The Final Score

…Have nothing to do with this blog.
Happy April Fool’s Day.

If you’ve found us for the first time, and you’re a sports fan, then stay a while. If you’re a Jim Baumbach fan from way back (like, months ago, when he started this blog), then welcome to the new Final Score.
Baumbach built this blog (and Newsday’s Yankees blog before it) from the sweat of his sports writer brow, and he’s been kind enough to let me, Anthony Rieber, join in. The idea, as Jim explained in a post last week, is to keep the conversation going since no one can blog 24 hours a day. Jim and I actually spend a lot of time doing other things for Newsday, like writing articles for the web site and newspaper, and we don’t want you to miss even one day of our take. And we don’t want to miss one day of hearing what you think about what we think or what you think about something we didn’t even think about (got all that?).
We’re going to debate stuff, like our predictions for the baseball season (see above, or below, depending on which side of the equator you’re on), and Jim is going to continue to do stuff like flying in blimps and working out with disgraced trainers and carrying a chain at a Dragons game and just being his usual irrepressible self.
One new feature on the Final Score: I’m going to answer baseball questions that have been stacking up in my “Ask Anthony” mailbag. “Ask Anthony” has gone all-video this season, but it’s hard to do too many of those for logistical reasons you need not concern yourself with, so I’m going to answer some questions here in a timely fashion to complement the videos. Look for that later this week.
(If you saw the first video “Ask Anthony” that Jim and I did, all I can say is I’m sorry. I’ll get better. I’m a writer, not a talker. We’ve got a really cool idea for the location of the next one, and if all goes well it’ll be on Newsday.com within a week. My promise: It can’t be any worse!)
So we hope you check us out a few times a day since we plan on doing a lot of updating of this thing. Comment, ask questions, chew us out, suggest topics you want us to tackle, make fun of Jim’s smile or my scowl in our blog photos.
We can take it.
Thanks to this site for the poster.