Blissfully Enchained: Two Decades of the Comebacker

By Eric Gouldsberry, This Great Game—Posted July 26, 2025

This, ladies and gentleman, is the very first edition of This Great Game’s Comebacker from July 16, 2005:

It was a rasterized image fully created as a GIF file, because the high-end graphic designer in me saw the limitations of the Internet at that time to be so beneath me, I was willing to sacrifice high page rankings for something that looked just as gorgeous on a screen as it would in a coffee table book.

Little did I realize just how much the Comebacker would serve as the lifeblood for our site going forward.

The Comebacker was a kneejerk reaction to conversations I had with my wife Michelle, and Steve Friedman—good friend and unofficial consultant for our then-fledgling site. After reviewing TGG 1.0, they both said that the Yearly Reader and Teams historical sections, along with Ed Attanasio’s initial number of interviews, were all very nice, but it needed something more current—something that would keep visitors coming back to the site on a daily basis.

Right, I thought. At that moment, it occurred to me that I had basically leveraged an unpublished book on the 20th-Century history of Major League Baseball to a website and sprinkled it with Ed’s interviews—but anyone visiting the site would go through it, read it exactly like a book, then never come back. After all, how often do you read through a book a second time?

The challenge thus became one of creating daily content on a baseball history site that, to that point, essentially provided no updates except at the end of the current regular season. It didn’t take me long to come up with a solution; rather than post baseball history content from the past year, decade, or 10 decades, I’d write about the history of the past day that was.

That very first Comebacker shown above did just that. It featured the top hitter and pitcher of the previous day, as well as a couple of newsworthy items that leant itself to history. The piece on Rafael Palmeiro’s 3,000th hit, in particular, transcended the idea by not just talking about the recent past or present, but also the potential for future history—as the headline (“Who’s Next?”) clearly reflects—to get visitors interested in returning to the site, every day.

I was all good with the Comebacker concept—but where was I going to find the time to put it together? The daily task of creating Comebacker content required reviewing all baseball games and news from the day, figuring out the top hitter and pitcher, then deciding on what items warranted the most attention from a baseball history point-of-view. Once I was ready, I would get on the computer, write up the content in Microsoft Word, place it in the Comebacker template “tile” in Adobe Illustrator, then rasterize it in Photoshop before posting to the site late at night. Every night, for the entire regular season. Suddenly, an already busy life with a successful graphic design firm and the raising of our two children (ages six and four) got even busier. But I didn’t mind. Call it all a labor of love.

The original, daily iteration of the Comebacker lasted two years, and was only an in-season thing as I took a well-deserved rest from it between October and March. But that left the site, once again, relatively dormant for half the year. So, starting at the end of 2007, I reinvented the Comebacker as a full-time, weekly page, mixing up the Best and Worst with an expanded palette of baseball news, mini-opinions and some wise cracks thrown in. For example: The first weekly Comebacker discussed the upcoming Hall of Fame vote, a thought on commissioner Bud Selig’s continued denial of the Steroid Era’s impact on baseball, and a small note on the arrival at Chicago of Kosuke Fukudome, joking how Minnesota Twins fans were ready to call the soon-to-be abandoned Metrodome by his last name.

Over the next five years, the Weekly Comebacker evolved. There were special, season-long segments; one of those, in 2008, was devoted to the Chicago Cubs’ 100th anniversary of their last World Series triumph subtitled the “Tragical History Tour of Wrigleyville,” counting down their closest calls to winning it all during that long drought; a year later, we followed the Pittsburgh Pirates’ quest to avoid a record-setting 17th straight losing campaign with a segment I called “You Ho, Oh No! It’s Not a Pirate’s Life for Me.”

Other, smaller nuggets making their weekly debut in the Comebacker included the week’s best game, the “Wounded of the Week” (new injuries), “This Week’s Challenger to Joe DiMaggio” (current hitting streaks), and “League vs. League” (interleague supremacy). In 2011, we began the “Day-by-Day Review of the Week,” an in-season daily diary of the more noteworthy MLB game events and record-breakings that would establish the roots for the Comebacker’s current primary content.

