Athletics Nation
Encyclopedia
Athletics Nation is a sports blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
focusing on the Oakland Athletics
Oakland Athletics
The Oakland Athletics are a Major League Baseball team based in Oakland, California. The Athletics are a member of the Western Division of Major League Baseball's American League. From to the present, the Athletics have played in the O.co Coliseum....
baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
team. The blog was founded by freelance writer Tyler Bleszinski (also known as "Blez") in 2003. Currently, Athletics Nation is part of the SB Nation
SB Nation
SB Nation is a sports network owned and operated by Vox Media with more than 300 separate web sites maintained primarily by part-time contract writers. They put together posts, facilitate dialogue and interact with commenters. At a kickoff event in February 2009, there were about 185 blogs...
network of sports blogs and has one of the highest traffic volumes of any non-political blog.
History
Frustrated by a relative lack of media coverage of the Oakland A's and encouraged by Markos MoulitsasMarkos Moulitsas Zúniga
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga , often known by his username and former military nickname "Kos" , is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, a blog focusing on liberal and Democratic Party politics in the United States. He is also a weekly columnist at the Washington, D.C...
(of Daily Kos
Daily Kos
Daily Kos is an American political blog that publishes news and opinions from a progressive point of view. It functions as a discussion forum and group blog for a variety of netroots activists, whose efforts are primarily directed toward influencing and strengthening the Democratic Party...
fame), Tyler Bleszinski founded Athletics Nation in November 2003. Bleszinski often viewed KNBR
KNBR
KNBR, The Sports Leader, is the on-air branding used by two AM radio stations in the San Francisco, California, area broadcasting a sports radio format, owned by Cumulus Media....
as a prime example of an anti-A's bias in the Northern California media. KNBR is a San Francisco
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
radio station with a strong signal that could be heard up and down the West Coast. KNBR also happens to be a minority shareholder and radio flagship of the San Francisco Giants
San Francisco Giants
The San Francisco Giants are a Major League Baseball team based in San Francisco, California, playing in the National League West Division....
, the cross-bay rivals of the A's. In response to KNBR's perceived slant, he created Athletics Nation as an online bar "where everyone knows your name and where the swivel chair at your computer becomes a bar stool upon which we will pontificate and ruminate together."
Athletics Nation attracted a following due to Bleszinski's ability to get interviews from many people well connected to the Athletics. He has interviewed local beat writers, players and coaches on the Athletics, General Manager Billy Beane
Billy Beane
William Lamar "Billy" Beane III is a former Major League Baseball player and the current general manager and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics...
, and team owner Lew Wolff.
In January 2005, Athletics Nation became the flagship of the SB Nation
SB Nation
SB Nation is a sports network owned and operated by Vox Media with more than 300 separate web sites maintained primarily by part-time contract writers. They put together posts, facilitate dialogue and interact with commenters. At a kickoff event in February 2009, there were about 185 blogs...
network of sports blogs. SB Nation was created by Bleszinski and Moulitsas as a way for each different baseball team to have a quality blog with a means to create fan community on the internet. Started mainly as a baseball effort, SB Nation now has blogs covering all thirty teams of the MLB and has a few blogs covering the NBA
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America. It consists of thirty franchised member clubs, of which twenty-nine are located in the United States and one in Canada...
, NFL
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
, NHL
National Hockey League
The National Hockey League is an unincorporated not-for-profit association which operates a major professional ice hockey league of 30 franchised member clubs, of which 7 are currently located in Canada and 23 in the United States...
, College Sports and Pro Cycling
Cycling
Cycling, also called bicycling or biking, is the use of bicycles for transport, recreation, or for sport. Persons engaged in cycling are cyclists or bicyclists...
. The network also includes a pair of general baseball sites, Minor League Ball, written by former Bill James
Bill James
George William “Bill” James is a baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics...
assistant John Sickels, and Beyond the Boxscore, a stats-oriented site edited by Marc Normandin. The bloggers who cover sports for the network are compensated by a revenue sharing agreement in which the blogger receives a portion of ad revenue generated by the blog.
Features
Athletics Nation is powered by the ScoopScoop (software)
Scoop is a content management system originally developed by Rusty Foster. Scoop's focus is on collaborative publishing, and its feature set is geared toward encouraging user contributions and participation. Scoop is written in Perl and runs via mod_perl on Apache web servers with a MySQL database...
content management system. In addition to the blog, registered users can post diaries without moderation on the site. The diaries are virtually similar to the blog posts on the front page and can be promoted to the front page by the primary users. The diaries are considered a "blog within a blog" for the individual users. It is often noted that diaries posted on Athletics Nation can receive more comments in a day than most blogs do in a month. Because of the Scoop system, Athletics Nation combines the elements of a blog and message board with its diary system. The diaries cover diverse topics ranging from statistical analysis to humor, general observations on the A's and even advertisements for offline gatherings.