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I can't believe it has gotten to the point where I feel compelled to say this, but...

 

Christian here (well, sort of -- more on that in a sec). I was supposed to wait until later this afternoon to announce this, but I had to jump the gun a bit and I hope the other writers don't mind. When the Motorola deal was announced, Rob hinted at other sponsorship deals, some of which have already been mentioned.

Take a second and check out the "Our Writers" page, and then come on back. I'll wait.

Check out that headline...thanks to the hard work of Cubnut, we've struck a sponsorship deal with Motorola. As far as we know, it's the first of its kind. We actually need to still cross a few T's and dot a few I's on the final deal, but we felt the off-day was the perfect time to make the announcement. We realize the whole thing is a little unorthodox and some folks will call us sellouts. That's fine, we'll accept the criticism knowing that this will be better for the site in the long run.

The deal is pretty simple, in exchange to referring to ourselves as "The Cub Reporter Presented by Motorola®" or "TCR Presented by Motorola®", Motorola backs up the Brink truck and gives us a bunch of cash to run the site. And of course, like any sponsorship deal, Motorola gets their name and logo plastered on the site.

....counting down to Vegas (I'm going next week, Cubs arrive at the end of the month).

- Feel free to use this as today's game thread, Cubs stay home in Mesa and battle the Angels; Ryan Dempster vs. Ervin Santana. 

- The big news of the week was another Lou lineup change, this one involving our highest paid player though. I immediately expressed my displeasure over the experiment, but I'll save my final judgement when it's actual put to use in a game that counts. Lou still has a few weeks to change his mind. I have no problems with moving Soriano to the 2-spot or the 5-spot or the 4-spot or even the 3-spot. I have all kinds of problems with giving Ryan Theriot even more plate appearances, even if it's just a handful more.

On the other hand...

There's just something about the Lou tenure so far that makes me give him the benefit of the doubt. It's not that I think he's infallible or anything. It's just that if he does go down this road with Theriot at the top of the order, I feel just as confident that he'll abandon it if it's not working. This is the complete opposite of how I felt about Dusty, who was stubbornly stupid.

Just wanted to give everyone a head's up about one of our new pages: the Cubs 40-Man Roster. We think it's an improvement over the one at cubs.com.

The Cubs travel to beautiful Peoria (Arizona) to take on the not-as-good-as-they-think Seattle Mariners. Jon Lieber and Sean Marshall will see the mound for the Cubs. Jarrod Washburn (I've been told we bear a resemblance minus his goofy facial hair) will start, but definitely not finish, for the Mariners. Some site info after the jump....

- A couple of quick site modifications with more soon to come. I added a "module" as Drupal calls them, that will automatically fill in the subject line for users when they comment. When you first hit the comment button, it will add "Re: {Title of Post}. If you hit reply to a comment, it will fill-in the subject line with the subject of the comment you are replying to. You can go in and edit them if you wish. If you are replying to someone's comment though, we do ask that you just leave the default because it makes life a lot easier for those viewing comments in the "flat" modes.

- The next tweak is the signature module. It has a few options - the most important is that it will stylize the signature automatically (no more broken tag troubles hopefully). Currently it's set-up to have a small line break and italicize it:

__________________________

Welcome to The New Cub Reporter!

Since the system is doing all the formatting now, I do ask that if you did add a signature, to go in and remove any tags or linebreaks (directly the opposite of what I asked yesterday). I simply typed in: Welcome to the New Cub Reporter! in my signature box without any formatting and what you see above is what is pumped out.

Also, if you change your signature or add one, it will change the signature on all your old comments as well.

Next, your signature will no longer show up in the comment box and you won't have to type around it. If you added a signature to your account, it will automatically attach it to the end of your posts now.

The last note is that after I installed the module, it did take everyone who had a signature yesterday and duplicated them in your comments. An unfortunate side-effect, but everything should be working normally from here on.

On July 21st, 2001, Christian started this site somewhere on the World Wide Web with a post simply titled, "Welcome to the Cub Reporter." About six and a half years later, the NEW Cub Reporter is born. Yes, the rumors are true, we've moved to a new site and to our own domain name (finally). If anything, we'll be easier to find now at www.thecubreporter.com. I suppose the first question will be: Why the move?

While we appreciated the opportunities afforded to us at MVN.com and all the fine people working over there, we're just not the conforming types. Plus, we were very anxious to take on the headache of maintaining our own website. Mostly though, we just wanted to do our own thing and be able to swear whenever we wanted.

The second question you might be asking is: What's the ultimate answer to life, the Universe and Everything? Answer: 42 (it's even in our FAQ).

Third question(damn, what's with all the nagging): What's new about the site?

Plenty my friends...plenty.