ESPN Plans Slow Expansion For SweetSpot Baseball Blog Network

With the 2010 baseball season just underway, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is expanding the number of individual teams covered on SweetSpot, the baseball blog network it started last October. SweetSpot launched with eight teams during the 2009 playoff season and the ESPN has now added another 11 sites, which are run by fans. An ESPN rep said that eventually, SweetSpot expects to have blogs tied to all 30 MLB teams, but no timeframe has been handed down in terms of when the blog network will be complete.

The Disney unit wants to carefully evaluate the individual sites, which are pretty idiosyncratic and seek to maintain an independent stance from ESPN. For example, last week, the Yankees blog, It’s About The Money (a snarky reference to Alex Rodriguez’s contract), took SweetSpot’s editor and ESPN.com reporter Rob Neyer to task over a post about collective bargaining issues.

The deliberate approach to rolling out new sites across SweetSpot is in keeping with ESPN.com’s wider local strategy. The New York metro site launched just last month, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Pittsburgh sites. In terms of new sites, ESPN plans to take its time and evaluate how its current local outposts do before committing to any new ones.

As for SweetSpot, the blogs all operate as they did previously, except for the SweetSpot affiliate banner at the top of each page. The blogs will not share in ad revenues — ESPN says it’s strictly a content sharing deal, that’s it — though ESPN.com will occasionally feature posts from the SweetSpot blogs on its main site as well. A list of the new teams is in this release; the launch release identifiies the original eight team blogs.