Friday, July 11, 2008

"Sorry folks, site's closed. Moose out front shoulda told ya."


(Fear not, non-sports fans; in spite of the many baseball-specific references ahead, this post is not really about baseball. And no, this site is not closing. Yay! or Boo! depending on how you feel about that news.)

Pitcher CC Sabathia's has been in the sports headlines a lot lately because he was recently traded from the Cleveland Indians to the Milwaukee Brewers in what is easily the most dramatic trade so far this season. If you Google his name, you're liable to come across this web site. There are lots of forsaken web sites like this on the internet, like research satellites deployed long ago that are still transmitting to nobody.
Seeing web sites like this is always kind of creepy. It's like coming across an out-of-business toy store or abandoned amusement park. I can't help but wonder what went wrong. At some point there was a person who was so excited about the exploits of CC Sabathia that they went out and registered a URL, designed a site, lovingly gathered statistics, placed pertinent hyperlinks and painstakingly scanned several photos, just so they could share their enthusiasm with the world. What happened four years ago that caused them to lapse? It's not like Sabathia hasn't been successful and therefor worthy of a tribute like this. Did they forget? You'd think his winning last year's Cy Young Award as the American League's best pitcher might have reminded them that they hadn't posted an update since 2004. Maybe they just stopped liking him. Perhaps they had a personal encounter with CC and he was less than pleasant. Unfortunately, that kind of thing happens between sports heroes and fans. But they didn't take the site down. They just...quit. Maybe it was something worse? Some kind of tragic personal circumstances that prohibited them from maintaining the site. Who knows? Apparently, nobody really.

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