I'm THAT Jorge...

We had 65 followers on Twitter. Our website, officially created and opened on this past Friday night was averaging 115 hits through its first four days. It wasn’t that great, but it was a good enough start for a niche-type website.

But then, on Tuesday, at 2 in the morning, Rangers’ star pitcher (second only to Cliff Lee) CJ Wilson tweeted one of our “cleefacts”. When that happened, Jacob sent him a tweet, asking him to send his followers to cleefacts.com to submit facts of their own. CJ Wilson did just that for us. By the time I woke up four hours later, our twitter account had 250 followers and the site had 1000 hits.

This was it. We had been hoping for a break like this, we just hadn’t expected it so soon. I went to work adding more facts to the website while simultaneously fielding the seemingly endless stream of cleefact submissions coming to us on twitter.

At 9:30, Ben and Skin gave us an on-air shout-out on their morning ESPN Radio show. Within 15 minutes, the website had another 1000 hits. Suddenly, our twitter follower count was going up every time we refreshed the page. People were messaging us with their praises: “This is the most brilliant site, ever!”, “Our office production has never been so low! Thanks, guys!”, “When will I see my CleeFact submission on the site? That will be so awesome!”

Jacob and I spent the rest of the day calling/texting/heytelling each other, neither one of us able to fully believe that our site, only created four days prior, was blowing up like this. By the end of the day, we had received shout outs from CJ Wilson, ESPN Radio, 1310 The Ticket Radio and Fox DFW Sports. Our Twitter account had grown to nearly 1100 followers and the website ended the day with 23,000 hits. We had received over 2000 cleefact submissions through twitter and the website.

Wednesday morning started off much the same way. We were still gaining a new follower every few minutes and the site was getting at least 500 hits an hour. Our excitement was palpable. This was the night. Cliff Lee was going to be pitching game 1 of the World Series and, with another solid outing (which was seemingly as sure a bet as anything else in this world), we knew CleeFacts would go through the roof. But even before the game, we were already getting all kinds of attention. We were getting more on-air shout-outs at various radio stations, including ESPN, The Ticket and this time, also on 105.3 The Fan. The Dallas Observer published a story on their website, mentioning CleeFacts. Still, later on that day, we got another on-air shout-out, this time from the MLB network channel on Sirius satellite radio.

And then, the game started. Surely you must know how this is going to end. Cliff Lee bombed, ultimately allowing seven runs in 4 2/3 innings of work. He had only allowed nine total runs in his previous eight starts combined. Suddenly, this new web sensation, CleeFacts was the reason Cliff Lee was playing terribly. The hate-tweets started coming and the follower count started dropping. The website hits slowed down and our excitement quickly dissipated. We finished the day with only 1266 friends (down from earlier in the day) and almost 25,000 hits, most of those coming before Cliff Lee’s ghastly outing. Even a CleeFacts mention in a game-recap article by the New York Times didn’t seem to be enough to save us.

People started cussing us out on our website and submitting Cliff Lee hate facts. One guy on Twitter told us, “You’re jinxing this. F*** you, man. Go away.” By this time yesterday, the website already had 5000 hits. Right now, there’s 221.

What a difference one REALLY bad game can make.

Cliff Lee’s redemption in Game 5 couldn’t come quickly enough…..