The 5 – All The Places We’ve been Banned.

March 30, 2017

Running a blog is a pretty thankless job, but from time to time you make an impact on something or someone, so you keep writing stuff. I ran a pretty successful blog in the summer of 2012 called My Sox Summer. I had just moved to Chicago, Bridgeport to be exact, and wanted to see how many games I could go to for under $500. I decided to try for 50, ended up with 53 games for $400. This was pre-$7 and $5 upper corner seats, so the lowest face value was around $15. So if you wanna relive that epic collapse of 2012 through the eyes of a guy with no job, you can read it here.

In 2017, we are trying to step our game up here in the 108. We had a bunch of ideas that we didn’t execute last year due to timing and piss poor planing, but look at us now! We have t-shirts and business cards! They were a big hit at SoxFest. Hell we even have a contest running for the best mustache with Tyler Saladino! And the most epic March Madness Bracket EVAR for the best baseball movie. So anyways we are trying to get more readers and followers in 2017.

I am not sure how familiar you as the reader are of the White Sox online community, but there was a really popular message board back in the day called WSI (White Sox Interactive). I was a west coaster back in the day and I am pretty sure one of the moderators hit me with a card back when it started up, but I never joined. Fast forward to 2012 and I am trying to promote my blog, I start posting on any White Sox message board I can find. I encountered a bunch of red tape when trying to post on some of these message boards, as they don’t allow the small time guys that make no money to self promote their blogs. After several messages WSI did decide to allow me to post on their board, which drove a bunch of traffic in 2012. I tried to post again in later years and I was banned for life. Ha. Soxtalk was another message board that always allowed me to post my blog, which was awesome too. I had a FB page, Twitter and Insta page. All drove traffic to the blog, all made me $0.

We started @fromthe108 in 2016, I was pretty aware of the different channels that we could use to promote. Message boards have since died, mostly due to the moderators being control freaks, and FB pages have become the new message boards. There are TONS of these pages on FB and I try to join as many as possible. Mostly I am there as a Sox fan, but I am also there to promote our blog among the others. Many pages allow this with no issue, a few have issues, but I will talk about them later. First let me tell you about the people that run our blog.

In 2012 I met a group of guys that had season tickets to the Sox and let me tell you, I lucked into a group that suited my needs for baseball. All of the guys were very welcoming, but not in a sappy way, more like “we respect you cause you are a big guy, but you are fun drunk so please hang with us” kind of way. It’s fun to come into situations where the guys were just like my friends, pretty much known each other for life. Lotta crazy Bridgeport stories, college stories, all that shit. It was a match made on the southside. We all have tickets (that we pay for) for every weekend series.

On the heels of a video that I shot that went viral, the From The 108 blog was born.If you haven’t, watch this video. It’s hilarious.

We promoted the blog on several sites, most were open to it, some were not. Here are the sites that had issues with us.

I was banned for 7 days? All for posting links to our stories. They claimed self promoting, which I was, but is that not allowed? You can post any link on their sub-reddit, except your own I guess. We got a serious keyboard lashing from one of the members because our blog didn’t fit in his/her little box of what a fun White Sox fan blog should be. He called out BeefLoaf for having a dumb name. That might be true, but fuck him, you write a blog. So if you wanna read censored White Sox stories, just like you can ANYWHERE, check out The White Sox Sub Reddit. If you like our blog, post it on there, we’ll owe ya.

Soxtalk On FB

Soxtalk started as a message board and has a FB page. We seemed to have a great relationship until we posted a blog in which BeefLoaf quoted Pulp Fiction and said the racial slur “wetback”. He is of Mexican heritage, so does it even count? Can’t you make fun of your own race? Not on the Soxtalk FB page! We were booted after that blog

Sox Fans On Deck – FB Page

I got a swell message from the moderator of this page telling me that while he was happy I was part of his group, he would appreciate it if I didn’t promote my page on his page. We linked to our Twitter contest with Tyler Saladino, I figured the Sox Fans On Deck could use some free tickets. I was wrong! We launched into a big debate as what most of these pages complain about is me making money off them. I tried to explain that we made no money with the blog, and then explained how other websites DO make money from ad revenue, but it fell on deaf ears. Another one bites the dust!

These are the most recent places that have asked us not to post, or booted us from their site for posting our blog. It’s America, so rock and roll. We DGAF that much, but it is just sad to me anyways that the independent guy can’t post his poorly written blogs but anything that Sports Mockery turns out will get a million views. Or the Trib. Or Yahoo. Christ, these guys are making thousands on ad revenue, but because they are established, no big deal, post away! This blog costs us money right now, with ticket prices, concessions and these sweet T-shirts that we got made up, we are in the hole. But we do it cause we are fans that love the White Sox. And we have something to say to you other fans. I am also sure that many of our ideas have not gone unnoticed.

Soon enough if you wanna contribute to the plan, buy a shirt from us. We have some sweet limited edition ones that we will be producing later this year, so keep an eye out. Original content blogs, sweet limited edition t-shirts, what more do you want? Let us know!

Big thanks to the FB pages (Pride & Passion, Debating Cage, We Love The White Sox, Grinder Ball, Sox Fans Only and many more!) that allow us to post our content and for the thousands of you that read our stuff. We promise to keep getting drunk to provide you with hours of shitty content and sweet shirts.