Dave Cameron leaves FanGraphs

I’ve been reading Dave Cameron for almost as long as I’ve been blogging about baseball on the internet. I started reading him in about 2008, and started writing online in 2006.

Today, Cameron left Fangraphs for a position in the San Diego Padres organization. He left a lengthy post to thank some folks and say goodbye.

Cameron was grouchy and moody at times, but was great at what he did. There are guys like me who are rookie ball or Single-A type talents writing online. We could never aspire to be what a Dave Cameron is in terms of his ideas or way of thinking – he was born with a different set of tools. Dave Cameron is a big leaguer in terms of writing about baseball on the internet.

And it’s amazing to see guys landing jobs in professional baseball front offices who were once just bloggers. When Fangraphs began, blogs were under attack in general for their credibility. Heck, some of the posts we wrote back then were absolutely terrible (don’t fish through the archives).

So congrats to Dave Cameron. Thanks for the memories. And good luck rescuing the Padres with your analytical mind. It will be interesting to see if there is a shift in baseball front offices continuing to seek out this type of talent to strengthen their analytics departments. There is no reason to think that anything will change as baseball shifts into a forward-thinking direction with each organization trying to get a leg up on the others.

In all these years – as much as I tried – I’m not sure Dave ever took one of my questions at lunch in his live chats. What could have been!