14 Years Ago Today
14 years ago today, I wrote my first ever blog. It was about Brett Favre coming out of retirement (ha, remember Favre? classic Favre!). I posted the blog to a site with the URL corked-bats.blogspot.com (ha, remember Blogspot? classic Blogspot!). This was a dumb little sports blog me and my buddy started to just make our friends laugh. That was it. But then it started to grow and more and more people started to notice and it became much bigger than we ever expected. It was also featured on ESPN’s SportsNation as their site of the day (ha, remember SportsNation? Classic Michelle Beadle and Colin Cowherd!). The site ultimately led me to meeting and working with incredible people over the years.
Now, sure, it wasn’t a full 14 years of content creation. There was about a 5 year hiatus in there where the site sat dormant on the internet with no traffic or social media play, which is essentially a death sentence for anything on the Internet. The site has completely flatlined. So when I decided to relaunch the site on January 1, 2020, it was like starting over from scratch. Oh, and take it from me, if you ever get a chance to relaunch a sports blog, do it right before a global pandemic when all sports cease to exist for most of the year. Just trust me.
But our motto’s always been the same: There’s enough serious on the Internet as it is, so we try to make content that’s anything but. So after relaunching, I grabbed my cousin A.D., my guy Grit came on board for a bit, we welcomed The Cineboiz to the family, and got three Jewish brothers out of St. Louis to eat some toasted ravioli on camera, and somehow we had built a little something. And it’s been fun.
Plus, we’ve also had our fair share of challenges. The first being: everything we do is done with little to no capital. It’s not really a sustainable business model, but I’m proud of how much we’ve been able to accomplish while making next to nothing doing it. We like making content. Don’t get me wrong, though. We also like cash too. We’ve just really wanted to make the content the focus first. So shout out to the guys I listed above for the time and effort they’ve put towards growing this thing. I can’t wait to continue to see it grow.
Another challenge was when Dana White and his team of cauliflowered ear goons from the UFC had our Instagram account deactivated. That was a damn gut punch. We had worked so hard to build our following and audience and had so much fun on Instagram (ha, remember the Dumb Social Experiment? Classic “We Got The Like!”).
We were also blocked by Randy Johnson on Instagram. This wasn’t so much of a challenge more than just a bummer because we loved The Big Unit growing up. Plus, A.D. never got him to shoot his wedding.
But there’s also been some really good stuff happen. Many of you remember Jason Kidd’s collar. Derrick Henry discovered Korked Bats and started following us on Instagram (the new account). A.D. got married. I had a kid. Those last two didn’t really have anything to do with Korked Bats, but they were still cool.
All in all, just wanted to take some time to share the journey KB’s been on. I’m not a fan of these sappy, reflective posts, but I did want to thank all the cool kids who support this dumb blog and everything we do. With little-to-no capital, we have to do everything grass roots style, which means the only way we grow is through word of mouth, retweets, shares, etc. So thank you to all who have helped us along the way. It really does mean a lot. Not as much as Derrick Henry following us, but close. So thank you, cool kids.
Now here’s a photo of Brendan Fraser.
