Over the weekend True Blue passed the 1,000 membership mark. My wife (dellblue) finally joined and she was number 999, but it was

l.a._chick09

Who became our 1,000th member.  Thanks to all of you who take the time to join the True Blue community. 

Just for our benefit and for those who would like to dip their toes in the water with their first post, could you let the community know where you hail from. If you want to expand you can tell us why you are a Dodger fan. Since you took the time to register we already know you are more then just a casual fan.

Also for the newcomers, while True Blue tries to be best blog available for Dodger content the truth is that many other Dodger blogs exist that do excellent work. I'd suggest taking the time to try out some of the Dodger blogs on the left sidebar. They all offer something of interest to the hardcore Dodger fan.

If you've read this site and its comments for the past few months, surely you have noticed one of our more insightful commenters, who uses the screen name bablue.

Well, bablue's real name is Brendan Scolari, and he is a college student in northern California.  He's a Dodger fan living in Giant country, so he offers a unique persepctive on the blue crew.  We are happy to have Brendan writing with us now.  The youth movement is in full effect here at True Blue LA!

Look for his articles shortly, and be sure to welcome him aboard.

Back on Dec 18th I wasn't sure of the future of True Blue with Andrew gone we were drifting rudderless losing eyeballs right and left.  We had always been the poor stepchild of SB Nation but even they noticed that things needed to change.  My finger was in the dike but the water was up to my waist when they told me to take control of the site. They must have read my stuff because the first thing they said was to get another writer.

I had my eye on Eric's talent for writing for over a year but he had finally branched out and started his own blog. Would he want to continue to run solo or help turn around this franchise? Luckily for us, Eric responded to my request and on Dec 19th he posted his first column, and from that moment on True Blue was back on solid ground.

I'm writing this column to celebrate the growth of True Blue since Eric showed up. Today we doubled the hits we had last March with 7 more days to go. By the time the month is up we will have tripled our views and 100,000 views is not out of reach.

The combination of Eric joining True Blue and SB Nation hooking up with Yahoo! sports has fueled our growth. Since 2009 started, True Blue percentage wise has been one of the fastest growing blogs in the SB Nation family. Andrew used to joke that True Blue was the 4th most popular site in the NL West. Well things have changed, we will never catch McCovey Chronicles who has an outstanding base but we are now competitive within the division.

Eric noted a few days ago how much he liked writing here and I could echo the same sentiments. SB Nation gives incredible support to their blogging nation and every week they seem to come up with some surprise that just makes it easier and easier to blog here. I'm not sure how it works for other bloggers but in the beginning you just want to write, they you want someone to read what you write, then you want more people to read what you write, then you want to get  paid for what you write. Hey, three out of four ain't bad.

As pleased as I am with the growth in visits/page views I'd like to request more direct participation. Many of you have registered with SB Nation over the last few months. Don't be shy, we encourage comment on our columns or game threads even if you disagree with what we've said.  When the game is on hook onto our game threads and talk to us just like you'd be talking to your friend at the game. We are going to make a real effort to have at least one person here manning the game threads all year.

We at True Blue are  excited to announce that SBNation has completed a partnership with Yahoo! Sports. The intricate details of that partnership can be read at  Blog Huddle

As members of our communities or readers of our sites, you already know that SB Nation takes a different approach to online sports.  Our focus has always been on empowering fans to participate in conversations that are specific to their particular teams, leagues or sports.  We’ve watched over the years as the popularity of this unique approach has rapidly accelerated.

(snip)

Relevant pages of Yahoo Sports will now feature contextual links to specific SB Nation communities.  Many other pages of Yahoo Sports will feature SB Nation content and links. The great news is that more sports fans will be introduced to SB Nation sites.

Editor's note: The college team pages are scheduled for later rollout. However, you can see fruits of the new partnership with the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB team sites.

We have two main writers at True Blue, Eric Stephen the smart guy, and myself the fluff and puff guy. We are both relative newcomers to the SBNation world. I was a co-writer for about a year and Eric joined several months ago. Since the two of us have been writing together we have seen True Blue grow over 50% and we expect more growth with the advent of the Yahoo traffic. Here is a quick primer on True Blue. Besides the writers you will find an excellent and mostly respectful group of commenters. If you are unfamiliar with Dodger blogs I'd suggest taking a look at the Dodger blogs on the left sidebar. All of them are interesting and some of our best commentators are fellow Dodger bloggers. I hope you join our nation and contribute to it but if not, I hope we engage you enough to come back everyday to read what is going on in the Dodger world. 

