Five Years of Twins Daily - BYTO Edition

Initially, I was on the outside, looking in at this curious experiment and was intrigued, to say the least. The writers were some of the best in Twins country but the site was rough around the edges and the forums were in their infancy. It just so happened that I ran a forum…

Courtesy of Nick Nelson, a long-time BYTO contributor, a meeting was arranged with the rest of the Twins Daily founders. We talked ideas, vision, and I was on board almost immediately. After a bit of back-and-forth, we agreed on a plan and began work to fold the Battle Your Tail Off forums into Twins Daily in the next few days. We haven’t looked back since that time.

I’m immensely proud of what the Twins Daily forums have become, largely due to the diligent (and, at times, exhausting) efforts of our moderation crew – ashburyjohn, ChiTownTwinsFan, diehardtwinsfan, glunn, nicksaviking, Riverbrian, snepp, stringer bell, twinsnorth49, and USAFChief – and how the forums have complemented the four founding writers. While the front page writers are front and center so often (as they should be), I view the forums as the backbone of Twins Daily and the work those ten perform on a daily basis keeps that backbone from curling in on itself and ultimately snapping in two is vital to the site's continued success. As I’ve said many times when discussing forum policy for Twins Daily, “this isn’t RubeChat”. We expect civil discourse and the moderators are the people who make this site such an enjoyable place to hang out and talk Twins.

It wasn’t always sunshine and roses. As some of you surely remember, the BYTO forums were a bit… volatile, to put it kindly. During the transition, we lost many great posters that I still miss to this day, posters who either couldn’t or refused to tone down their style to fit the curated and tempered approach to forums we strive toward on Twins Daily. I’ll never forget the BYTO wiki, the expansive word filters (at one point, we had filters in place for the entire 25 man roster), the meltdown threads, and a certain fella from Alaska who reported me to the FBI for… well, I still haven’t quite figured out why I was to blame for any of that in the first place or what he was going on about in general, actually. There’s a lot I miss about BYTO and I’d be lying if I said I don’t look back fondly at that site whenever I’m faced with the overwhelming desire to really go for the jugular when posting on the forums.

But what emerged from that integration was the best Twins forum I’ve ever seen on the internet, and I’ve been participating in Twins forums since 1999, when I found the dedicated ESPN team forum and later, the Dickie Thon Fan Club. We encourage (and, unfortunately, sometimes demand) reasoned, intelligent takes on the Twins and baseball in general.

It works. Twins Daily continues to grow year-over-year despite the Twins fielding something that more resembles a clown car than a functioning baseball team for four of the past five years.

It’d be easy to congratulate myself and call it a day but I’m not the one who made that happen. All you great posters from BYTO who stuck around (many of whom later became moderators on Twins Daily), all you posters who followed John, Seth, Parker, and Nick over from their blogs, and all you new posters who were first introduced to us through Twins Daily itself, you made that happen.

So congratulations to all of you for making Twins Daily what it is today.

I also blame you for every headache I’ve had over the past half decade but I’ll save that missive for the ten year anniversary post.

On that note, I have a fun surprise for those of you who have stuck with us since the BYTO days. While putting together my notes, I dug into my old BYTO design archives and pulled out the best shirt designs we had over the years.

Enjoy. I couldn’t stop laughing when I opened the folder and saw its contents.