The death of a blog

This caught me (and many others) way off guard. The Pride Of The Yankees blog at NJ.com is likely done. I found this very troubling for a number of reasons, the least of which was the fact that I have known the brothers writing team since we were wee lads. I'm having trouble going to past tense here, so bear with me.

POTY is/was a great first-stop source for all Yanks baseball news, not disimilar to Buster Olney's "blog" with all the latest news from around the league. David and Aziz are/were adept at siphoning out the noise and giving us the nuggets that would most interest us.

Besides the writing of the brothers, POTY has/had a great following of commenters who didn't fall prey to the hyperbole, name-calling, slap fights that overtakes other large sites. They are/were smart, fact-driven, self-policing. It was a joy to watch/read.

Some 30-odd comments into the post-mortem, they posted this in a comment:

Aziz and I are working with the NJ.com staff to try and maintain this site. While the blogging will likely stop for a little while, we're hoping to bring the blog back in the not-too-distant future -- hopefully with us as contributors (only less often), and perhaps with other contributors as well.

We can only hope.

Now, D&A have given the reasons of "life" and "law school" as reasons to halt the daily production and I hope the call was theirs to make.

Nonetheless, here at IIATMS, I welcome all of the POTY readers with open arms and bountiful comments-driven debates. I will leave their links in the blogroll and daily blog circuit to keep vigil.