Hello, and thank you for reading St. Louis Bullpen. Given the nature and timing of this post, there is a good chance that this is the first post you have ever read at St. Louis Bullpen. Hopefully, it won’t be the last.

My name is John Fleming, and I am the founder of St. Louis Bullpen. I created this website for a very simple reason–I love writing, and I particularly love writing about baseball and the St. Louis Cardinals. I grew up in and around St. Louis and enjoy watching all sports, but it is baseball which I most enjoy discussing, contemplating, and committing to memory every detail.

I have written about the Cardinals on the internet for many years, most recently at the SB Nation site Viva El Birdos. With St. Louis Bullpen, I look forward not only to continuing my love affair with writing about the baseball team of my youth, but fulfilling my dream of managing a website staffed with some of my favorite writers. I’m baffled that I was able to entice a group this talented to get on board with a website that, at the time, did not actually exist, but I believe we have lined up, to use the obligatory baseball pun, a Murderers’ Row of baseball writers. This is a group which includes both experienced baseball bloggers and gifted writers whose work I have enjoyed covering other topics who I believe will thrive with a new topic at hand.

While I believe that we are fundamentally an ambitious site (we are hardly the first St. Louis Cardinals blog, and several great ones exist, yet we have the audacity to expect people to read what we have to say), we are also realistic about what we have to offer readers. We will cover breaking news–we can’t regularly break news with the speed of the team’s full-time beat writers, much less inform readers of the latest scores more quickly than, to be obvious about it, television broadcasts of the games. We will provide intelligent analysis of the Cardinals, yet there is countless proprietary information about the team that the public will never know.

But what we will do is try to have fun. The name St. Louis Bullpen is meant to embody the range of styles and topics of the site, because just as a Major League bullpen can include a 21 year-old who throws nearly 102 miles per hour, it can include former minor league starters mimicking the running style of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I love writing about baseball because I love statistics, and I love approaching the game as though it is a puzzle which can never be completely solved but which can be more easily understood. But I also love the moments which cannot be quantified, and the inherent silliness of caring so deeply about how grown men I don’t know perform in a children’s game while wearing what are essentially pajamas.

We will have a few posts going up per day–some will be analysis of the present-day Cardinals, some will be previews of an upcoming game or series, some will be recaps of previous games, some will be looks back at Cardinals history, and some will just be whatever ridiculous thing one of us feels like discussing on a particular day. We will try to be informative but above all, we will try to keep you engaged with whatever we are discussing.

This is an introductory post to the site, but we have some others on the site already, and more will go up as time goes on. We hope that you will continue to check us out at STLbullpen.com. In addition, you can like St. Louis Bullpen on Facebook and following @STLbullpen on Twitter.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.