A Long Overdue Introduction

Hello everyone. This should have been my first official post but it goes in-line with how unconventional 2020 as has been. With that said, my name is Dan Martin and I am a journalism student at the University of Houston. A few weeks ago, Bilbos asked me to join the staff, which is why my articles have mysteriously been appearing on the front page.

Aside from attending UH, the only other interesting personal tidbit of information about me is that my brother, Tom, used to run the Rockets’ SBNation blog The Dream Shake years and years ago before he became a big shot and developed an ego that outgrew SBNation (he’s probably not reading this).

I’ve been an avid Astros fan since the early 2000s and somehow managed to stay loyal during the glorious 3-hole hitter Jason Michaels/designated hitter Ronny Cedeno era of the early 2010s. As the 2010s progressed, analytics took over the game of baseball, and as a result I became fascinated by them. The amount of information available nowadays is incredible and has added a great deal of complexity to an already complex game. It’s greatly boosted my passion for the game and I think has made it substantially more interesting (not that it wasn’t already). Utilizing the immense amount of information available has made writing about baseball a lot of fun for me.

This is a rock solid community of Astros fans and I’m glad that I’m able to talk baseball with all of you. I know not everyone is a hopeless baseball nerd like myself and is analytically savvy, but I hope my articles thus far have been interesting and easy to read. I’d like to thank the entire TCB staff for a warm welcome that’s made this transition quite an easy one for me. They’re a talented group that evaluates the Astros and baseball in general from many different angles and I’m happy to be apart of it.