River Avenue Blues

River Ave. Blues » Administrative Stuff

A Goodbye and a Thank You

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Don’t be sad it’s over. Be happy you were along for the ride. (Getty)

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. There has never been a moment — not once — where I felt like I deserved the recognition or praise that came my way for RAB. I’m not oblivious to the site’s success and to this day I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I don’t feel I’ve earned it.

To me, I’m just a guy who had an internet connection and met the right people at the right time, has a love of dingers and Mariano Rivera frontdoor cutters …

… and has a curiosity about baseball. When we launched RAB, it started as a passion project, and I did my best to keep up with Joe and Ben. We’ve added writers over the years to reduce my workload and also to bring different perspectives to the site, and I felt the same way. I’ve just been trying to keep up.

I never expected RAB to become what it did or last as long as it did or lead to where it did, and I feel I played only a small part in that. RAB was at its best with multiple voices and different opinions, and I am only one person. Everyone here made me better. So did all the other baseball bloggers out there, Yankees or otherwise, though they may not know it.

No one pushed me to be better more than you folks though. Through mailbag questions, emails, social media, and our comments (RIP), RAB readers pushed me to be better. You helped me broaden my horizons, helped me come up with post ideas — I couldn’t possibly tell you how many topics I “stole” from the comments or random Twitter interactions over the years — and kept me on my toes.

The Yankees provide great subject matter and a dedicated fan base, and that made RAB all the more fun. More demanding, but also more fun. Building a successful blog is almost impossible nowadays. Building one in the New York media market about this team? I look back and wonder how we managed to do it, and I know I couldn’t have done it without everyone who read. Your passion pushed me.

RAB has led to some pretty cool things, including my current spot with CBS Sports. Eventually I became credentialed — I am forever grateful to Marc Carig for showing an overwhelmed blogger the ropes in a big league clubhouse (you can all Marc thank for talking me into keeping RAB alive as long as I did) — and now I’m in the BBWAA and halfway to a Hall of Fame vote. This was not the plan, but here I am.

The best part of RAB has been the friendships, both the new ones I’ve made and the existing ones that grew stronger. I’ve put a lot of time into RAB and the friendships make it all worth it. There are things I would change if we could go back and do it again — we were jerks to people unnecessarily in the early going, which I blame on youthful know-it-all-ness — but not that. I have friends for life because of RAB.

RAB started as a hobby and evolved into a life-changing journey. I’m sad the site is shutting down but I also know it’s time. Part of me is sad to see RAB go and the rest of me is excited to figure out what’s next. Whatever it is, I know it won’t be as rewarding. Even though I never met most of you, you were part of my life for 12 years, and you helped me get to where I am today.

Thank you for reading, thank you for the thank yous and the stories about what RAB meant to you, and thank you for pushing me to make RAB the best it could possibly be.

–30–

A Guide to Life After RAB

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How it all started.

In the three weeks since we announced RAB is shutting down, I’ve been overwhelmed by thank yous and people reaching out to tell me what RAB means to them. It means a lot to me (to us) and I thank everyone who reached out.

In those three weeks I’ve also been overwhelmed by folks asking where they can get their Yankees fix going forward. With no more RAB, people want to know where to go next, so I figured it was worth putting together this “guide to life after RAB” post. It feels presumptuous (who made me bloglord?), but people want it, so here it is.

Going forward, the RAB website will remain live so you can go back through the archives, though the site will not be updated. Our Twitter account @RiverAveBlues will remain active though. That’s easy enough. Here is everything I could cobble together for the post-RAB world. I hope this helps, and thank you again for reading.

“RAB Thoughts” Patreon

In our shutdown post I said I was considering a mailing list/newsletter type thing with a weekly “thoughts” style post. Posts like this. You’ve seen plenty of them even if you haven’t been reading RAB all that long. I’ve decided to go through with the once-a-week thoughts posts. I’m still going to have the itch to write (and fanboy and complain) about the Yankees, and one post a week shouldn’t be a burden.

These weekly thoughts posts won’t appear at RAB and they won’t be free. I’ve set up a $3 per month Patreon page called RAB Thoughts. Create a Patreon account (the account itself is free) if you don’t have one already, then click the “Become a Patron” button on the RAB Thoughts page, and you’re in. Weekly thoughts posts for the cost of one non-Starbucks cup of coffee a month. You’ll get an email each time a post goes live. There’s also a Patreon mobile app and you can received a notification for new posts. Easy peasy.

