RCS: Bill Simmons gets a lot of the credit for creating a type: the rambling fan who writes online. But in a lot of ways your approach seems similar, but with press credentials. If you have a longer point to make, you won't be constrained by an 800 word limit. Instead, you'll go to JoePosnanski.com and write out your entire point.

To what extent do you owe your career and the perception of you to the Internet and your personal website?

Posnanski: Probably to a great extent, and in a lot of ways that's very surprising to me. I've been writing a newspaper column for probably about twenty years before I started writing anything on the internet, as far as a blog goes. And you mentioned Bill, and I've always liked Bill, going back to his days as Bostons sports guy, and I've always really enjoyed his work and still do. But he was not somebody I was thinking about when I started doing the blog.

The way the blog came about was I had written a book about Buck O'Neil and I wanted some way to promote it and I thought that, hey, I would start a blog, because that seemed to be what everybody was doing.

It then evolved into this big thing, because at first when I did it, it was just intended to tell people where I was going to appear and maybe a couple of thoughts about the book. It evolved into this enormous thing where I just basically would write whatever happened to be on my mind at the time and it started to take off and people started to read it. I was stunned, because I just never expected any kind of readership. What I ended up finding was not only a very large readership, but also a very large and kind of influential readership. I would expect that that blog is a very big reason why Sports Illustrated called, it's certainly a big reason why people have come to know me a little bit. It's weird because it was absolutely not my intention and not my goal at all and now it's all happened and it just sort of seems like I plotted it out that way. It seems like it was sort of a natural progression, and it wasn't that way at all. Every step along the way has been very surprising to me.

10 Questions with Joe Posnanski