Switching from a daily format to a weekly took the strain off my having to post something every night, but it only transferred that strain to Sundays. That’s when I spent more hours than I wanted finalizing all that I had written through the week, while selecting and writing about—from scratch—each league’s Best and Worst hitters, pitchers and teams from the past seven days. As happily dedicated as I was at putting the Comebacker together, I valued my Sundays for other things like being with my family and enjoying my various outdoor hobbies. Alas, the Comebacker held many of those activities hostage.

Therefore, I had to once more reinvent. That led to the current format: The Monthly Comebacker. The content would now be rethought purely as a day-by-day review of the month that was, sometimes accented by italicized BTW’s and opinions—a tactic admittedly borrowed from one of my favorite baseball reference books, Burt Solomon’s The Baseball Timeline. The daily notes were now year-round, meeting the challenge of finding something worthy to write about on even the dullest of offseason days. Besides the day-by-day review and the Best & Worst section, the Monthly Comebacker introduced “Wild Pitches,” our formal collection of odd and/or humorous baseball-related bits.

The monthly version of the Comebacker worked fine—I only had to spend large parts of one day per month, instead of four, producing the finished product to final post—but I felt like I shed my oath to the readers and drifted away from what led me to create the Comebacker in the first place: Daily content. Sure, TGG had grown more frequently active to that point, with something new roughly every week from the site’s other sections including the newly-created Ballparks and Lists offerings. But I had reduced the Comebacker’s total yearly output from 180-ish (in-season daily) to 52 (weekly) to, now, a mere dozen. Never mind that the content contained in the monthlies was denser than the dailies or weeklies; it just bothered me that our growing audience was having to wait 30 days for the next edition.

That problem would be solved thanks to, of all things, the pandemic. When COVID hit in the spring of 2020 and shut down baseball for nearly five months, it gave Ed and I downtime and thus opportunity to totally rebrand and refresh TGG. The Comebacker would remain as a monthly deliverable, but the day-by-day baseball news that provided the bulk of its content could be viewed almost in real-time with the introduction of The First Pitch on the home page, accommodated by non-Comebacker items such as on-this-date items, baseball birthdays, and the best box score lines of the day—all of which gave readers extra reason to visit the site every day. And that’s the way it remains today.

I’ve realized just how valuable the prodigious information contained in 20 years of the Comebacker has become. Before that first posting on July 16, 2005, my source material for all things baseball history came from the collection of books I accrued, with all my notes dumped into a monster-sized portal created as a text-only Quark Xpress file. But the Comebacker has since become a significant resource for the rest of the site’s content. Need to refresh myself on the 2024 campaign when writing up that season’s Yearly Reader entry? Just look back through the past 12 months of the Comebacker. Reconfirming Cal Raleigh’s biggest and most memorable feats when I most certainly announce him as the Mariners’ best hitter of 2025 in our annual end-of-season review? Search through the Comebacker. Need notes on Washington’s Nationals Park for our Ballparks section? The Comebacker will come in handy in recalling memorable, historic and odd bits about the ballpark going all the way back to its 2008 opening.

For you, the TGG audience, the Comebacker is a wonderful way to cull information or just relive through a certain time. Currently, the Comebacker archive is available on the site going back to the 2016 season; 2015 will soon be added. Going further beyond that will be challenging, as the process of trying to convert the weekly Comebacker pages from 2007-14 into a monthly could be akin to putting a square peg in a round hole. But I’ll work on it.

As for the GIF-only dailies from 2005-07? Forget it. A good chunk of them have been forever trashed; I’m just happy to have saved the first one. Maybe, back then, I was wise to do so—knowing that it might be the beginning of something really special for this wonderful site.

So, you may be wondering: When do I get exhausted from the current process of putting the Comebacker together? Five years into the First Pitch thing, the groove still feels pretty good. I still find doing this fun, and my command of baseball history one-third of a century after getting into it allows me the perspective to write fluidly about current events with confident ease. (Though sometimes I will err, which leads to some of you emailing in to correct me. Thanks for doing so; you thus become a crucial part of the process.)

When I’m so old a fart that I’ll be imprisoned in some sort of assisted living facility 30 years or so from now, I’ll have just one request for the keepers: Give me my computer—or whatever gizmo has replaced it—my online access, and let me write my Comebacker.

Because, at that point, all I’ll need in life is baseball and oxygen.