Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness Wiki
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MSTIlogo

The current official MSTI logo.

Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness is an award-winning online blog written by Mike Petriello about the Los Angeles Dodgers.  It is named after a line in the Simpsons episode "Homer at the Bat".

OldMSTI

Original design of Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness.

History[]

Beginnings (2007)

The Blog was started on July 12, 2007 by Mike Petriello and a friend writing under the pseudonym "Vin".  He wrote that MSTI would not be a place for daily lineups and game threads, as those could be found elsewhere. Instead, he simply intended to write articles about Dodgers subjects from his own perspective.

Rise to Prominence (2008-2011)[]

Mike's blog rapidly became popular due to a likablemixture of professional-level sabermetric-aware analysis and entertaining, passionate opinions. His immense dislike for Juan Pierre became a common trope.  His annual End-of-the-Year reviews became highly anticipated, and his 2008 review of A.J. Ellis was read by Ellis himself (who commented on twitter that he hoped to recieve better than an 'inc.' grade in a subsequent year).  On June 9, 2011, LA Weekly named MSTI the Best Sports Blog of the Year.  He routinely made amusing and informative side-graphics, such as the Russ Ortiz DFA-o-Meter and the McCourt Sins Count which was referenced on air.

MSTI20

Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness Layout, April 2012-present

MSTI 2.0 (2012-Present)[]

On April 3, 2012, Mike revealed a radically redesigned version of his site, with several new features.

Game Threads[]

Mike finally went against the sentiment of his inaugural post In order to foster community building and improve traffic. He began posting Daily Game Threads - a staple feature of major sports blogs - for live discussion of the game.

Bullpen Chart[]

A unique feature Mike was excited to debut, the Bullpen Chart shows the pitch counts for each Dodgers bullpen reliever over the games in the previous calendar week. However, Mike was unable to write a script that would automatically update the chart, and the monotony of formatting it by hand led to it being out of date for extended periods of time during 2012.  Mike demonstrated more vigor in 2013 with a higher level of dedication to updating it daily.

Livefyre[]

To make discussion more fluid, Mike applied Livefyre to the comments section, which updated the comments live as they were posted.  This led to a shift from the comments being primarily about Mike's posts to being primarily about isolated moments happening during the game or community-oriented discussion.

Links[]

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