Greetings, Rockies fans, and welcome to Purple Row! We are the PREMIER source of Colorado Rockies information, analysis, inside jokes, silly pictures, and irrational love for Carlos Gonzalez. Seeing how you took the time to find us and click into our little corner of the baseballwebs, I figure we owe it to you to at least give you a bit of an introduction to the site.
1. HISTORY
Purple Row has been around since 2005, when Rox Girl, my co-lead of the site, founded it all by her lonesome. Russ Oates, the current Managing Editor of SB Nation Denver, soon thereafter joined up with her. After several seasons of running Purple Row practically alone, the two of them decided that it was time to clutter up the masthead at the bottom of the page with more names for some reason. Thus, did myself, Andrew Fisher, Bryan Kilpatrick, and Jeff Aberle come to join Purple Row.
Since the beginning, we've added writers, lost writers, temporarily became a blog entirely about knitting, signed Luis Vizcaino to a 2 year contract, and had a couple of BBQs.
The best part, in my mind, of our history is the fact that the staff is entering our 4th season running this place, and a lot of internet webzones can't make that claim.
Click past the jump, there's more!
2. WHAT CAN PURPLE ROW DO FOR ME?
What can WE do for YOU? How about what YOU can do for ME? Wait... that isn't right either... hangon...
Seriously folks, we have a lot of content on this site. We cover just about anything possible we can get our hands on. We're big dorks like that. We run a lot of different articles covering a lot of different topics that run at various regularities.
Daily
Every day we have an article called the Rockpile. The Rockpile typically consists of the most recent Rockies/MLB news and some random analysis of some sort of topic. Usually we talk about all the news of the day in the Rockpile, you can share links, share opinions, all sorts of neat things like that.
Being a community-driven site, the people in the Rockpiles tend to like to share other interests in their lives. To accomodate this, we also post a daily Off Topic thread, usually right before the jump in the Rockpile. In here, you talk about pretty much anything and everything non-baseball.
Every morning we recap the games of all the Rockies' minor-league affiliates in the Pebble Report. We all focus on varying elements of the games, but be sure to check Andrew Fisher's Pebble Reports. Those are the best.
Weekly
When the Class of 2009 started writing for Purple Row, we all had a weekly feature that we would write.
Greg Stanwood writes his own article about Transactions, but rather than the business of it, Greg tracks every player movement through every North American level of the Colorado Rockies franchise. You can see more about this at Rockies Roster.
Additional to the Transactions articles, Greg is also the host and editor of Purple Row's Podcast, Purple Row Radio. You can listen to that Fridays first thing in the morning.
Andrew Fisher writes the NL West Report every week, giving you a rundown of the goings on of the Rockies' 4 biggest opponents.
Bryan Kilpatrick and I write the series previews in the Know Your Foe column. While we try to keep it light and fun to write, we still highlight things in the series to watch, a couple of players to keep an eye on, things like that to know coming into the upcoming series.
Sporadic
Along with the Series Previews, Bryan also writes the Rockies Retro column, a piece we've recovered from the scrap pile and dusted off.
Rafael Rojas Cremonesi is Purple Row's part-time beat reporter. Raffy has already shown us what he can do in Spring Training, bringing us daily notes and player quotes. You can read what Raffy has in Raffy's Notebook. In addition, Raffy brings us all sorts of articles with insight on the Venezuelan baseball scene and how it relates to the Rockies in the Rockies and Venezuela section.
Finally, and I can't believe it took me 2 days to add him here, but Craig Baker chimes in from time to time with articles documenting his life in the minors and his take on the MLB team. Without his prior knowledge, I added them all to a section called Baker's Dozen, and he'll probably demand I change that.
Sunsetted
I started out by writing a very Stat-heavy column that introduced new metrics and applied them to the Rockies called Counting Rocks. Jeff Aberle wrote an article documenting the business of baseball, salaries, payrolls, transactions, things like that, and he dubbed it Purple Row Academy. While these aren't being regularly written any longer, click through the archives. There are a lot of primers and long-form descriptions on a variety of topics that fall within those scopes.
3. HOW CAN I PLAY NICELY AT PURPLE ROW?
FIRST AND FOREMOST, READ THE COMMUNITY GUIDELINES.
The gist of these is "be nice to people and they'll be nice back." But as always, there are things that get people more riled up than normal, and things get a bit dicey. Again, READ THROUGH THE GUIDELINES.
Second, if you're new here, DO NOT POST A FANPOST AS YOUR INTRODUCTION TO THE SITE. We do love to read our members' opinions in a full article form, but most things that new folks post as a FanPost ends up being something that would work well as a comment and then gets overlooked by a lot of readers.
If you WANT to post a nice "Hi, my name is..." post, feel free to make a new comment in the Rockpile. We have users who have dedicated themselves to being the welcoming committee.
Third, you're welcome to have opinions, even unpopular opinions. But be forewarned that posting something unpopular tends to get a lot of responses. If you think that Chris Nelson is a bona fide star and deserves to be starting every day at 3B, that's totally fine, but be prepared to back your claims up a bit, as there are people here who might NOT think that and will want to debate this issue with you.
Fourth, if you DO get a warning from our moderation staff, you'll find yourself unable to post until you refresh your page. Then a popup in the middle of the screen will pass a message from the mod who warned you. If you do happened to get warned, typically it's meant as a corrective measure. Fair warning: If you call out the mods after being warned, you will be banned. Not intended to be threatening, but our staff works hard to make this site the best it can be, and I personally (Andrew Martin) don't take kindly to my staff getting thrown under the bus. I'm sure you all understand!
So yeah, lots and lots to cover, but we're a fun and complex place. If you ever find yourself lost in conversation (we have a lot of stupid inside jokes - yes, regulars, stupid ones), don't hesitate to ask what on earth people are talking about. I have to do it myself pretty regularly.
Finally, welcome. Welcome to Purple Row. We're all ridiculous Rockies fans and we're really thrilled to add you to our numbers.