AaronGleeman.com

This is a major milestone that I'm very proud of, and there are far too many people to thank to even begin to name names. First and foremost, I want to thank you, the readers. Without you guys I'd just be babbling to myself, and the constant readership growth is what has kept me going. Knowing there will be actual people expecting to have something to read here each morning has motivated me to write countless entries when I otherwise might have taken the day off.

I'd also like to thank the many other bloggers out there, both for inspiring me to blog and for sending thousands upon thousands of readers here through various links on their sites. The blogosphere runs on word of mouth and the willingness to promote the work of others, and I've been very lucky when it comes to both of those things. I've also been fortunate enough to have had a number of mainstream links, from guys like Jayson Stark at ESPN.com to the good people at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and I'd like to say thank you for that as well.

Beyond that, I'd like to thank my family for always being supportive of my writing here when it would have been really easy to ask why the hell I was wasting so much of my time on something called a "blog." And finally, a big thanks goes to the many outstanding baseball writers who first inspired me to become a fan of the greatest game in the world, and then inspired me to try to write about it. Rob Neyer, Bill James, Peter Gammons, Jim Bouton, John Sickels, and the whole crew from the early days of Baseball Prospectus -- if you're looking for people to blame for unleashing this blog on the world, those are the guys to start with.

Since the launch of The Hardball Times last March, the amount of general baseball content on this blog has gone downhill. I've continued to write about the Twins here on a regular basis, but all of my other baseball writing has been shifted to THT (or to places like Rotoworld and Insider Baseball). Because of that, this blog has become much more of a place for odds and ends -- stories about my personal life, entries about music or movies or television, and all sorts of other non-baseball stuff.

I'm still not quite sure what the best way to juggle writing on a semi-daily basis for multiple websites is, but the fact that my audience here has actually gone up substantially since I began writing for THT (and other places) is really encouraging. This is my 30th month of blogging and the average number of visitors per day has risen in each and every month, despite some major dry spells in content and some major shifts in the topics I cover.

I realize this entry isn't very interesting to most people, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way. I hope you'll continue to make AG.com a part of your daily reading and I also hope you'll add The Hardball Times to your routine too (if you haven't already).

And, just in case you thought this whole blogging thing was all fun, I'll leave you with an e-mail I received over the weekend:

As if that weren't enough, Mimiru then proceeded to bash me over at USSMariner, chiming in during the stats vs. scouting discussion (which had absolutely nothing to do with me) by saying, "Starting with Aaron Gleeman, most of the stat-heads I know are incredible jerks and people, who if they write like they really are, I would not want to be around."

The funny thing is, I went back to that January 6 entry to see exactly what sort of horrible things I had written, but I couldn't really figure out what was so offensive. Oh well. A million hits is a really nice thing, but having people call you names is definitely also part of the territory. I do plenty of name-calling myself (too much actually, I'm trying to work on that), so I can take it. Plus, in 30 months of doing this, I've been called so many names by so many different people that what Mimiru wrote might actually qualify as a compliment.