Jeff offered up a brief explanation in his Pirates Season in Review piece but I thought I would delve a little further into our vision for the future of this place.

Basically, we don’t want to be writing if we aren’t adding value to the larger discussion. The more we considered what this place should look like from that angle, we realized a few things. Inasmuch as we are a fan site, we don’t do it as well as Surviving Grady. Inasmuch as we are a place to report and comment on Red Sox games and news, we don’t do it as well as Joy of Sox. So what really is our niche? What differentiates us? We thought long and hard about this and here’s what I think. I think that we are as strong as any Sox blog out there analytically, so we have that going for us. I think we have our finger on the pulse of the rest of Major League Baseball more than most Sox blogs. And finally, all three of us, even though we love the Boston Red Sox, love the game of baseball even more. So we concluded that, going forward, we ought to have more of a bent towards baseball in general and a little less focus on the Red Sox.

So what of the name of our site? After all, Dwight Evans was a Red Sox and aren’t we shifting our focus away from the Sox? Well we’re comfy with it. We all happen to share some fundamental beliefs with respect to what makes a baseball player good and we all believe that Dwight Evans ran the gamut in terms of possessing a skill set that many baseball fans probably under-appreciate. He was exactly the kind of player that, still today, can be had at a discount. He was a rangey rightfielder with a cannon for an arm, a run-of-the-mill batting average, a propensity to draw walks and plenty of pop in his bat. So in a sense, Dewey - or his ilk to be exact - did sort of build this place. After reading and learning more about baseball than I ever thought possible, it was the conviction I developed in my belief that players like Dwight Evans were overlooked that drove me to write here. Jeff named this site after him not only because he was one of his favorites growing up, but also because he came to understand just how good Evans was. And finally, we’ll be maintaining enough of an output-quantity bias towards the Sox that the Dewey moniker will not seem inappropriate anyway.

Our goal is to be the Sox blogosphere’s #1 destination for Sox-and-beyond coverage. We’ll do game recaps but we want to do them while looking to extract macro themes. For instance, if Terry Francona pulls his starter and goes to some mediocrity with the bases loaded in a tie game in the 5th because his best relievers are earmarked for the end of a ballgame, we may shift focus from the game itself to the larger theme of bullpen usage. In trying to seek out larger themes our goal is to come up with a format resembling a mini-version of Jonah Keri’s “Prospectus Game of the Week” for our recaps. We’ll also keep a keen eye on the rest of MLB. We will once again do team previews next March. We will be all over the Hot Stove. We’ll be dishing out our share to the mainstream media I imagine too. Hopefully the format ends up feeling something like Futility Infielder (only with worse writing), where Jay Jaffe ruminates on whatever the hell he feels like but more often than not, the Dodgers or Yankees. We’ll do the same but with a Red Sox bias and we’ll also feature Sox game recaps.

We’ve spent the last few years figuring out what it is we’re good at and think we have been able to identify how it is that we add value. We are looking forward to formatting Dewey’s House with a focus on our strengths and stepping the quality up.