What'd I do to deserve this?

Everybody googles themselves once in a while, right? I do it, too, but I use Google Alerts to help me out. Basically, Google Alerts sends me an email whenever it sees somebody refer to me out there on the Web. So, the other day, I get something from Google Alerts — Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs started a thread called "The Sabermetric Library" in which he asked readers to list in the comments section their favorite "influential sabermetric articles".

There have been 47 responses so far, one of which mentioned me by name -- hence the Google Alert. The kind soul, who uses the moniker "vivaelpuljols", who referenced my work wrote:

John Walsh’s building blocks of Pitch f/x work:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/fastball-slider-changeup-curveball-an-analysis/

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/pitch-identification-tutorial/

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-eye-of-the-umpire/

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-fast-should-a-fastball-be/

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/searching-for-the-games-best-pitch/


Bless your soul, vivaelpujols! I think the above pieces are some of my best, so it's good to see the shout-out. Then I saw something that tempered my satisfaction a bit. At FanGraphs, readers can rate individual comments, giving them either a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down". And I saw that vivaelpujols excellent suggestion had received 0 upward-pointing thumbs and 3 downward-pointing ones. WTF? What'd I do to deserve that?

I learned later that vivaelpujols is actually a guy named Nick Steiner, who is a regular writer at the Hardball Times. I don't contribute to THT much anymore, just don't have the time, but I do follow the site fairly closely and Steiner is one of the better analysis-oriented writers over there. And he has great taste in others' work.

UPDATE: Somebody gave the first "thumbs up" to the comment in question. Thanks, Dad.