Scott Proctor's back

I never thought I'd be writing that Scott Proctor was back in pinstripes after the Yankees traded him to the Dodgers at the 2007 deadline. But life is unpredictable, and here we are.

Obviously the biggest news here is that Jesus Montero will finally be joining the big club, but Proctor's return is more poignant for me. This blog served as an outlet for me to get my long-form baseball and Yankees opinions out there, to hone my writing skills, and to pretend to be a baseball reporter.

The jokes about his arm falling off are as tired as me complaining about Jorge Posada, but for a time way back in 2007, those jokes inspired me to name this blog. Thank you, Joe Torre, for riding Proctor's arm for a ridiculous 102.1 innings way back in 2006. Wow, 2006. The year I graduated high school; the year I began college. I can't believe that was five years ago.

Proctor has always seemed like a good dude and hopefully he can take advantage of the opportunities he gets to finish out this season. It'd be foolish to expect him to get high-leverage innings out of the bullpen in a race to win the division, but the fact he's back here at all is rather astonishing. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

My interests and goals have changed, but I'll always look back fondly on the time I had keeping up this blog and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

Maybe Scott Proctor will get a ring after all.

Guess who’s back

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Now that I’m on Thanksgiving break, I figured it’s time to try to get back into blogging.  I’ve been extremely busy at school and hopefully this break will recharge my batteries.

Plus, I reached an agreement with Jeremy that he would stop pestering me to blog if I wrote today.  So here we are today.

I know I rarely posted in September, didn’t post once in October and only posted a picture thus far in November, but I’d really like to get back into this.  There was a reason (in my head) for not posting during October – superstition.  The Yankees were playing just fine without me getting in the way and it paid off in the end.  You’re welcome.

The AL MVP is announced today at 2 p.m., so I’ll have something on it later.

Connect with Scott Proctor’s Arm

I haven’t done a post like this in a while and the idea always creeps back into my head whenever I see Peter Abraham do posts like these.

Anywho, as some of you know, there are many ways to connect with me, Andrew Fletcher, and this blog.

First, you can e-mail me at ScottProctorsArm@gmail.com.  I didn’t make it clickable because I don’t want spam!

My RSS feed can be used to subscribe to various RSS readers, such as my favorite, Google Reader.  The posts are delivered to you instead of you finding the posts yourself.  It’s very convenient, especially if you read many sites during the day.

The blog is also on Facebook in two different places.  You can become a fan and you can join the blog network.

My favorite site of late has been Twitter.  My account is @ProctorsArm, so if you have a Twitter, please follow me!  I’m extremely active during most of the games, as evidenced by my 4,200+ tweets.  I have connected with some great Yankees fans over there and I’m always looking for more to converse with!

I am also an administrator of a Yankees message board called “The Yankee Zone.”  This group of die-hard Yankees fans has been posting together for years and we’re as close as people who have never met each other in real life can be, but we are always looking for more additions to our family!

Of course, you can leave comments on any post.  I love receiving comments.

Thank you very much for continuing to support Scott Proctor’s Arm!

Introducing: Scott Proctor's Arm 2.0

I'd like to introduce to you the revamped Scott Proctor's Arm, dubbed "The 2009 Project," "Scott Proctor's Arm HD" or "Scott Proctor's Arm 2.0." I don't know which one I like best.

First, I bought the domain name earlier this week, back when I had no plans to add anything else to the site except the usual wonderful content.

However, things changed yesterday when I was bored and thought of things I could do to change the template. I spent most of the day trying to install a third column (the new left-hand sidebar). Believe me, it's harder than you think. I'm not going to go bore you with the details, but it wouldn't work right and I was trying to fix things for many, many hours.

Because of the width of the extra column, a new banner had to be made. I found the picture on Greg Cohen's construction updates page. Thank you.

Now that this is settled, what do you think of the changes? Would you like me to try and change anything? I'm working for you guys.

Also, just a tiny housekeeping note. If you subscribe with the old Feedburner URL, please change your subscription to this URL: http://www.scottproctorsarm.com/feeds/posts/default

www.ScottProctorsArm.com

Big news, folks. I bought the domain www.scottproctorsarm.com this evening. No more having to say ".blogspot.com" when I tell people where to find my site.

http://scottproctorsarm.blogspot.com will simply redirect to the regular .com, so you don't have to update your bookmarks. Though you can if you want to.

My interview with YanksBlog

I was Patrick's latest guest on YanksBlog's Interviewing the Yankees Blogosphere.

Check out what I said in the above link.

Thanks, Patrick, for thinking of me.

Scott Proctor's Arm on Twitter

I've officially joined Twitter today. Basically, it's a whole Web site of Facebook statuses: small updates telling people what you're doing (if you're not on Facebook or don't know what it is, ignore the part about Facebook statuses). I've also linked it to my RSS feed so it'll update my Twitter account when I make a new post.

So follow me and I'll follow you! My name is proctorsarm.

We've gotten a lot of new readers over the last couple of days, so I'd like to remind you of some other things I've been doing. Scott Proctor's Arm has a Facebook page, is on the Blog Network (please join if you have a Facebook!) and has a BallHype account, among other things. I'm also a member of the relatively new Sports Blog Net.

You can subscribe to my RSS Feed, and I highly recommend using Google Reader. That's where I catch up on all of my favorite blogs and news outlets. I'm currently subscribed to 125 feeds. You can also subscribe via e-mail. The option to enter your e-mail address is on the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page.

As always, my email address is scottproctorsarm@gmail.com.

New links at the end of each post

If you view my posts on the homepage and not on an RSS reader, you may have noticed the addition of links underneath the tags on each post (BallHype, StumbleUpon and Digg).

