My last byline for Baseball Prospectus was on March 20th, 2019. It’s been two long years since I published anything meaningful about baseball, and closer to four since I attended any type of baseball game with any sort of regularity. If I went back in time to talk to my summer 2017 self, who still harbored some moderate-sized dream of working for a baseball team, working “in baseball” in the way that matters to the outside world, she’d be stunned at what’s transpired. Mainly, by the global pandemic, the fact that I moved back in with my parents willingly for three months in 2020, the fact that masks are a thing now, and my burgeoning dice addiction, but she’d also never be able to comprehend where I am with baseball right now. Baseball was my entire life. I dreamed in the game, moved heaven and earth to make afternoon doubleheaders. I drove hundreds of miles without compensation, hoping that this would be the thing I wrote that got me the job. I drank way too much, I lost friends, and I lost jobs thanks to my obsession, and letting baseball take priority over everything else. I was too naive, too stubborn, and too damn young. For a topical reference that will seem hideously out of date for anyone reading this after the late winter/spring of 2021, when Harry said his relationship with William was “space,” that echoed how I’ve felt about baseball for a while. I haven’t really talked about it much - partially because I ditched Twitter for the better part of 2020, and partially because how do you talk about “this game wore me down until I burned out and couldn’t stand to watch two innings consecutively” on the platform where you’ve made your name as someone who talks about...baseball. So, I let it kind of fade away. Answered questions to the best of my ability (or ignored them), that ability severely hampered by not knowing what on earth was going on. In college, I could name the 25-man roster of six or seven different teams at any given point, and that felt important. Now? I’m only really sure that Sean Doolittle is on the Cincinnati Reds because of the excellent “Red Scare” jokes. In some ways, it’s better on the other side. Baseball no longer has any power over me, so I can say what I want. Not that it truly stopped me before, but friends can attest to sleepless nights wondering if speaking the truth had cost me a job, and caring entirely too deeply about that. I still do baseball work, or rather, I’ve returned to doing baseball work, but it’s quiet work, private work, and it’s something that fills a want, not something creating a need. I’m nearly thirty, and it feels weird to consider that in a year I’ll have been publicly talking about baseball for ten years. I’m so completely different from the person I was back then - at first, eager for men’s approval, desperate to be “one of the guys,” and then combative but still bone-crushingly aching for acceptance, and then something of an expert, and now...well, if we define post-modern art, perhaps that’s what this is. I’m now looking at the sport from a post-baseball perspective. At the raw foundation, baseball still fascinates me. The pure interaction of pitcher to batter. The way we’re still learning and growing and defining and discovering the science and art of the game, the way the ball leaves the fingertips and takes on a life of its own. We can’t ignore everything built on top of that, of course, the white supremacist nature of the corporate entity swallowing the game whole, the very misogyny baked into the bones of it, from the miserable attempts at addressing sexual misconduct to the very fact that women are still fighting just to play the game, and while at one point in time I was the person to address these things, and perhaps I will be again, I’ll happily leave them to better voices. If you let something define your whole entire being, at some point, it will eat you whole and spit you out a bone-scarred shadow of yourself. This time, I’m coming back to baseball on my own terms. I think we’ll both be happier that way.
