Behold the power of baseball blogs

Jane Heller was stuck in her house in Santa Barbara at the height of the recent wildfire. She understandably freaked out a bit, but something kept her sane:

The phone rang with rumors of friends whose houses were burning to the ground. The local television stations suspended their regular programming to cover the fire nonstop . . . I couldn’t decide which was making me more anxious: staying on top of the situation or trying to block it out . . .

. . . With nothing to do but wait, I watched the Yankees, who’ve been my trusty escape ever since I can remember . . . Still, it was after the games, late into the night as the winds continued to buffet the house, that I really needed a distraction. I fished out my computer and went in search of Yankees bloggers . . . The blogs were such a tonic that I decided to post entries on my own blog, which I had considered abandoning in light of my possible evacuation. The thought of writing about the Yankees seemed trivial, unseemly, but I yearned to add my own voice to the cyberconversations. My real-life community was in flames, but my blogging community was intact and there was something incredibly reassuring about that.