I am leaning toward Wednesday being thoughts post day. I definitely don’t want to do it Monday because it’ll hang over my head all weekend. Wednesday’s a good day right in the middle of the week. Maybe Thursday works better because it is typically the end of the previous series and start of the new series. I’ll see how it goes. For now, the first post will be Wednesday, May 8th. I’m taking the rest of this week off, so it’ll start up next week.

(Update: Just to be clear, the Patreon will be year-round, not just during the baseball season.)

Where you can find us

Yankees news and analysis

I leave you with a smorgasbord. Try a little of everything and see what you like. Personally, I read everything Lindsey writes (no, The Athletic is not paying me to say that) and pretty much everything at RLYW. I enjoy the snark and the short, snappy posts.

Minor league daily updates and analysis

The Bronx View runs a daily update post similar to DotF. Pinstriped Prospects is the best independent source for farm system news and they provide lots of original reporting, including Extended Spring Training information that is impossible to get anywhere else.

Stats and other information

FanGraphs has a bullpen workload page similar to ours, though it doesn’t include warm-ups or Triple-A pitchers. The individual player pages at Baseball Savant (here is CC Sabathia’s, for example) are incredibly useful. Traditional stats, Statcast, heat maps, the works. My best advice — my only advice, really — is to keep playing around with each site. There’s so much information and so many tools available these days that it can be overwhelming, I know. Give it time and you’ll learn your way around.

RAB: Origins

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(Al Bello/Getty)

Contemplating the end of RAB, I thought of its origins. Why did the three of us come together to create this site?

Ben covered the basics in his own farewell post so apologies if I’m covering known ground. But this is the story as I remember and can document it.

In 2006 we were all writing on our own blogs — The Sporting Brews, Off The Facade, In George We Trust. At that stage in the evolution of blogging everyone read everyone else’s blogs, so we were all familiar with each other’s work. Ben and I both started new jobs in the second half of 2006 and were posting less frequently than we had previously. When Ben asked me to join him on Off The Facade, which was part of a network and much bigger than my puny operation, it was an easy yes. And so it began.

After a few months things were going well, but not exceptionally well. The network was having some technical issues. We felt a little stifled in terms of what we could write. On a Wednesday in mid-January, Ben emailed:

I’m getting really sick of all of this [network] server downtime and I am not against the idea of taking our writing elsewhere.

A few hours later in the same email thread, a name was born. Ben again:

I’ve always liked tying in River Avenue to a Yankees blog. It’s more out-of-the-box than Pinstripe Something or Bronx Anything. River Ave. Blues is what I had going…

Two weeks later Ben and I still hadn’t made a decision, but we’d talked more about setting off on our own. In the middle of an email thread about something completely different, I wrote:

Re: breaking off. We need to set a deadline on a decision for this. Say, by March 1. I’d actually like to get Mike A. on board…

That was February 2. It took maybe a day to get Mike on board. At that point it was all technical: how quickly could we buy web hosting, set up the site, and start publishing?

The answer was just over two weeks. On February 20, Mike kicked it all off. About an hour after he christened the site, he sent this in an email.

I’m not in the writing business, nor do I have any desire to enter into it, so it’s really up to you guys.

Good call, Mike.

Later in the week I was enthralled by how many people actually visited the site:

252 unique visitors yesterday, 242 today, 405 total — not too shabby for the first two days in the office.

The blog grew. It grew and it grew and it grew. It grew to levels we couldn’t even imagine when it launched. Had we kept at it, I daresay it would have continued growing. But that passion faded years ago, as anyone who’s been reading since the early days can tell you. If this farewell doesn’t seem very emotional, it’s because I moved on long ago.

And so I close the RAB chapter of my life with some gratitude:

Dad for basically everything: my Yankee fandom, encouragement of my writing pursuits, and constant readership. In those early days, when barely anyone read or commented, Dad was there to support us.

Ben, Mike, and Jay for friendships that extend far beyond River Ave. Blues. Y’all were at my wedding, we were all at Ben’s wedding, and it’s reassuring to know that we’ll see each other long after these doors close.

Jonah Keri and Jay Jaffe for using their relatively prominent positions to help spread the good work that independent bloggers were doing back in the day.

