I volunteered to revive the newsletter for the Connecticut “Smoky Joe Wood” chapter of SABR, and successfully sent out its first new edition last week.
You can access it here.
This was so much fun to create. I had minimal guidance and effectively carte blance from our chapter president. That was a bit intimidating, but I started with editions from the previous editor to guide my design. More directly, I ripped it off as closely as I could in Affinity. I had to relearn the basics of desktop publishing while I figured out how badly I wanted to do this “the right way” with master pages and repeatable formatting. I made mistakes, learned how to fix them, and am pleased with the overall design. Graphics and layout are not my passion nor my strong suit, but I got the job done.
My greatest delight was brainstorming punny sections I could repeat across editions, while I relied on our wonderfully curious chapter members to submit articles.1 There’s Caught Looking, where I will find a cool or silly image from past seasons. Numbers Game will be a recurring trivia section. And my pride and joy, Smoky Joe Word, is a crossword puzzle.2
I aim to make this newsletter quarterly. That gives members time to submit stories and will ensure I don’t rapidly burn out. I’ll continue experimenting with other sections based on any feedback I receive, and I’ll keep having fun. Besides, that’s what baseball is really about.
I also plan to write for future editions, but I didn’t want this to be the Mark Show. Having other contributors will hopefully encourage more participation the next time around now that people see that I’m taking this revival seriously. ↩︎
I will write more about how I made this puzzle another time, but the tool I find is amazing and, incredibly, completely free. ↩︎