About this site


I am the worst salesman in the world. 

I've tried, but if had to work on commission I'd starve to death in a week.  I don't know how to open a sales pitch, I have a compulsion to tell the whole story rather than the one that suits my purposes and I am loathe to point out my accomplishments or pad my resume.  In fact, most of the time I feel embarrassed when talking about what I've done.  I asked a beat writer who covers the Nationals what he thought of the STATS Scouting Notebook and he was very enthusiastic in citing it as an excellent resource for information on the organization.  He just didn't know I was the one who wrote the team's essays; he thought I was just the "stats guy" scoring the game.

That said, if you've been reading this site for a while, you know that longgandhi.com is quite probably the first place you read that:
1) pitchers with a heavy workload before the age of 23 tend to fall short of their potential.
2) Major league Baseball was going to be played in Puerto Rico,
3) Barry Bonds has been using steroids (the first of three columns on the topic)
4) Washington DC was the only logical location for the Expos once MLB gave up on Montreal and that despite Peter Angelos' protestations, the team was coming to DC, and that
5) the Nationals would be a pretty decent team, much better than last year's Expos' record indicated.

Fantasy baseball readers know it was also the first place you read that:
1) Esteban Loaiza was going to have a big year in 2003, and not follow up with a similar year in 2004,
2) Johan Santana was the best starting pitcher in the AL as early as 2003,
3) the Brian Giles for Jason Bay/Oliver Perez deal was going to be a big mistake for the Padres, and
4) Ray Miller was going to have a profound impact on the Orioles' pitching.

If you read what I wrote in the Fantasy Baseball Index in 2004, you knew that:
1) Oliver Perez and Joe Nathan were going to be studs last year,
2) Juan Cruz was going to be terrific wherever he was in 2004, and
3) Marco Scutaro, Adam Melhuse, David Delucci, Eli Marrero, Rob Quinlan and Ryan Freel were going to be excellent $1/end-of-the-draft pick-ups.

Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I also wrote that Bubba Trammel was a poor man's Brian Giles, Sean Burroughs was the next great NL third baseman and that the Braves would struggle to win their division (finishing as low as fourth one year) in each of the last five years.   Needless to say, those didn't turn out well until 2006. 

And it's no accident that I don't tailor my columns for fantasy baseball.  It's not that I don't appreciate the game; quite the contrary.  I'm one of the few who believe that the money fantasy baseball owners spent on tickets and baseball-related publications after the work stoppage in 1994 is what saved baseball.  Not Cal Ripken or the home run race of 1998.  It was dollars spent by people seeking to get an edge on fellow fantasy leaguers, not some overly romantic notion that kept the game from becoming what hockey is today. 

But the first reason I don't tailor to fantasy games is that I don't know what games you're playing.  How valuable is an AL-only dollar value to a mixed leaguer, or a prospect in A-ball to someone who plays in a league that has complete roster turnover every year?  If I had to put caveats on everything, I would still be writing my preseason previews... for 2004.

The second reason I don't cater exclusively to fantasy baseball is that understanding fantasy baseball is growing closer and closer to understanding real baseball.  Serious baseball research has made huge strides over the last decade and come from a wide variety of sources, both sabrementric and fantasy.  Things like strand rates, Defense Independent Pitching Stats, doubles power translation, walk-to-strikeout ratios (for both hitters and pitchers) and numerous other metrics have given great insight into human performance on the field.  As the art of talent evaluation grows closer to science, so too do the underlying principles of winning in real baseball and fantasy baseball.  In essence, the more one understands about what makes a good player in real baseball, the more one understands where good fantasy players come from.  While league scoring has a long way to go, the prinicples for talent evaluation for both real and fantasy are already very close.

Relative to other fantasy and baseball research sites, I don't get a lot of page views.  However, I get a respectable number of email and personal kudos from fantasy baseball columnists and sportswriters.  That means that a large portion of my readership is made up of the people who write for the major fantasy and baseball web sites.  So if you want to read what the pros are reading (even if they don't always agree with what's written here), you've come to the right place.  Thanks, and enjoy.