Phoenix Reborn: I'm Now ObsessiveGiantsCompulsive

I am taking the unusual step of abandoning my Biased Giants Fanatic nom de plume and taking on a new one: ObsessiveGiantsCompulsive. I will be switching all my IDs around the place to reflect this new ID but I might either forget one or another or have a technical glitch.

I am doing this for a number of reasons. One is that I've found that people get a bit confused about my intentions and motivations when they see the "biased" part of the name. Hence my having to try to explain it in my description. I try (don't always succeed, but try) to be fair in my logic and rationale in assessing the Giants but I'm human and I make mistakes - I just try my honest best. I find my greatest pleasure not in seeing my team with rose-colored glasses, but in knowing how good or bad my Giants are and setting my expectations accordingly. Hopefully I'm succeeding more times than not. In any case, my new ID reflect my mind-set more aptly.

Two, I'm not proud but I've gotten into some flame wars with this ID on a discussion board. I try and try to have a civil discussion with certain board members but for some unknown reason they decide to pick a fight. The first few times I took the high road and let them go, but eventually it came to this old proverb: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

I decided to defend myself because the moderators there were either weak or a friend of these people who sink down to name calling and insults when their logic is not sound enough to convince anyone of their position (one sunk low enough to use my dead father to try to insult me). But this left me feeling all negative and life is too short for that type of stuff. Plus the moderators' lack of discipline and tolerance for these baseless insults grew tiring as well. I decided to leave for other discussion boards, it wasn't the only one in town, and it was good for my mental health.

Three, I think this name has served its purpose and has outlived its origins. The BGF moniker was a lark that started when I volunteered to help out somebody who started up their Giants website on Yahoo and was looking for contributors - so I had to have a name for my column and came up with Biased Giants Fanatic, which was funny to me because I try so hard to not be biased, but you know how good (NOT!) inside jokes are, that other people don't get.

Initially, I just did that column on an irregular basis. But I ended up posting articles pretty regularly. Then soon I was helping out with farm system reports, which evolved the next year into contacting the Giants farm clubs for interviews. It just grew from that and eventually became my online identity and I dropped my prior on-line ID that I had at that time.

However, soon my publisher left and one of my tormenters from the board took over. I decided then to try out blogs and publish via both channels. I found that I enjoyed the freedom of blogging plus my work would go out the day I'm done, not delayed because there was a queue of other articles ahead.

Of course, the thought of working under this person made my skin crawl but I felt I owed it to the former publisher, who was very nice, to still post there so that her baby could live under the new publisher, instead of leaving them high and dry because I was the only one regularly writing stuff beyond the usual game recaps plus doing original research. But, when I thought they were ready to fly on their own, I just stopped sending articles.

I am for the better for the experience of helping out with that website because I know so much more about the Giants (and baseball in general) today than I ever did before. I love swimming in numbers and there are numbers galore on the Internet and I love to analyze things. But now it's time for me to move on.

Last, but most importantly, I've found an ID that fits me to a T and I am very happy with it. I have thought about this move for a long time now, since the dark days of my on-line battles. But it never felt right to change my ID plus I never found a name I wanted to move to. Until now.

And while I like this BGF ID - as it feels like it has become a part of me, weirdly enough - it recently reminded me of the bad times when I was getting into battles when that person came back into my life and I hated the feelings that was engendered by that. So I've made the difficult decision to stop using this ID and switch to another.

To get a clean start. To be re-born. I won't forget the abuse nor the illogic of these people. I was going to list and provide links to the stupid advice this person had put out there, but I've decided that going forward from this point on, now that I got this off my chest, I will finally try to move on from all that. (But I was really tempted to post the links - really, keeping Snow at $6.5M was better than getting Vlad?!?)

So I'm going to switch to a new ID and hopefully it has a better karma but I really like this new ID and feel real good about this move. Take care and hope to see you at my new blog: ObsessiveGiantsCompulsive. (And sorry to those who have to switch their RSS links, I know what a pain that is, I had to redo all my RSS in switching IDs plus having to redo my whole format of myYahoo for my new ID)