A Very Fond Farewell

This isn't going to be easy.

I have accepted a full-time position in the front office of the Pittsburgh Pirates, starting in January. That makes this my last blogpost as a writer for CamdenChat. This means this is goodbye, and this is also my last chance to shout out how much I love this corner of the internet.

There are way too many people to thank personally, just for reading and striking up (mostly) good conversations. A couple years ago, I was at the Orioles' FanFest with Stacey and a couple of other people, and at the end of the day there was a blogger forum hosted by MASN's Steve Melewski. Stacey repped our great site, and when asked what makes CamdenChat special, she replied the community here. She was absolutely right.

Stacey deserves a ton of credit for building the community up. I wish I could write like her: extremely smart yet so approachable. That goes double for Mark, of course. It is sad to no longer be a part of the group here anymore, but I have so much joy in getting to just sit back and be a fan of both of your writing and podcasting.

I've also been challenged to defend and evolve my ways of thinking about how baseball works by the rest of you: the sabr-geeks and the most strident anti-stat fellows both. Some of you have at times been rivals for the front page here and at other times good friends (my night on the town with zknower in Boston is one the very best things that came out of me joining CamdenChat), but you have all forced me to "adapt or die", as it were. Thank you all.

Anyway, to the point: you are in such good hands, and I have no doubt this community will get better and better. There's a really good reason why I started to come here for my daily baseball chatter and stopped going to The Sun or MASN's website. We're just plain better here. I can't wait to see how much better you're going to get.

As for me, I'm really excited to go chase a World Championship. I told the Pirates in my interview that I wanted to go to Pittsburgh because I saw how awesome it was to see the Orioles turn it around and finally wake back up, and I really badly want to be a part of that in Pittsburgh.

Anyone who wants to keep up with me, trying to do that, you can still find me on the various social media. I certainly don't intend to stop trading e-mails and direct messages with the friends I've made on here.

We're going to do one more CamdenCast sometime this week, so you can look forward to just a little bit more Andrew yet. Other than that, gang, take it easy.