An Athletics Nation Success Story (sort of)

Hello, I'm Jerry Brewer. You might remember me from Athletics Nation posts such as Josh Donaldson vs. a Curveball and Austin Beck and High Low Hanging Fruit. It has been a while now, but I was once a regular contributor to Athletics Nation.

About 10 years ago, I started www.eastbayhittinginstruction.com (don't bother trying to open it, I took the site down a couple years ago). I have a passion for baseball, and I was trying my hand at giving back to the game by doing hitting lessons for charity. Due to my lack of a Baseball Reference page, the first few years were pretty slow. Like really slow. To try to gain some traction, I started writing a lot of articles poking a few holes at the old doctrine of hitting. I used numbers and video to show that the best hitters don't chop down at the ball and ground balls aren't good.

Then one day I stumbled across Athletics Nation and saw anyone could post articles. I posted one I had intended for my site on the FanPosts section. (A scouting report on then Athletics prospect Addison Russell. For the record I wasn't crazy about his swing.) The next day it was on the front page!

I did a few more FanPosts focusing on hitting before I was offered a spot as a weekly contributor. I held the gig for about a year, doing something like 50 posts. Toward the end of the run something pretty cool started to happen. Quite a few people were looking at the posts. Josh Donaldson saw and tweeted about one. Eno Sarris sent out one over his Twitter feed. Coaches from all over the country were emailing me about my posts. I left my spot as a contributor so I could grow my site (which had all but died) and write about more than Eric Sogard's swing.

My Twitter following kept growing (now nearly 6k for some reason), I met more and more coaches, and got to know quite a few people inside the game. I hung up working on baseball a couple years ago. I have twins now and it got to be too much work to do part time. It was a pretty good run. I was interviewed for a FanGraphs article. I got to meet tons of coaches, a lot of them I now consider good friends. Guys I used to chat hitting with til midnight are now doing jobs in baseball. I can count 7 guys I know well as coaches in baseball, one a head hitting coach in MLB. I've talked with folks in MLB front offices about player development and been offered positions. (Not from Oakland, if you are curious.)

Pretty crazy for someone who just wanted people to read his stuff and hopefully help the local high school kids not be so terrible. So if you are thinking about giving writing or contributing to the site I would say go for it. You never know what might come of it.