Keith Law, Rob Neyer, and Peter Gammons for the little praises that sent more readers our way.

JP, Steve H, James K, Stephen, Brock, Hannah, Larry, Moshe, Jamie, Eric, Matt W, Katie, Betsy, Sung-Min, Steven, Dom, Matt I, Bob, Ashley, Derek, and countless infrequent contributors for helping us maintain our high standards for content both in quantity and quality.

All of you who found us over the years. I’m fairly certain we would have kept this thing going through at least 2011 without the level of readership that we attained. But boy did y’all keep us motivated. Thanks for stopping by.

Our Back Pages: A Farewell To All This

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(Rob Tringali/Getty)

A lifetime ago, Joe and I were in charge of the Yankees site for the Most Valuable Network, a long-defunct sports blog network, when we decided we could do a better job on our own. We wanted Minor League content too and invited Mike along for the ride. We felt we could provide comprehensive Yankee coverage from a fan perspective and do a better job than anyone else out there. It was typical early 20s hubris from a bunch of kids with internet hookups, and somehow it all worked out.

Twelve years and over 28,000 posts later, we decided it was time to say good bye, but quitting is never easy. Beyond the ins and outs of the Yanks’ rocky 2010s, we’ve all been through a lot together – job changes, career changes, grad school, weddings, births. We started out as business partners and became fast friends, adding Jay a few years in to keep everything humming smoothly.

At some point, though, over the years for each of us, what started as a passion project becomes less fun and more of a burden. I couldn’t keep up with posting after law school ended and my current career began. Joe’s writing slowed down with the birth of his daughter. Mike, our Energizer bunny, kept going and going and going, but when a passion project isn’t a passion any longer, it’s time to hang up. We still love the Yanks, warts, frustrations, injuries and all; it’s just time to love the Yankees as fans again.

It’s a trite cliche to quote Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” in a farewell piece, but after 12 seasons, I think about Dylan’s lyrics a lot. Back in 2006 when the idea for RAB came together, I was so much older then. We’re all younger than that now. When we started RAB, the general tenor of online baseball writing focused around doing a better job. We all thought we could do a better job than our favorite team’s GM. We thought we could out-manage our favorite team’s manager. We thought we could out-coach our favorite’s team’s coach.

RAB came of age at a time when the volume of data about baseball was readily available and increasing dramatically. The statistical understanding of the game shifted from Bill James’ printed books to Baseball Prospectus’ annuals to daily WAR updates to wRC+ in the span of a barely a decade. With it, came a different approach to team-building that turned everyone into Moneyball accolades and led everyone to propose a budgetary-constrained approach to baseball team-building. As more online analysts were hired by teams, that approach shifted from the Internet to the game before we knew it, and now teams are underpaying players while the game is based more on an all-or-nothing understanding underpinned by batted ball profiles more than anything else.

This is not to say that River Ave. Blues was instrumental in changing the game of baseball any more or less than any other site, but as I reflect back on the past 12 seasons, I see shifts in the way baseball works that grew out of the idea that a bunch of kids knew more than anyone else. Today, I can see how baseball writers helped drive a hidden search for value, how we all helped shift understanding of the game, and how we had a role, even if slight, in whatever labor battles loom. I wouldn’t change RAB’s approach over the last 12 seasons for the world, but if we all knew then what we knew now, many of us would think twice about that Moneyball approach (and we sure as hell would’ve traded the Big Three).

As RAB comes to a close, I think about the friends we made along the way, the baseball friends I chat with every day on Twitter and the ones I see in real life. I think about the playoff games at Bleecker Heights Tavern, a World Series championship at Blondies, and I think about the babies born, the weddings, the parties, the games in the Bronx. I think about the fans and readers who have written to us lately talking about how we expanded their baseball horizons and their love and appreciate for the game. And I think about how we did it. Joe, Mike, Jay and I set out to build a better baseball blog, and we accidentally stumbled into a community of great people, lifelong friends and some amazing Yankee fans. I wouldn’t trade the world for it. Thanks for coming along for the ride. And as we go gently into that good night, just remember the 2-2 pitch to Tino was a ball and no, I’m still not going to eat the hat.

