Columns and commentary from a New England sports journalist who remains a fan a heart.

I’m a sports copy editor and layout person at the Boston Globe. Before coming to the Globe in December, 2004, I was the assistant sports editor at the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for nine years. For the last five years there, I wrote a column, mostly about Boston sports, and it was pretty well-received. After I took the Globe gig, I gave up writing and missed it more than I knew I would, so in December ‘04, I started the blog.

I’ve been a sports fan since I was 8 years old, in 1978. My dad used to come home from work every day with the Globe and the Herald under his arm, and he’s a sports lunatic, and it was just such a treat, even at a young age, to read all the great Boston writers in those days, like Gammons, Ray Fitzgerald, Bob Ryan on the Celtics, Leigh Montville, and so on. Once I realized I probably was never going to play left field for the Red Sox, I decided the next best thing would be to write about the Sox. The blog is just the natural extension of a lifelong obsession.

I started it in December, ‘04, basically with just an extension on an email I had written to a buddy about the decline of Drew Bledsoe. It was kind of a test-run, done almost on a whim, just looking for an outlet to write. I wasn’t really sold on the blog concept at the beginning to be honest, especially after I had about 30 visitors the first month, most of them being my wife logging on to the computer at home. But I liked how easy Blogger was to use, and it grew by word of mouth and the usual link system among other blogs, and it’s become very rewarding, one of the best career decisions I have made, actually..

About 3,000, and I don’t really know how that measures up compared to most other blogs that have been around for 2.5 years, but it pretty much blows my mind that so many people make the effort to check it out every day. I’ve been fortunate to have some pretty respected people in my corner on this thing along the way - Gammons links to it off of his ESPN Insider page, Providence Journal sports editor Art Martone has always been a great supporter, Steve Buckley at the Boston Herald, NBC’s Tom Curran was very encouraging in the beginning, Dave Doyle at Fox Sports, quite a few others . . . and of course, the people at the Globe that gave me the leeway to do this even though I’m not sure some of them understood why I was doing it. I now have an affiliation with Boston.com, so that has obviously been pretty beneficial to the hit count, too. (Wow, I just name-dropped like Stuart Scott there. My apologies. Boo-yeah!)

Well, Boston sports fans, obviously. I’d say our content is 60 percent Red Sox, 35 percent Patriots, 4 percent Celtics, 1 percent ancillary stuff. It does seem to appeal to people who aren’t Red Sox or Boston fans, though - I hear from a lot Yankees fans who are good sports about everything and realize a lot of what I write is tongue in cheek. It’s funny, among the stuff I write about in the “other” category, the thing I get the most response to is commentary about the TV show “The Office.” We’re pretty obsessed, and it was a nice revelation to realize people enjoyed when I wrote about that stuff, too.

I’d say I write three times per week, two or three hours at a time. I put some thought it into what I write - I approach it the same way I did my column during my New Hampshire days - and so it takes a little longer than it would if I were just cranking out short little disposable posts. I wish I could write more, but with the Globe job and two little kids at home, I barely find time to sleep.

I think it’s a fun and thoughtful read by someone attempting to straddle the line between journalist and fan, and it seems to appeal to people who can’t stand the Sox or the Patriots, which means I guess I’m doing something right.

Stay with it. It’s frustrating at the beginning when no one’s reading the thing but a few buddies, but if you have something interesting to offer, write relatively well, and post on a fairly consistent basis, it will develop a readership. I think a lot of promising blogs die on the vine because the people producing them get frustrated in the beginning, and that’s too bad.

This blog can be visited at http://touchingallthebases.blogspot.com/