How To Read The Slurve

We know what you're thinking: how do we get use out of this newsletter?  Here are some samples: Here's a sample. And here's another. And one more.  But let's go through some screenshots of a recent edition and show you what we do:

This is the header. It's mostly just for visual interest and to give you a sense of what's going to be the top story that day. On May 14th it was Jake Westbrook. We went into great detail about how well he has pitched recently. 

This is the start of the email. We call it the Opening Pitch. This is where we highlight the best stuff written about baseball yesterday and offer some original takes on it.  

Sometimes we just describe the article and link out to it. We try to let you know where the link is taking you. Subscribers know that [stlpd] is the St. Louis Post and Dispatch.

Sometimes we quote a paragraph to give you a better sense about what the conversation in baseball is that day.

When we can, we really like to unearth hidden gems here, like an interview with a former top-prospect who has become a monk, or some beautiful tone-poem about how miserable it is to be a Mets fan. 

The idea of this section is to give you the most insightful and most fun items. We think all the items in our opening pitch are essential in some way. 

Then there is a section we call Major Updates. Here we make sure we include all 30 teams every day.  This is a section that rewards skimming for most people. 

It's here that we list all the scores from the night before, and link to three or four items about each team.

We start with a recap of the game. We'll link to whatever injury or roster stories are important that day for each team. And we try to find the best contributions of fan blogs. It could be GIFs, rants, laments, celebrations - whatever is worthwhile. 

If you run your eye over this section you'll develop a sense of what's going on with each team. 

Next we have a section that just groups together all the Injury Reports that appeared in our "Major Updates" section?

Why repeat them?  

Because some people play fantasy baseball and just need to run their eyes over these quickly.  We hope to have more sections that appeal to fantasy fans soon. 

Goods From Around the Web is at the end of each newsletter. This is really just a place to have fun before you actually have to return to thinking about whatever is happening on your workday. We try to link to cultural stories that are worth seeing. It's here you'll find stuff about music, new movie trailers, and even a little bit about other sports from time to time. 

This is just the beginning for The Slurve. We hope to have so much more in the near future, including original charts and graphics that instantly tell you more about a player or team's performance than we can in a few paragraphs. All of that is in the works right now. 

So please, give a chance and subscribe today.