writing a natural fit. While I currently live 450 miles from where I was born – and grew up* – in the Twin Cities, this move feels like a coming home.
*Shout outs to Valentine Hills Elementary, Chippewa Junior High and Mounds View High School!
If you have enjoyed the work of Steve, Erin and Josh you will be happy to know that they have elected to live “pond-side” and will continue to contribute content to this site on a weekly basis. As for me, I plan on publishing at least one article per day going forward. I may miss a day here and there as I continue to balance the demands of a full-time job, wife, two young boys and a slew of home projects with my loves of baseball and writing.
Speaking of my writing, all aspects of baseball interest me so my columns will touch on all sorts of Twins related topics. While I will be watching most games by way of the MLB Extra Innings package, I am not big on writing game summaries and rarely will I react with immediate emotion after a win or a loss. My writing process is typically methodical, my style is verbose and analytical and I take pride on being level-headed and rational in most of my opinions.
Being among my areas of interest, there will be a healthy dose of content based on the minor leagues, prospects and the draft. I also feel it is important to keep things in perspective by comparing our team against our divisional competition so I will also write about the AL Central as a whole on a semi regular basis. On the scouting/sabermetrics scale, I fall solidly in the middle valuing both viewpoints as critical elements to drawing accurate conclusions about players and teams past, present, and future.
I hope you enjoy your visits to Puckett’s Pond and come back often. We will be here working to bring you all the relevant Twins news as it occurs along with plenty of content that you will hopefully find fresh and insightful.
If you enjoy what you read here on this site, I encourage you to follow us on Twitter and to also “like” our Facebook page.