A changing of the Guard part II

Hello everyone! This will be a relatively short post but I just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Matt Dallas, and as of this week I am the new interim site runner for Covering the Corner. Having been an avid CTC reader for years I am beyond excited to be stepping into this role. While I am looking forward to hitting the ground running, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to thank Matt Lyons for the fantastic job he did in this role over the last few years.

With that said, a little bit about me. I was born in Cleveland, but I’ve lived in Columbus, Ohio almost my whole life. I’ve been a Cleveland baseball fan for as long as I can remember. My grandfather was a season ticket holder and some of my earliest memories were sitting in the ballpark with him and falling in love with the game of baseball, and the team we now know as the Guardians.

For whatever reason I also distinctly remember my grandfather having a deep-seated hatred for former Cleveland second baseman Ricky Gutierrez (bit of a deep cut) whom he referred to as “the king of double plays” Unfortunately this was not due to his defensive prowess. He once told me “I swear, he’s the only guy I’ve seen that could ground into a double play from the on deck circle.” In Gutierrez’ defense he only grounded into 14 in 94 games, or 24 averaged out to 162 games, which isn’t great but nowhere near all time levels of feeble, but I digress.

My wife and I just welcomed our first child in June, his name is George (after my grandfather). I coach baseball at Jones Middle School in Upper Arlington and work as a private pitching instructor (currently in the process of getting a certification through Driveline Baseball). I also recently left the IT company I started to return to Ohio State with the intention of going to law school. Writing, however, has always been a passion of mine, I’ve been involved with a number of, now defunct, online publications talking about everything from sports to video games, to Magic: The Gathering (I’m a bit of a nerd), so when the opportunity presented itself to work for CTC I was thrilled.

So with that said, I’m sure many of you have questions about what things will look like around here moving forward, if there’s something I don’t answer here please feel free to ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

What are our goals?

Simply put, I want to live up to the tagline on the front page of the site, “A Cleveland Guardians community.” I strongly believe that Guardians fans are the best fans in baseball. While that may sound like it’s coming from a place of bias, Guardians fans are consistently some of the nicest, most engaged and most knowledgeable fans in all of sports. Beyond anything else the goal is to ensure that we as a staff are doing everything we can to help this community be the best place to talk Guards.

What can you expect?

I’m going to be spending the next couple of days talking with each of the CTC writers to build out our content schedule, so I will ask for some patience as we work to get things moving here, but there are some cool things that you can expect to happen here in the very near future

• A renewed focus on growing our discord community
• More consistent posts
• Opportunities for new writers to join the team
• The return of the Covering the Corner podcast!!!

I know the season ends soon and I don’t think anyone is particularly thrilled with how the team has played down the stretch, but there’s going to be a lot to talk about this offseason with the managerial search, potential roster moves, etc.

With that said, be on the lookout for some cool stuff coming in the next few weeks, and go Guards!