I wanted to take a moment today, on this final day of 2011, to thank all of you for making this a great year for Brew Crew Ball. Entering the day today, roughly 1.36 million of you have visited the site this year. That's easily the biggest year in site history. The site also logged 110,000 or more visits in eight different months this year: Every month of the regular season, October and December.
As we put the finishing touches on a year today, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge 2011's most popular posts, ranked by page views.
10) On Ryan Braun Testing Positive For Performance Enhancing Drugs
Unfortunately, we start this list with 2011's worst news. The news about Ryan Braun's possible suspension broke on a Saturday night, and Noah was all over it the next morning with this post discussing what we did and didn't know at that point.
9) Your Newest Brewer, Francisco Rodriguez
We're only two posts in and this is already becoming a recurring theme: News broke out of nowhere, and Noah was there to compile what we knew and provide our first reaction.
8) Ryan Braun And The Five Stages Of Grief: Anger
In the wake of the Braun news, we did a five part series attempting to process the emotions and move on. As you might expect, anger was certainly the most popular of the five stages.
7) Comparing The Top Of The NL Central, Player By Player
Long before the NL Central race began, Noah had a line-by-line look at how the division's likely contenders compared to each other.
6) A Quick Thought On The Brewers' Decision To Acquire Nyjer Morgan
This was probably my biggest swing and miss of the year. It's hard to believe it now, but a significant number of us were solidly against the decision to bring Tony Plush to Milwaukee. I was one of them, and I ranted here.
5) If Teams Were Comprised Only Of Players They Drafted
Noah is really dominating the first half of this list: Here's his exhaustive look at what the major league landscape might look like if all players remained with their original organization.
4) Top Ten NLCS Quotes From Russian Play-By-Play Announcers
This was easily 2011's best FanPost, and it was pure brilliance. Argichi stopped by to show us what we were missing by watching baseball on this side of the world, instead of in Armenia. This was the origin of "Hello, I'm a bear."
3) Did Albert Pujols Just Have The Most Overrated Performance Of All Time?
The morning after Albert Pujols' three home runs in a blowout World Series win, I felt a need to pen a counterargument against the people calling it the greatest Fall Classic performance of all time.
2) Ryan Braun Reportedly Tests Positive For PED
Unfortunately, one of the biggest traffic drivers anywhere on the internet is shocking breaking news. As we all learned about this for the first time we congregated here.
1) Tony Plush Does Milwaukee: April 7 Edition
Because Nyjer Morgan didn't join the team until the end of spring training, most of us didn't get a chance to learn much about his personality (personalities?) and antics until we witnessed it firsthand. Rubie Q heard and transcribed one of Morgan's first radio appearances and gave us a glimpse at what we'd be talking about for the rest of the year.
Thanks to the contributors who penned those posts, and thanks to all of you for reading them!