This was the first post on this website:
With that horrible joke in mind, we’d like to formally welcome you to the last post on this website.
Hey everybody, Jake Mintz, Jordan Shusterman here. We’ve been teasing some news now for a while and the day has come to finally explain ourselves.
As some of you know, we graduated college a few weeks ago. One of the many shitty things about graduating college is that afterwards you’re usually expected to get a job and make money and stuff. After four years of dicking around on this website and on the Internet in general, the time has finally come for us to face reality and get our sorry asses a job. Now we have to do adult things like cleaning up dishes and peeing in the toilet and paying a mortgage (honest thing: I don’t know what a mortgage consists of. Is it a physical thing? Can I trade it? Does someone win? I don’t know…).
Lucky for us, we are happy to announce that we have in fact successfully obtained an ADULT JOB™. Even more lucky for us, said job will not stop us from watching an unhealthy amount of baseball on a regular basis. In fact, said job encourages such behavior! Starting this week, you can find whatever the heck it is that we do on MLB.com, primarily on Cut4 (where you may have seen some videos from us over the past year). Today is our first day at the offices in NYC (cubicles are weird, I want to rearrange all of them to fit together like Tetris blocks… apparently ADHD doesn’t subside when you graduate college), where we’ll be working regularly to produce entertaining baseball-related #content, as opposed to just whenever we don’t have too much homework to do. So while the BBQ as currently presented to you will be no more, there is a bigger and better version on the way.
When we started this thing four years ago in my living room during a game of MVP Baseball 2004, we never expected it to get us a job or even get us a following, let alone a follower. The whole journey from December 2012 to now has been inexplicable and hilarious.
OG stop on the OG road trip circa July 2013
The first game we attended together as the BBQ was in July of 2013. We drove from our homes near Washington D.C. to Clinton, Iowa and paid ten dollars to watch the Clinton LumberKings take on the Cedar Rapids Kernels (19-year-old Jose Berrios actually started that game!).
The most recent game we attended together was Game 5 of the 2017 World Series at Wrigley Field. Before the game we made a video with a Cubs pitcher in the dugout and then watched the game in the auxiliary press box. I guess life is like baseball: weird, unpredictable and running around in a circle might actually get you somewhere.
last year for the World Series we were studying abroad in Europe. this year for the World Series we’re at the World Series pic.twitter.com/Tm7wA3F12R
— Cespedes Family BBQ (@CespedesBBQ) October 29, 2016
It sounds dumb and cliche, because it is, but we owe a lot of it to you people. Jordan and I always say that the most enjoyable part of Twitter is seeing what funny stuff people tweet at us. There’s only two of us and there’s thousands of you, so your collective humor is miles better than anything we could ever come up with. So yeah, thanks. Don’t expect a card or a hug or anything, but still, thanks for making it super worth breaking Rule #1 all the time.
We also want to thank our parents for keeping us alive for 21+ years and supporting (almost) all of our BBQ-related decisions over the past four years, Kendall Guillemette being our behind-the-scenes tech magician and one of our earliest supporters, and of course, Yoenis Cespedes for being the most entertaining, bizarre, and captivating dude in baseball. If Yo wasn’t Yo, we’d just be two lame dorky unemployed guys who just graduated college. Instead, we’re two lame dorky employed guys who just graduated college. Thanks, Yo.
So now what are we gonna do? That’s a really good question. Over the next few weeks our role at MLB.com will become clearer, but there are a few things you can definitely expect. We’ll be working mostly with the kind, talented, and deceptively athletic folks over at Cut4. We’ll also be focused on developing a bunch of video content for them, in studio, at parks, in the house, with a mouse, etc. And yes, we’ll still be tweeting goofy baseball shit @cespedesbbq and posting silly Snapchats at the same handle.
I think I speak for Jordan and I — actually I know I speak for us because I am me and he edited this — when I say that MLB’s resources, access, and platform will allow us to do way more cool stuff that will be available for your eyeballs. As White Sox legend Michael Jordan once said, “The ceiling is the roof.”
People always talked about what would happen if Bo Jackson quit football and dedicated himself only to baseball. We’ve always talked about what if the BBQ quit school and dedicated itself exclusively to baseball jokes. Well, time to see if Yo is Bo…
BBQ signing off… for now.
HOUSEKEEPING (a couple important FYIs about where you can find our stuff/contact us):
- Our Twitter (@CespedesBBQ) will remain active and operated by both of us. Nothing changes on that front.
- Same thing goes for our Snapchat, which we will hopefully start to pick back up now that this is our job and not our hobby (also @cespedesbbq). Snapchat is also the best way to reach us if you have a question or wanna tell us something — we are far more likely to respond on there than on Twitter. You can also still e-mail us at cespedesfb@gmail.com.
- The Barbecast in its current form will be ending this week. Our final regular Barbecast (Episode 110, the Podultimate Pod) is available now. Our final see-ya-later Barbecast (AKA the BarbeLast) will be released soon and will basically just be us saying a lot of this post out loud + a few special guests. The current plan is to keep all past episodes available here on our site and on iTunes for you to peruse. You can find a list of links to all old episodes + which special guests were featured on each on by clicking here.
CESPEDES FAMILY BARBECUE 