We've Been Plagiarized!

In the short, sad history of this blog (almost two whole months!), there hasn't been too terribly much to get excited about. The team hasn't been playing very well, and it's hard to get your foot solidly in the door when you're writing about a team that has hundreds of already established fan blogs. By far, the most exciting moment has been the writing of the Wade Miller Petition and being linked to from Deadspin for it. Easiest way to receive 1,000 instant hits from actual sports fans. It was a good day.

Earlier today, I was looking through our visitor statistics, and found that someone had found there way here from the phrase 'will ohman sucks'. This inspired me to find out where we stood on other interesting phrases. None of these searches use quotes.

• will ohman sucks: 6th
• scott eyre sucks: 3rd
• bob howry sucks: 5th
• ryan dempster sucks: 10th
• michael wuertz sucks: 4th (though we have never said this was true)
• carlos zambrano sucks: 14th

From what I can tell, most of these results stem from my co-writer having the name right field sucks. You can search for the name of nearly anyone on the Cubs with sucks, and we'll show up there, mainly because more legitimate sports sites don't use the word sucks. We stick out our tongue and make farting noises at them. Let's look at some of the results that don't involve sucking.

• raise the w flag: 1st (obviously)
• chicago cubs blog: unknown (really low)
• wade miller petition: 68th...

What? This seems really low, so I tried to figure out why. First of all, there have been many petitions involving people named Wade, and/or Miller. Also, many of the sites in front of us are actually sites linking to our petition. But then I took a closer look at the first result, a profile from gametrailers.com.

Recognize any of that text? Hmmm, it looks exactly like what I wrote, but 5 hours after the fact. This date marks an exciting moment in my sports blogging career, the first date something I wrote was directly plagiarized! Nowhere in his "blog entry" does it mention my website, anything alluding to the fact that he didn't write it, and it doesn't even have the first letter of the first word. I don't know whether to feel honored or incensed.

What I find the most interesting in all of this is that he posted this before Deadspin actually linked to me, but after I emailed them with a link to it. This means either he is one of about 5 people who actually read this regularly, or he's actually Will Leitch going by a clever handle that includes neither Will nor Leitch. By the way, apparently his name is actually pronounced leech, like the blood sucking parasite. Anyways, I've told GameTrailers about this through their "Report" button, which required me to register and is now the reason that I will shortly be receiving spam from them. So hopefully it won't be up their much longer.

Ummm, most of that didn't have anything to do with baseball. Sorry about that. Go Cubs.