Blogstronauts!

Verizon Center has been home to its share of fans who have displayed unique approaches to getting the fans involved in Caps games. We’ve had horns and cowbells. We’ve had booming voices and rave lights. This year, we saw the debut of “Capstronaut.” And Capstronaut got me thinking about…

Bloggers.

Rewind back to the 1960’s. Well, back to 1959, to be precise. A new government agency – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – was charged with putting a man into space. And to that end they administered a lengthy selection process to select seven “astronauts” to be the first wave of pioneers to leave the earth wearing the red, white, and blue on the sleeve of their spacesuits.

As the “Original Seven” became the names associated with the Mercury manned space program, NASA had to recruit men to serve in the next phase of manned space flight, and hence, “The Next Nine” were born in 1962. They would be followed by “The Fourteen” in 1963, selected primarily to serve the lunar missions that would come later that decade.

You can almost see that sort of “generational” effect growing up around the Capitals blogging community. We started our own scribbles back in July 2005, and (he said with all humility) you might think of that “era” of Caps blogging as the Mercury program era. There were a few blogs out there – the pioneers like Off Wing Opinion (with blogs dating back to 2002), On Frozen Blog, and Japers Rink (think of them as the Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, and John Glenn of the Mercury phase, while we might be more the “Scott Carpenter”).

But quite a community has grown up to fill Caps fans’ growing need for information – numbers, features, in-game reports, previews, recaps, pictures, interviews, videos, even translations (given the European influence on the roster). We had more blogs take up the “mission,” so to speak – Puckhead’s Thoughts, A View from the Cheap Seats, Homer McFanboy, and others in 2005-2007 (at least I can find archived entries going back that far)…

Then another wave, the Capitals Kremlin, Capitals News Network, Musings of a Hockey Mom, and others in 2008. And more have grown up as the months and years pass.

Like those early pioneers in NASA, some of those early bloggers went on to do other things and find their voice in other places. Some joined the SB Nation community, others the Bloguin community, others left blogging to pursue other paths. But on this morning, when we’re cooped up and looking out on the woods behind us with snow in the air, giving us the chance to read all that we have to pick from in the Caps blog list, we were just thinking of how this has unfolded so quickly over the past five years.

Oh, and you might wonder why we haven’t mentioned the Blogger in Chief here. Well, we were thinking about that, too. Ted Leonsis predates all of us, I guess, in a way similar to those astronaut classes we mentioned. Seems that before there was a NASA, before there was a “Mercury” program, and before there were the “Original Seven,” there was a group of men chosen in 1957, called the “Man in Space Soonest” Group. While all of them were distinguished test pilots in the American military, it was left to one of that group to distinguish himself in the field of space flight –

Neil Armstrong. You might have heard of him.


(We apologize if your blog was not mentioned here. No disrespect was intended, and we recognize that all who make up this community of Caps fans sharing their observations of the team comprise probably the most comprehensive and most sophisticated community of its type in the NHL)