I have a problem. It’s a problem usually emblazoned onto a fantasy site with two upper case letters in bright red, my scarlet letters.

NA.

Not Available. I know this is the true meaning of the acronym. Any player with this suffix affixed to their names are in the minor leagues, unable to contribute to our MLB squads unless you have cooler league rules than mine. My problem is rather simple. I haven’t had a team without an NA player for at least the past 5 years. I do not have an NA slot in any of my leagues.

It’s almost at the half-way mark of the season, so it’s a good time to take a step back from your team, adjust your glasses, look at what you need – and then find the patsy in your league who still simply prorates stats or believes that the first half of the baseball season dictates how the rest will unfold. We who have lived longer than we would like to admit, yet are grateful for the wisdom and the greater community of humanity time has bestowed, recognize rubes like a man born on the bayou can tell an alligator from a soggy log.

There are those among us pleased that Jacob DeGrom is getting a second Tommy John surgery. I do not count myself among them, as I am not a complete monster. I am a partial monster. This little introduction is dedicated to those claiming a level of Fantasy Baseball Edge regarding Jacob DeGrom’s draft position in regards to his injury history.

Some days one has the juice, others the juice has dribbled between the humble 2×4’s of your local park’s picnic bench, to be scarfed by ants drowning in the treasure of sweet excess. 

Bud Black.

It always comes back to the dread captain Bud Black, sailing the seven seas of mediocrity. I had let him go. I had cast off the shackles of the man whose first name insists on a friendship I never agreed to. He is the producer of so many blurbs in so many different ways. He is the tower of celestial creation, a pillar of stardust whose suns all go white dwarf despite the promise of a Goldilocks zone. If you got all that, get down on your hands and knees and try not bump anything as you crawl into my inflatable astronomy dome, and give me a quiet high five as our teacher tries to remember any constellations beyond the Dippers and Orion’s Belt.

We all avoid certain players every fantasy season, for better or worse. I normally avoid rookie pitchers, but made an exception for Grayson Rodriguez. We all know how that went. The classic “I’M EXCITED-to-I’M ANGRY-to-I’M EXCITED-to-I’M DISAPPOINTED-to-I’M DISGUSTED” pipeline. You know it’s bad when you agree with management regarding a player being sent down to the minors. 

Give up some love for your pets. They’re usually the only members of your family who can stand your addiction to fantasy sports, and will always listen to you rant about Kevin Gausman’s lack of run support without dying of disinterest.

One would be best to avoid most internet chat groups, especially larger public forums Reddit or Twitter, full of idiots like me drawn into conversations we hate with people we’ll never know. I previously wrote about Yahoo deleting message boards on all leagues, to be replaced with their useless “Chat” function, which serves to shove even more advertisements down our collective throats (a disgusting image).

David Lynch’s mid-career masterpiece Lost Highway tells the story of a few lost souls and found ghouls prowling the liminal spaces of Southern California. About half through the film (spoiler but the movie is more than a decade old, so the spoiler rule does not apply suckers), Balthazar Getty’s character transforms into a completely different character played by Bill Pullman with no explanation beyond Lynch later stating that the film exists in the same Nightmare Logic universe as Twin Peaks. Identities, egos, and even flesh are seen as nothing more than oobleck, temperamental and seemingly impossible. 

Such a film brings to mind one person: Bud Black.

Communication is fundamental when discussing baseball. Without communication, we wouldn’t talk about baseball. We wouldn’t talk about the filmography of an actor to our friends while watching a movie they’re in. We wouldn’t shake our head and frown when a rival car does a rolling stop at a four way intersection, and cuts the line while pretending to be embarrassed or catatonic as their despised profile zooms by .05 seconds faster than if they stopped.