Here I sit in the head-space I visit while creating this content, and I can’t see the prospect world. On a typical Tuesday night, it’s all around me, sometimes filling four screens in between sentences. I’ll have the TV going on two big league games, the laptop going on one minor league game (or vice versa), the desktop screen sliced between research tabs and writing tabs, and the phone screen chirping up at me with pretty lights and chimes. Every dive into the phone means another lap around the box scores for Pavlovian reasons, both majors and minors, and probably a check on the Twitter timeline, where I’ll find any number of highlights, stats and feelings. 

Tonight I’m just sitting here seething on the porch, bouncing between laptop and phone, doomscrolling Spider Tack stuff. Soon enough I’ll head up to the desktop and dig in on my plan for tomorrow’s article, but right now, I thought it might be worth our time to tickle the keys with how it feels to be a baseball fan for the moment. Then I realize I don’t even know how to say it. The first several words to mind begin with F and don’t get us to the deconstruction or reverse engineering phases we need to find to ever really articulate ourselves. Actually, fuck that. How else could you say it today? What the blue fuck is going on here? Who handed these hacks the wheel? Were any actual fans bellyaching all day about the shape of a game? Not that I heard. Every baseball friend I have was excited about the season. Most were planning to attend at least one game. Many had already been. 

And most of these people, they’re still excited, I think, for now. 

But you can’t change the rules of a game in the middle. When kids are playing, that’s the first move toward the end. It’s fine. Games run their course and go poof in the wind. For kids, I mean. They invent on the fly, play a game for a while, then toggle a rule. A timer somewhere begins. The game will see several quick rule changes now as kids embrace every thought for what might happen differently. It’s fine. It’s fun. And then it’s over. 

If you haven’t seen Tyler Glasnow’s Tuesday press conference, you can find it here.

I like how he articulates the proper timing of such a change. I think we can set aside the fact that the baseball itself is always changing for whatever dumbass reason, just for a moment, and look at the preference Glasnow lays out for how baseball could handle this. Just tell us. Just let us know what the rules will be, and then let us play by those rules. Revolutionary. You can change them in the off-season. Hell, the contract between owners and players will have to be resettled this off-season. What better time to restructure the game ever so slightly? I don’t mean to sound like a total jackass here, but you might even want to discuss this Spider Tack issue with the players heading into or as part of the CBA. I dunno. Just spitballing. 

I’m sorry. You didn’t come here for this. Decent chance I’ll delete it all before this goes live. I’ll get to the prospects in a minute. It’s just, Grey tweeted something funny about something ridiculous that Olney tweeted, and that made me think about how smart Bud Selig was to turn the other way during the steroid era. Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it: using “smart” in juxtaposing understandable behavior to what we’re seeing from Manfred on a daily basis, but maybe it’s the perfect word. Perhaps only an idiot would freak this much the fuck out about what’s happening in the media-reaction sphere and jeopardize the game itself–not to mention the health of everyone playing–but perhaps it’s gotten harder to ignore the angry clammor from people in search of something to angrily clammor against. And now that describes me. I wasn’t looking for the clamor, I guess, but here I am, stunted by that wild strain of galaxy brain irritation with everything that powers so much of our world. 

Fuckin Manfred.

Let’s talk prospects.