Smell You Later

I often say the first baseball writing I ever publicly published was back in 2007 wishing the Dodgers would play Wilson Betemit over Nomar Garciaparra at third base, largely because Juan Pierre was outslugging Nomar — it used fielding percentage! — but that’s not really true.

Seems the first thing I ever wrote that I liked was a midseason review of the 2006 Dodgers on a message board, during which I made fun of Toby Hall‘s name, included the obligatory height jokes about Mark Hendrickson, and begged the Dodgers to sell Joel Guzman before it was too late. (Ha!) I thought it was good. I sent it to Sons of Steve Garvey to see if they’d let me write there. They rejected me. They were absolutely correct to do so.

So instead I fired up just a terribly-named blog and wrote 2,643 posts, most of which were probably also about Juan Pierre. Remember how mad you all were about the McCourt debacle? It was pure gold for someone like me. It got me noticed, and got me jobs. Anyway, then I joined forces with Dustin, Daniel, and Chad over here and wrote 704 more posts, this one included, and wrote for FanGraphs and ESPN and MLB.com, and appeared on TV and interviewed players and now we’re up to like 3,700 total things, and well, you already know where this is going.

This is my last post here, because I recently quit my day job to work for MLB.com full-time, starting Wednesday. I guess in one sense that’s making things official, because it’s not like I’ve been writing here at Dustin Digest all that much lately anyway. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work and good fortune, and it all goes back to people reading the stupid blog I started nearly nine years ago. (In my younger brother’s bedroom, not my mom’s basement. We didn’t have a basement.) I will miss the total freedom to write about whatever I want here; I will not miss having to post lineups and recaps.

Since I announced that last week, I’ve heard from a lot of people saying that they’d enjoyed all the writing and that it got them to think about baseball differently, and that’s extremely cool and gratifying. I’ve spent hours here talking to goats and dranks and wolves and cats and future people, which is inexplicably a sentence that makes complete sense. You nerds sent a baseball around the country to sign it and send it to me. I love you all, except for you. Yes, you.

Anyway, DD goes on with the excellent Dustin, Daniel, and Chad, and they will do great things. You can still bug me on Twitter, too. It’s not like I’ll be dead. Just dead to you.

Thanks, @AKAtheconman