When you are ready, feel free to join the conversation or start one up.  Whether you create a new profile or use your Yahoo or OpenID credentials to register, one username and password will give you access to all our communities.  Each SB Nation site offers the same mechanisms for participating in the action via comments, FanPosts (a blog entry of your very own) or FanShots (a quick micro-post of a thought, link or photo.)  Before you post though, please remember, you are entering an established and ongoing community.  Your voice and opinions are encouraged (that’s what being a fan is all about after all), but as in any productive conversation, they should be presented in a manner that is courteous, civil and respectful of the culture that you are entering.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Congratulations to  Eric Stephen as he was recently promoted by SBNation to Co-Manager of the True Blue Blog. At the bottom left you will find his mug now brightening up our main page. When Eric is writing for ESPN or FOXSports you can say you knew him when.

So while we continue to wait on Manny and how the Dodgers spend or don't spend the remaining 40 Million of payroll we are going to stay busy until Spring Training by building the best damn historic LA Dodger lineup we can.

True Blue is going to start doing a poll in which we let True Blue readers determine the all-time Dodger team. However I want to throw a twist into how we go about it. Normally the voters would vote for each position but most times that is to obvious. What I want to do is build the best lineup. For example the first poll would be the LeadOff Position. The obvious candidates would be

Furcal, Wills, Lopes, Pierre:), Junior Gilliam, Steve Sax and so forth. So if we voted Davey Lopes as the lead off hitter, 2nd base is off the table. The way we are going to do this is that we will list six possible candidates. Either Eric or I will post a comment on who we think is the best choice. Then we will enter a day of debate between ourselves and our readers. If you can convince us to add someone to the original six we will. The voting will commence after the 24 hour debate in case something happened during the debate to change your mind. We will do this once a week and the poll will remain up on the main page during that week.

Look for the lead off article by Eric for the lead off position shortly.

At the end of the poll we will have built the best possible lineup of Los Angeles Dodgers.

Many of you might be unaware of Fanposts/FanShots. All of you who are registered have the ability to post on either of those. Fanposts require a certain minimum of characters while a FanShot can be very simple.  Any type of baseball news can be posted on the Fanposts. It you know of some breaking news before we post about it please pop it in a Fanpost. Here is a link from Beyond the BoxScore
as he explains how SBNation bloggers would like to see Fanshots and Fanposts utilized.

Most of you know that  Andrew had been the main writer and site manager until this fall. He was a great blogger who made True Blue a daily click for many of you, while teaching many of us the merits of linear weights.  He gave me a chance to write and I'm  thankful for that though I wasn't keen on how he left me hanging this fall.  I learned early on that communication was not a strength of his so when he stopped blogging I figured eventually he'd show up. By December it was evident something needed to be done because he continued to be a no show, so by default I became the manager of the site.  If you have any questions about Andrew I can only tell you "I have no idea what happened to him but he is alive". My first order of business was to lure Eric Stephen into our web as our lead blogger.  As I learn to manage the blog I've made a few changes as we head into the 2009 season.

Per Eric's payroll information, the 2009 season payroll is updated on the right sidebar. Most of the SBNation blogs I visit have links for baseball sites and other links related to the team they represent. True Blue has not had these links so I snagged the baseball blogs that DRaysBay uses and added them to the left sidebar since they represented an excellent cross section of baseball sites.  I've also added the Dodger Blogs I either read or am aware of.  I'm sure there are Dodger blogs that get updated regularly that I'm not aware of.  Let me know so I can check them out and add them.

Give those blogs a click, you may be surprised at the different perspectives each blogger brings to the world of Dodger baseball.

Also I'd like to thank all the new viewers we have had over the last few days. For the first time since I've been watching the site we hit over 1,000 views. In the SBNation world of baseball blogs we are probably considered a slacker so while 1,000 views is commonplace for most of them,  it is big news for us.

Most of the credit for the increase in views belongs to Eric Stephen who has been doing yeoman work in keeping this site fresh, combining excellent  analysis with excellent writing. We are lucky he was a free agent and snagged him with deferred offers of wealth. We will keep an eye on a Russel Martin burnout but until then we will ride him into the ground and hope some of our prospects will be able to step up when his typing hands turn into molasses.

The increase in participation by our readers is making a real difference in our own interest.  For those who just lurk, sign in and add your voice to our stories.

For those of you who are not content to only comment but yearn to write, might I suggest using the FanShot and FanPost sidebars. You can write to your hearts content and particulary noteworthy posts will get promoted to the main page. Our sister site ClipNation uses this to great effect as do most of the other SBNation blog sites. I'll have more on that later.