AaronGleeman.com

The articles are online at the Star Tribune's website if you're interested:

- Batty About Blogging

- The Baseball Blogs

- The Best of the Blogs

- A Taste of Three Bloggers

- Why Baseball is Best (audio clip)

I didn't mention this fact until now because one complaint I get quite often is that I spend too much time stroking my own ego by talking about personal accomplishments, and I didn't want to further infuriate my audience by preempting any important Twins playoff talk to point out that there was a far-too-big picture of me on the front page of the Variety section on Tuesday.

(That would be Yours Truly on the far right, along with Ryan Maus and John Betzler from Twins Chatter on the left and John Bonnes, aka the Twins Geek, front and center.)

As you can see from the picture, it is quite clear why I am interested in being a writer, as opposed to, say, a television personality or an underwear model. In addition to that, I learned that I should never say, as I did in this space last month, that "I'm not very pimply." As the evidence above seems to show, I get a sudden case of what appears to be acne when lights come on and a photographer begins shooting.

This is rather confusing to me, because as someone who is forced to look at myself in the mirror nearly every day, I was under the impression that my complexion was relatively clear. After seeing the picture I even double-checked, and it is! So while I don't have the acne problem that seems to be portrayed in the photo, I apparently do have a problem with having the appearance of acne when I'm in the newspaper, which, as far as I can figure, is at least as bad as actually having the acne in the first place in this situation.

As I've been telling people all week, I'm not particularly fond of how I look in the picture, but the photographer admittedly didn't have a whole lot to work with. Or, as someone so eloquently put it to me Wednesday morning: "The guy's a photographer, not a miracle worker."

Anyway, my gorgeous face and I would like to thank the writer of the story, Regina McCombs, as well as the photographer, Tom Wallace, and the photo editor, Ellen Lorentzson. For the four of us pictured above and Bat-Girl, Seth Stohs and the other Twins bloggers who were talked about in the article, it was nice to get a little recognition for the good work we've been doing, especially from the local mainstream media. Plus, along with my mention in Sports Illustrated last week, it gave my mom and grandma a lot of stuff to brag to their friends about.

Okay, enough with the collective ego stroking, let's get back to baseball. While you wait impatiently for Carlos Silva to take the mound against Kevin Brown tonight, head over to The Hardball Times to check out my column for today ...

The Hardball Times: Reader Mail (Aftermath Edition)

I got more e-mails about Wednesday night's loss than I can remember getting in a very long time, so hopefully I was able to respond to some of the main points you guys were making. Plus, there's a whole bunch of other good stuff at THT.