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August 28, 2012

Prospects Will Break Your Heart

Baseball is My Stereo: Keeping it Local

by Jason Parks

“Baseball is my stereo, and applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.” –Alfred Jarry

More often than not, when I make a pilgrimage to watch talent in person, I bring along a familiar character to help ease the pain and discomfort commonly associated with travel and social interaction. That character is my crazy, and I turn to him when I need to turn a trip to Delaware from banal to bombast, or a five-week sojourn to Surprise, Arizona into a tolerable experience worth documenting. The more I travel, the more airtime my travel companion receives, which is cool if you like my travel companion, but uncool if you share the same genetic code and find yourself wearing the mask of the travel companion more than your own face. This is my Ubu paradox, the marriage between my character and my construct, and the once separate lines continue to merge into one faceless blur.

I’m mindful of my standard procedure as I leave my apartment for Staten Island, a two train/one ferry journey that takes around an hour and twenty-five minutes from door to door. At times last season, I was happy to make this trip with my travel companion and, thanks to his ability to attract attractive German tourists on the outer railings of an aesthetically unpleasant ferry, turned one of the adventures into an article that was probably more interesting than the talent I originally wanted to write about. This was my sixth trip to the outer borough this short-season, and I’ve yet to offer much in the form of analysis or adventure, mainly because the talent on the field doesn’t translate to traffic on the site, and my trusted travel companion has been working on a pompous advice column for Baseball Prospectus. But scouting isn’t just about high-ceiling talent, and writing about scouting isn’t just about satisfying the appetite of an audience hungry for updates on high-ceiling talent. Sometimes you have to write about what you see, free from the limited focus of a specific profile or the narratives of a reckless hedonist looking for love on the deck of a boat. Sometimes you just have to bypass the pataphysical and focus on the player. Here are some notes:

Player: Brandon Nimmo