Ten Years of the RAB Fan Confidence Poll

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(Chris McGrath/Getty)

I did not realize this at the time, but the ten-year anniversary of our Fan Confidence Poll was this past March 2nd. The big stories when we launched the Fan Confidence Poll? Alex Rodriguez needing hip surgery, Mark Teahen trade rumors, and CC Sabathia’s and A.J. Burnett’s Spring Training debuts. Feels like a lifetime ago.

Like pretty much everything else with RAB, I did not expect the Fan Confidence Poll to last as long as it did. I was hoping to capture a few months worth of data, maybe two or three years worth if everything went well, and now here we are a decade later. The idea is pretty self-explanatory: Take the pulse of the fanbase over a long stretch of time.

There has always been a lot of week-to-week noise in the Fan Confidence Poll. A good week will cause fan confidence to spike. Going 1-6 and getting swept by the Red Sox meant a tumble. Big trade? Series of injuries? They all have a short-term impact on fan confidence. Here’s an interactive Fan Confidence Graph and here’s an annotated version:

(1) The absolute peak of the Fan Confidence Poll is, of course, the 2009 World Series. The Yankees won the World Series on a Wednesday. The prior Monday they had a 3-1 series lead and the Fan Confidence Poll peaked at 9.27. The following week it was at 9.25. People were apparently more confident about winning the World Series before winning the World Series than after actually winning the World Series. Huh. It’s come close a few times, but fan confidence never again reached 9.00 after the 2009 World Series hangover faded away.

(2) Eyeballing it, I would’ve guessed that dip in mid-2010 was the Cliff Lee non-trade. Fan confidence went from 8.01 one week to 6.85 the next week. But nope, it was not the Lee non-trade. That came a few weeks later. That big dip came after … a series loss to the Mets? A series loss to the Mets. The Yankees dropped two of three in Citi Field to a pretty mediocre Mets squad that weekend and fans were Mad Online. Fan confidence actually increased from 8.01 to 8.48 following the Lee non-trade. It increased because fans were happy the Yankees held on to Jesus Montero. What a time to be alive. Also, Fan confidence dropped only slightly (6.99 to 6.67) when Lee signed with the Phillies that winter.

(3) The big sudden dip in 2011 (7.42 to 5.43) is one of the largest week-to-week drops in Fan Confidence Poll history and it was because the Yankees lost five in a row the previous week, including getting swept by the Red Sox over the weekend. Also, the Yankees were 3-10 in their previous 13 games at the time, and fan angst was on the rise.

(4) In the span of about an hour one January 2012 afternoon, the Yankees traded for Michael Pineda and signed Hiroki Kuroda. Questions about the rotation persisted for two straight years up to that point (remember when they went into 2011 with Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia penciled into rotation spots?), then, in one fell swoop, the Yankees added a high-upside youngster and a quality veteran on a one-year contract. Fan confidence jumped from 7.06 to 8.41.

(5) About four months later, fan confidence dropped from 7.69 to 6.07 in the span of two weeks because we learned Pineda had a torn labrum and needed season-ending surgery, and also because Mariano Rivera blew out his knee on the Kauffman Stadium warning track during batting practice. That was not a good week.

(6) The single biggest week-to-week drop in Fan Confidence Poll history came during the 2012 ALCS. The Yankees beat the Orioles in Game Five of the ALDS and fan confidence sat at 7.98. The next week it was down to 4.41. The Yankees trailed the Tigers two games to none in the ALCS and Derek Jeter broke his ankle in Game One. Gloomy postseason series situation and the captain’s devastating injury led to a massive, massive drop in fan confidence.

(7) Despite a plethora of injuries, a good start to the season had fan confidence on the rise early in 2013. As the season played out and reality set in, fan confidence dipped and eventually bottomed out at 3.06 on September 23rd, 2013. The Yankees had been eliminated from the postseason race, the roster was old and expensive, and the farm system was unproductive. As a result, fan confidence was at its lowest point during the RAB era.

(8) A busy offseason (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, Masahiro Tanaka) and Tanaka’s early season dominance had fan confidence on the rise early in 2014. However, because things went so poorly the year before, the big increase only brought fan confidence back up into the 7.00 range. Fan confidence very rarely dipped below 7.00 from 2009-12. Now the Yankees were struggling to give their fans reason to get back up to that level.