If you are a member of any of those three sites and you enjoy a specific post, don't be afraid to submit it. People who may not know about my site could be interested in something I write (shocking, I know).

Also, if you're a member of any of those sites, send friend requests my way! I'm ajfletcher on BallHype, scottproctorsarm on StumbleUpon and ajfletcher on Digg.

Move-out Monday

I completed my second year of college this morning and it feels extremely weird. I have no idea where the time went. I will be traveling back to New York sometime this afternoon, so there won't be much posting. With the off-day today, I doubt there will be much news.

Also, this is my 1,000th post. I started the blog last May 26, so more than 1,000 posts in less than a year is pretty good in my opinion.

Enjoy the afternoon and I'll talk to you all later.

Day 2 at Steinbrenner Field

Mike Mussina is starting to lighten up, as he is mentoring young pitchers Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, according to Mark Feinsand.

Feinsand says that Mussina requested to have Hughes' locker moved next to Mussina and Kennedy. From Feinsand: “If I’m going to sit there and talk to Kennedy about pitching, it makes sense to have Hughes there, too,” Mussina said.

Good to see Mussina talking to the young pitchers. He has struggled in the last few years of his career, but he can still offer valuable advice to the young pitchers, especially Kennedy - he has been compared to Mussina in the past.

According to Peter Abraham, Jason Giambi has been working out since November. He has dropped a lot of weight and has been hitting nearly everyday, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Giambi is in the final year of his seven-year, $120 million deal, and he is in a competition for the first base/designated hitter job.

In other news, your favorite Yankee blog (this one) was mentioned in the Riverside (Ca.) Press-Enterprise. Diamond Leung did a feature on the namesake (Scott Proctor) and mentioned Scott Proctor's Arm in the lead. Thanks to Bubbafan for bringing this to my attention.

That's not going to be good for business

Headquarters for Scott Proctor's Arm (AKA my laptop) is down. My hard drive crashed overnight and the new one will arrive on Monday.

I don't know how much I'll be able to post over the weekend, but I'll try to best to post some news.

Please bear with my this weekend.

Thanks.

Scott Proctor's Arm on Facebook

So, Facebook has added this cool new feature that allows people to promote their businesses. Me, being the opportunist that I am, decided to make one for Scott Proctor's Arm.

Scott Proctor's Page on Facebook can be found here. If you are a frequent user of Facebook, please add it.

Girardi agrees to offer

From Jon Heyman:

People inside the Yankees organization are re-energized by the appointment of Girardi after suffering a difficult blow when Alex Rodriguez opted out of his $252 million Yankees contract.

An announcement regarding Girardi's hiring could come today.

It is believed that the Yankees were offering about $6 million over three years to Girardi but may have had to bump the pay to counter the Dodgers' efforts. Girardi has longtime ties to the Yankees as a former player and coach and current broadcaster. He has been baseball's hottest commodity among managerial candidates almost since the day he was fired by the Marlins following a Manager of the Year performance in 2006. (SI.com)

Joe Girardi was Scott Proctor's Arm's choice for the managerial vacancy, so we obviously are thrilled with this decision.

The Joe Torre story is still rather funny to me. I'm happy Torre got another chance to manage, but the Scott Proctor sub-plot is too good.

In other news, the previous post was my 500th post. When I started this blog at the end of May, I didn't know how much I'd update or how long I'd even write before forgetting about it. I'd like to thank all the readers, because without you guys, this wouldn't be possible.

Sorry about the lack of posting

Things have been pretty busy around blog headquarters lately. It's midterm week and I procrastinated like I always do. That means I have had less time for Scott Proctor's Arm than I normally do.

Hopefully the news picks up in the coming days because it has been rather boring in Yankee land this week.

Oh, and let's go Cleveland.

SPA = good luck

When I started the blog on May 26, the Yankees were 21-25 and 10.5 games behind Boston.

Since then, the Yankees are 71-43 (.623 winning percentage).

Just sayin'

Hola fanaticos de los Yankees

Today, we are launching El Brazo de Scott Proctor to appease the growing Latino community of the United States.

To translate posts into Spanish, use Google Language Tools.

Big day for Scott Proctor's Arm

Scott Proctor should get traded more often. After news about Proctor's trade to the Dodgers came out, the blog exploded.

According to Stat Counter, I had over 800 hits today, over twice the amount of hits I normally get daily. My previous high was not even 400 hits. I also had 569 unique visitors.

I'd like to thank everyone for their support in my three months of writing here. I hope the next three months are just as good!

It's unfortunate that Proctor is no longer with the Yankees. However, I thought a commenter nailed it on the head. He said, "Andrew, don't worry about changing the name of the site. It will have a cool retro feel to it in a couple of years, when Proctor is pitching for the Brewers or out of baseball. Think, 'NoMaas.org.'"

It's time to move on. While I disagree with the trade (in the most unbiased way possible), it's time to support the team as they make a run at the Wild Card.

I am good luck

So I was browsing the blogs on my Yankees blogroll today, and I noticed a change on IT IS HIGH, IT IS FAR, IT... IS... caught. Instead of posting the Yankees' lifetime record like they had been, they now have up their record since the blog started.

Me, being extremely curious, decided to figure out how the Yankees have been doing since I started the blog on May 26. That afternoon, the Yankees lost 3-1 to the Los Angeles Angels.

Since May 26, the Yankees are 27-20. They are now 48-45. In 47 completed games in Scott Proctor's Arm history, they are seven games over .500, as opposed to three games over .500 in 93 completed games overall.

If I started the blog at the beginning of the season, we'd be ahead of the Red Sox by now.