Musings on blog hits

Do not underestimate the power of the Gleeman.

Earlier this week I put up a post about a play on which Delmon Young displayed a decided lack of hustle. It drew no comments, and the blog got hits at its usual rate.

On Thursday, Aaron Gleeman linked to that post. And the hits went through the roof almost immediately — three times the normal rate.

(I check my stats with a frequency that belies the advice I give anyone silly enough to ask me for advice about their blogs: Don't worry about hits. Write and post things that you like. If it's good, it will find an audience, or an audience will find it. And if the audience doesn't flock to it, at least you like it. In truth, I believe that -- but I sure know if my audience is finding me.)

Things settled back into a more normal range Thursday evening, but the Young post had already become this blog's third most visited post, with every likelihood of becoming the second most visited.

The photo they all
want to see.

But it has no chance of catching the leader. That belongs to a post from last June, shortly after Danny Valencia was called up. Titled "Contemplating Danny Valencia," it took a skeptical view of the rookie third baseman's minor league record.

And it contained a photo, the team mugshot taken during spring training.

That photo is the draw. Image searches on Yahoo and Google are bringing multiple visitors to that post every day. In almost any given week, "Contemplating Danny Valencia" is my most visited post. It had 43 visitors in the past week, and that's fairly typical.

There are either a lot of people contemplating Valencia's face, or, perhaps, a few obsessives contemplating it repeatedly.

I guess this is proof that I do, in fact, follow my own advice. If I were just looking for more hits, I'd post more Valencia photos. I have yet to post his 2011 mug;  I'm waiting for a post good enough to want it seen thousands of times.