Sunday, January 11, 2009

I'm baaaaaaackk!

Greetings, faithful readers. Baseless Speculation is back and, hopefully, better than ever.

I'd like to apologize for leaving all three of you high and dry in the middle of the season last year. Unfortunately, the travails of the newspaper industry hit your friendly neighborhood paper-boy pretty hard. In a cost-cutting move, the paper in my town decided to have the morning edition delivered by a robot.





In short, I lost my job.

Although you might guess that my expenses are limited, what with living in my Mom's basement, I do require a nominal amount of income for room, board and other necessities. To make ends meet, I was forced to take on odd jobs, such as mowing the lawn at Old Man Jenkins' place. As it turns out, I have a pretty severe grass allergy which, combined with my (recently discovered) allergy to antihistamines caused me to suffer something like anaphylactic shock. I crashed on the bathroom floor, twitching like a rainbow trout fighting the hook. It damn near killed me. I spent most of the summer and fall in a light coma.

But, happy ending, faithful readers! I'm alive! Also, it turns out the robot didn't like being a paper-boy - the hours suck, you have to admit - so I've been hired back.

At any rate, Baseless Speculation is tanned, rested and ready for 2009. My hope for this season is to do a little bit more of the type of stuff I set out to do last year but didn't, namely make shit up. Shit about trades, free agent destinations, roster moves, etc. If the Interweb is good for anything, it's for spreading rumors like wildfire. I don't mean any disrespect to Tim Dierkes, who I consider a good friend, because I love a good juicy rumor and he provides a wonderful service by compiling them all in one place. But, and this is not Tim's fault, they're almost entirely full of crap. They're in fact largely meant to be crap. We need to ask why a rumor might exist, whose interests it might serve, if it was leaked by the team or the player's agent to increase leverage or what. Rumors are treated like news by reporters and fans alike and then fans become disappointed and angry to find there was never anything to it.

In that light, I think there's a certain integrity to just making shit up. Fake trades. Bogus rosterbation. When you're transparent about the baselessness of your speculation, the sky's the limit!

Let's be clear: I have no insider sources. I did not have breakfast with Scott Boras yesterday; I refuse to return Theo Epstein's calls, and let's just say Peter Gammons is still pissed about what I wrote.

I'm just one paper-boy, living in my Mom's basement, ninety percent recovered from a light coma, trying out ideas that make sense to me. As I've said before, I hope it's interesting for you, but I don't know why it would be.

I'll also post the occasional bit that tickles my funny bone.

What is it, like 35 days until pitchers and catchers report? Woo hoo!

2 comments:

David K. Martin said...

I knew that my checking this web site every day for the past 7 months would pay off!

My Daily Struggles said...

TK didn't get it. I'm a plagiarist. That's my art.

The medium is the message. My I -- the I that I present to the world -- is really an "I" or he.

He, Eugene O'Neill, is my "I."