Hi. I’m Jon, the guy behind GroundRuleDoble, which is a play on my last name. I’ve been blogging about baseball and the Cardinals for over a decade now and while I don’t write nearly as often, there are still times when the mood strikes. That’s what you can find here.
I call myself a “Retired-ish blogger,” because I intend to be very inconsistent. If you want a weekly column, this is probably not the place. But if you’re interested in the occasional paragraph of brilliance surrounded by several more of questionable value? This is the spot.
I like trade deadlines and offseasons. I like analyzing roster moves and the business of baseball. I like rumors about bringing a team to my home area in Raleigh, North Carolina. So, if there’s something worth saying in that regard, I’ll probably be here writing about it. Maybe you get five posts a year, maybe you get five posts a month. Who knows? It’s an adventure for you and me.
To have done this for as long as I have and still have what metrics would consider to be a nonzero amount of people interested in reading what I have to say is still amazing to me. I really do appreciate all the clicks and reads and the related discussion on Twitter and I try to make sure that whatever I’m posting is worth your time.
So, if you’re interested, and I mean, after that sell job, who wouldn’t be? You can sign up to get the newsletter. Or follow me on Twitter. Or just bookmark the page and check it occasionally if you’d rather a lesser level of commitment.
The history
December 7, 2010. The Cardinals had just acquired Ryan Theriot from the Dodgers and called him a “natural shortstop” as the organization distanced themselves from defensive whiz Brendan Ryan in their effort to improve the team. After thinking about blogging for awhile, it was the push I needed. A few days later Redbird Dugout was born and I wrote a critique of how someone could possibly be a “natural shortstop” when ever metric says they’re a terrible shortstop and if they wanted to be better, Theriot should start a second and Ryan should be the shortstop. Then they traded Ryan on December 12th.
That was the start of what would turn out to be a relatively “successful” blogging career for that point in time. I started at Blogger and then moved to a self-hosted WordPress platform when I got “serious.” During this time, having discussed metrics with a lot of the other bloggers that I would have considered to be far more popular than me, I was probably one of the most widely read Cardinals’ bloggers for a few years. Which constantly blows my mind. But life happens. You graduate college, you get married, you get the big boy job, you have a kid, you buy a house, etc. All things that take you away from hobbies you enjoy as you reassess how you prioritize your time.
Over the last few years I’ve bounced around platforms. Medium, CardsConclave, and Substack. And Medium again and back again.
Meanwhile, so many talented writers, analysts, and content creators have emerged in the Cardinals’ blogging sphere that are amazing at everything they do, I find myself quite happy to just be a fan of everything they do.
But every so often, the itch returns. That’s what this is here for.
Oh, and the Cubs suck.
