My Baseball Blog Reconsidered
November 27, 2023
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill
It has been four months since I last posted on my blog.* The 2023 Baseball season has come and gone with the Texas Rangers winning the World Series over the Arizona Diamondbacks. My last post was way back in July 2023 and was basically a mid-season wrap-up. After that post, my normal life, among other things, got in the way of any more posting. The “other things” basically break down into the following 4 categories:
*Actually 4 months and 19 days but who is counting other than me?
1. Lack of Brevity
I can’t seem to write a short post or resist biting off more than I can either chew or swallow. To practice writing short posts, I came up with the idea of writing a short article about each Major League team. This ending up with me writing 30 long essays simultaneously. Not one of my brighter ideas. Instead of writing a bunch of short snappy posts, I got endlessly bogged down in 30 separate essays and couldn’t really complete anything. I did publish 4 posts of these “2023 Franchise Reviews” at a rate that would have finished the last post sometime in 2025 or so. The solution to this lack of brevity seems pretty obvious: no more planning a whole bunch of posts, just post about whatever random baseball stuff is currently interesting me.
2. Joe Posnanski
Of course, the problem with that is Joe Posnanski. I love Joe Posnanski. If I could write about Baseball as well as Joe Posnanski, I would be a happy man. I subscribe to his blog. I even bought his book (Baseball 100) and had him inscribe it for me (though I now completely regret that, and I should have just picked it up cheaply from Amazon or some other crummy bookseller). But I also hate Joe Posnanski (of course, hate is probably too strong a word. I feel that I would like him if we actually met).* Over the past year, there have been many times that I was inspired to write a short Baseball post. But then I open my Joe Posnanski email blog link to find: that Mr. Posnanski has just written a post about the same subject that is clearer, better written, and much funnier than anything I was going to produce. Maybe hate is not too strong a word. Once again, the solution is obvious. Just throw up posts about whatever I am currently digesting (about Baseball, I mean).
*Bill James and Joe Posnanski would probably be tied as my two favorite Baseball writers. But I have always felt that, if I actually met Bill James, the chances that I would like him are slim. But life is funny. Perhaps we would get along famously if stuck in an elevator together (or some other unlikely scenario) while I would not be able to stand Joe in the same situation. Who really knows?
3. Rabbit Holes
Yet another problem I have with writing posts for my Baseball Blog would just be “Rabbit Holes.” Recently I was working on the “2023 Franchise Review” for the Oakland Athletics. The A’s will be moving from their Oakland home to Las Vegas sometime in the near future. In the history of Baseball, there have been many other franchise shifts like this. However, the A’s are the ‘skipping stone’ of Baseball teams. This will be their third move. But I had a hard time really focusing on this A’s post. I went down one rabbit hole about recent Baseball retirements. I read a biography of the great Sam Crawford who played for the Detroit Tigers way back in the days of Ty Cobb (going down down multiple rabbit holes in the process). And those would just be the main Baseball rabbit holes while also trying to write about the A’s. Every time I get a SABR Bulletin in my inbox, there is, at the very least, some small rabbit hole awaiting. The solution to my third problem is pretty much exactly the same as the first two. I should just quickly write up my rabbit hole reveries.
4. Who Cares?
And finally there is one final and completely separate problem (from the first three). As far as I know, no one is reading any of this. My motivation to write a post for my Blog often takes second or third or fifty-first precedence to such things as: spending time with my children or simply goofing off. It’s hell to be retired and also quite sweet all at the same time. But I promise myself, if to absolutely no one else, to do better.
Now that I’ve finished with this exercise in one hand clapping, I’ll actually try to start my next actual Baseball Blog post. It will be a wrap-up of my previous 2023 Franchise Review series and my very last actual post: “2023 Mid-Season Review” way back on July 8th, 2023 [#32]. Hopefully, this post will come out both quickly and be published before the year ends. After that, I will just post about whatever random Baseball stuff catches my fancy.
JHR