Hello, and welcome to The Rooftop.
Some of you poor souls may already know me as RockiesMagicNumber, the former overlord of the SBNation site Purple Row. Some of you may know me as Andrew Martin from uh... well, the same role as before. Some of you only know me through Facebook. Some of you know me in person. For whatever reason, you've come across this site (which means I probably beat all of my social networks over the head with links to the site) and here you are, reading the introduction to this site.
I've never written an introduction to a site before. It's certainly a unique experience, trying to dodge the typical bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed cliches that tend to come with a new site and a new venture. This is generally where one would talk about my background a bit, my ambitious plans for a New Blog (TM), so I guess here goes:
I'm Andrew Martin, I'm 30, I'm a software engineer with a couple of degrees from the Colorado School of Mines. I'm a fan of the Colorado Rockies baseball club, the Colorado Avalanche hockey club, and just in case the Denver Thought Police are reading, also the Denver Broncos to the minimum amount required by law. I enjoy live music of the prog funk jam variety. I try to read here and there.
As for my ambitions with this site, I have none. Really. After departing Purple Row, I just figured I was done writing. No more schedule, no more overseers, no more pressure to hit post counts for whatever reasons. It was awesome. I was allowed to not care about the Rockies for a full year and that was alright. Granted, as soon as I left, we ended up watching 3 pitchers actually have respectable seasons and there were actually things to write about again, but I was still enthralled with my new-found freedom, which I promptly threw in to the Denver music scene as well as attempting to juggle a career and dreams of following a rock band around the country (\mm/ Umphrey's \mm/).
After a full season of not having to care about stuff, however, I guess I decided I felt like writing again. My initial intention was to start a site like this, but to do it in more of the LiveJournal fashion. You know, explore my inner thoughts and areas of growth and new ways of thinking contrary to my upbringing. After no small amount of deliberation, I decided that it would be overly self indulgent and ultimately not that interesting (because come on, nobody seriously wants to read the existential crises of a near-30 year old guy who's working his way through a personal renaissance and rediscovery).
So I landed on an idea, and after some encouragement from people like my good friend Matt Muzia, I figured I'd get this started. I named the blog "The Rooftop" after spending an evening at Coors Field with the aforementioned Matt and some friends. We went up to The Rooftop (the new section in Coors Field that basically replaced a bunch of empty bleachers) on... I think it was a Tuesday, and really enjoyed the experience. See, on a weekend evening, it's going to be so packed up there with folks who are just hanging out getting drunk until they can go out to LoDo and continue getting drunk that it's hard to really enjoy the game. But a Tuesday? It was pretty great to just lean on the rail, bullshit about baseball, sports in general, music, work, whatever, and just enjoy an evening. So that kind of became the vision for the site. Bullshit about whatever and relax.
I don't want to put a specific definition on the theme in general, but given what you know about me and my (hopeful) contributors, it's going to be pretty baseball-centric. I hope we'll see articles here about music, movies, books, pop culture, whatever.
I can't promise any sort of schedule either. This is going to be a "as it strikes me" sort of site, and for any contributors I'll have the pleasure of showcasing here I made it abundantly clear that this site is entirely "at-will", and they should follow the same mindset of writing when the inspiration strikes them and they need an outlet.
I will say that I hope to avoid overly contentious or personal topics such as politics and religion, but I can't promise that there won't be an interesting line of thought that intersects such topics and demands to be written about.
As anybody who's dedicated their time to blogging about one specific team, it's not easy to find narratives to follow about guys who would be bench players with more competitive organizations or why a 37 year old pitcher might not be amazing. You've read those articles before, and you're likely as tired of them as I am. So I do hope that this blog will venture into other teams' territory, have opinions on other sports and forms of entertainment, and possibly provide perspective on topics that you hadn't considered before.
Anyhow, as I seem to be already running long with my introduction post, as I'm wont to do with anything I write, I suppose I should consider this a good break point and consider anybody reading this to be thoroughly introduced.
Welcome to The Rooftop. Grab a beer and a leaning spot, let's hear what's on our minds.
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