(9) Aside from a few spikes at midseason, fans never really did buy into the 2015 Yankees. They faded badly in the second half and were quickly dispatched by Dallas Keuchel and the Astros in the AL Wild Card Game. By the middle of 2016, fans were as consistently low on the Yankees as at any point in Fan Confidence Poll history. They were bad, they sat just under .500 most of the first half, and there were no indications major change was coming …

(10) … and then major change did arrive. The Yankees traded veterans for prospects at the 2016 deadline, were universally praised for their moves, and fan confidence climbed from 3.51 to 6.02 in two weeks. Two weeks after that, it sat at 6.75. Gary Sanchez arrived soon thereafter and went on a two-month assault of American League pitching. Fan confidence steadily climbed starting with the 2016 trade deadline and continuing through the 2017 season and into early 2018.

(11) Last May 7th, fan confidence hit its highest point (8.71) since April 19th, 2010 (8.93). For all intents and purposes, that was the lifespan of the rebuild transition. The Yankees won the 2009 World Series, faded a bit from 2010-12, bottomed out from 2013-16, then rose back up in 2017 and 2018. Fan confidence slipped as last season progressed because the Red Sox ran away with the AL East, and it has slipped again early this year because there are so many injuries. Given how well the Yankees have played the last two weeks or so, I would’ve expected fan confidence to rise as the Yankees got healthy.

* * *

The week-to-week noise is inevitable. The overall trends in fan confidence across the last ten years are pretty easy to see in the graph though. Fans were feeling good about things from 2009-2012, then fan confidence really sank from 2013 to the middle of 2016. The climb from the 2016 trade deadline through 2017 is pretty neat. It is essentially a measurement of fans falling in love with Aaron Judge, Luis Severino, and all the other youngsters.

There will be no Fan Confidence Poll this week because there’s really no point with RAB shutting down today. Thank you to everyone who took the time to vote over the years, even the trolls who voted “one” each week. I hoped this little spur of the moment project back in the day would help us take pulse of the fanbase, and I think it’s done that quite well. The injuries stink, but I’m glad we’re going out on a high note with a talented young homegrown core.

Update: I’ve had a few people ask about weekly voting sample sizes and whatnot, so here’s my Fan Confidence Poll spreadsheet.

A Brief History of the Tech Behind RAB

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Jay has been RAB’s SysAdmin, you can find him on Twitter at @jaydestro.

Keeping RiverAveBlues online has been “a thing” for me over the years.  Whether it’s when I worked at a web hosting provider and was just a fan of Mike’s writing… all the way until today, where I am getting ready to start archiving the site I’ve done my best to keep available.  Back in 2009, I did a ton of technical work for free for the guys to make sure the website stayed online and ran smoothly.  To repay me, they made me a partner in the company — pretty cool, huh?

RAB has run on the WordPress blogging platform since its inception.  Originally on a shared hosting provider, the site was eventually moved to a single VM with Rackspace.  I eventually migrated everything to two dedicated servers: one was a HP DL360 G3 front end server we used for all the web traffic with Apache and the other a SuperMicro generic white box we used for the MySQL database server and memcached.

The hard part was always keeping up with the excitement of the Yankees as the accessibility of the internet exploded on mobile.  Every day we saw the need for more capacity increase as the need for Yankees news at any moment continued to explode.  Mike’s profile began to grow as he took on jobs with MLBTradeRumors and eventually CBS.  People really came to rely on the work Mike did and I took personal responsibility to keep that work online, and for it to reach as wide of an audience as possible.

One moment I always recall as pivotal in making a major overhaul to the RAB infrastructure was the day the Yankees traded for Ichiro.  I was in Oxford, England at a job I had just started.  I had recently moved the website in a “lift-and-shift” manner to AWS and really had not had a chance to do a ton of optimization.  I woke up to a slew of text messages from Mike and Joe telling me they couldn’t get to the site.  I found a free moment to fix the problem I found on total MySQL connections and got the site back online.

I later would learn a ton more about AWS from my friends Lenny Herold, Jeff Kaplan and Tony Tonns (RIP).  I would take this knowledge to eventually fully automate the RAB services to no longer rely on static VMs and moved to an autoscaling platform.  Tony taught me a ton about memcached, tuning MySQL and ensuring reliability through resilient services.  I later configured a number of cache layers and made the W3 Total Cache plug-in an absolute MUST.  I found a lot of success in using the plugin in combination with a memcached service for each cache layer.  This was for object, page and MySQL database cache that ran on RDS.  Auto-scaling the front end also became an easy task so that when our traffic increased, we could easily add capacity automatically.

