Hi, and welcome to the Belfry. We're glad to have you. There are a lot of great baseball sites on the Net, and a couple of fine Orioles ones, too. What we're striving for here is something you can't get elsewhere, namely the types of articles that we've been writing for years...open-minded, well-written stuff that might feature a player, something going on around baseball or the Orioles, some stat-driven material (Kerry's specialty), and sometimes, just some lunacy, like this past year's "Orioles Survivor" series, or the "Orioles Christmas Carol" that I penned for the Orioles Hangout. (These are still available in the Hangout archives, and may even occasionally see the light of day over here.)
We also hope to have a good chat board, one devoid of the playground comments so prevalent on so many boards. I realize this is a pipe dream, since humans are humans, but we're going to do our best to keep the level of discussion high and the personal attacks low.
As for me, I grew up with little baseball savvy, not even playing the game in Little League. I suddenly got turned on during the 1968 World Series, which I watched at home while I was out of school with the flu. I was totally hooked.
Years later, I moved to Richmond, Va., home of the AAA Richmond Braves, and I became a real live observer, going to games as often as I could. Around the mid-70's, I began driving up to Baltimore a couple of times a season to see the Orioles, and I fell in love with Memorial Stadium and its denizens.
After a couple of years in baseball purgatory in Columbus, Ohio, among other places (a hated rival of the R-Braves, an astroturf field, AND a Yankees farm club...yecch), I moved to Baltimore in 1988, just in time to see the infamous losing streak come to an end. I became a true full time Oriole fan, and have been ever since.
As for writing, I fell in with a Prodigy group called the "O's REGS" in the early days of online, and I eventually met a couple of the guys who participated. One of them, Kerry Leibowitz , has been my fellow scribe for years. Kerry and I began toiling for the Oriole Hangout, which had been started by another old "REG", Tony Pente, about seven years ago, when the Web began to beckon those who had previously only had message boards to slake their thirst for online baseball interaction.
I had a lot of fun working at the Hangout. I wrote all kinds of stuff. Serious, goofy, sarcastic, some of it pretty good, some of it...well, let's just say I think I'm a better craftsman than I was seven years ago. I have Tony to thank for giving me the outlet to develop my style as a writer, which, of course, is an ongoing journey, though not quite as fraught with uncertainty as authoring a Web Site.
As the Hangout grew, it went in a direction that Kerry and I didn't really fit into, and editorial problems arose...so, we decided that, just as the Hangout grew from the "REGS", that the Belfry should branch out from the Hangout. ("Birds in the Belfry" was the original moniker Kerry and I came up with years ago for our mutual columns at the original Hangout, a title we lost when the Hangout moved to Rivals; we're pleased to give it it's own URL right here.)
We hope some of our old Hangout friends will be regular visitors, as well as newcomers to our way of looking at the O's and baseball (you'll quickly see that although Kerry and I agree more often than not, the way we approach things can often be quite different...though when Kerry does decide to get funny, he outdoes anything I can come up with). We don't expect to "replace" the Hangout or ESPN or any of your other favorite informational sites, though we will certainly have information here for you to enjoy. We'd just like to be an alternative to the "mainstream" sites. We both enjoy baseball, and the Orioles, and writing. We think it'll show. We hope you will enjoy it all along with us.
Again, welcome...and let us know what you think. Just no death threats, please. We think Peter Angelos gets enough of those for everybody.