As time moved on, we removed the native WordPress commenting system for Disqus.  This was an absolute godsend, as server load during “thundering herd” moments of large traffic greatly decreased. Users were storing comments in a separate database which really meant we were prepared for GDPR protections years before it was implemented.  I never really wanted RAB to be in the business of storing anyone’s data.  Because of that, the old users were eventually purged from the RAB database, including any user information you may have provided us. This makes me happy that we have never compromised/hacked thanks to good security defaults and reducing our total data exposure by simply not storing that data.

Later on, we found new ways to further reduce server load with the implementation of a CDN and better communication amongst the writers about how we needed to store static images.  That meant faster load times and better access to the site when big moments happened.

Things haven’t always been perfect, but the bigger incidents have done a ton to teach me more about what I do for a living,  I have always appreciated including communities in the work I have done or the hobbies I enjoy.  Baseball and technologies are my passions and RAB was the ultimate culmination of both for me.

Now, I work at Microsoft and teach people how to use the Azure cloud.  I also spend my time helping organize the DevOpsDays NYC conference and do the On-Call Nightmares Podcast.  I love chatting technology and baseball – feel free to reach out if you ever need help or just want to talk about these topics, or metal music, or anything pug-related  Thanks for reading RAB all these years; it’s been a big part of my life.  None of this stuff happens without Mike, Joe and Ben.. to them I am eternally grateful.  Thank you always to my wife, Betsy, who was woken up as many times as I was to fix things (and occasionally woke me up for breaking news, like the Andrew Miller trade in 2016). Eternal gratitude to everyone who came to the site and returned an HTTP call successfully. That means I did my job.

RAB Tech Stack 2007 – 2019:

Linux, WordPress, Apache, PHP, Memcached, MySQL

Yankees Only.

The Beginning of the End

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(Rob Tringali/Getty)

Isn’t that a great photo? I’ve been sitting on it since last August waiting for the right post.

This post has been more than 12 years in the making and I still don’t know how to start it, so I’m just going to come out and say it: We’ve decided it’s time to shut down RAB. More accurately, I’ve decided it’s time to shut down RAB, since I’ve been running the show the last few years.

RAB is not shutting down right away. The final day will be Monday, April 29th, so we’re going to keep going through the end of the month. It will be business as usual until then, with analysis and game stories and minor league updates and all that. It’ll be the same old RAB the next 24 days.

Believe me, this was not a rash decision. I’ve been year-to-year for a few years now, and two years ago I was leaning toward calling it quits. Then the Yankees started socking dingers and got good and fun in a hurry, so I decided to go another year. I’d been waiting nearly a decade to blog about a young and exciting team.

Sometime last summer I indicated to Ben that I’d close up shop after the season. I changed my mind shortly after the season and decided to stick it out another year, but I realized that was a mistake about two days into Spring Training this year. My heart is not in it anymore. Careless mistakes are piling up and everything I write feels forced. It’s time to do something else with my time.

RAB celebrated its 12th birthday in February and 12 years for an independent team blog is about 1,200 years in internet time. I’m just some dope with an internet connection. I never imagined RAB would become as popular as it did, but I’m proud of what we’ve built and I sincerely hope you’ve all enjoyed it.

I’m still with CBS (my archive) and in all likelihood some RAB-style Yankees content will wind up there once we close the doors here. It’s not like I’m going to avoid the team completely. Also, I think we’re going to keep the @RiverAveBlues Twitter account active because it’s easy enough, so we’ll have thoughts and GIFs and other things there.

I am considering a newsletter/mailing list with a weekly “thoughts” post. I’m not certain if I’m up for it yet. There will probably be a mailing list signup post at some point just so people can sign up should I decide to give it a go. If it’s something I’m up to doing, I’ll probably turn it into a $3 per month Patreon or something like that. Nothing set in stone yet but that’s something I’m considering.

The last 12 years have been a lot of fun. A lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and these days the work outweighs the fun. There will be some sentimental farewell posts (maybe even a podcast!) in the coming days and weeks. For now, this is just an announcement that RAB will soon be no more.

I thank you all for reading and I thank everyone who’s contributed to site the last few years, because without them, RAB would’ve closed up shop a long time ago.