Have you read this piece about the Mariners’ dysfunctional front office?

If not, you should, then come back and read this.

Because whatever’s going on in Seattle is nothing compared to the problems of my fantasy team, where the GM and the owner are constantly butting heads, and the manager is often asleep at the wheel. Like the week that he literally forgot to set a lineup. Who does that? It’s not like the deadline changes every week. It’s always the same day, and one week, he just forgot. And who did he blame it on? Me, the owner. As if I’m supposed to micromanage everything that I do and can’t trust my fingers to go to the website and click some buttons without my brain getting involved. Ridiculous.

And then there’s the trades. We have my brain going one way, my heart going the other, and who’s to know what the right answer should be? My general manager is insisting that we need to dump Mike Moustakas, but the owner says no, we need to show loyalty, we need to keep giving him a chance. Moustakas is one of our guys, he says, and the heartless executives in the GM suite up in my cerebrum can’t just argue the statistics every time they want to make a decision that they know will be unpopular with the rest of me. Clearly no one’s on the same page.

Fact is, my general manager completely misrepresented his skill set when he applied for the job. He said he had a foolproof projection system. He insisted that he knew who was going to thrive and who was going to fail, who the unexpected breakout candidates were going to be… and I believed him. I looked at his spreadsheets and listened to his conviction and I believed he knew what he was doing. Turns out he didn’t. He fooled me. He fooled myself. I fooled him. We fooled oneself. Other pronouns, all in one sentence. Yes, all of them. Turns out my GM is no better than anyone else’s, and I don’t know why I keep him around except that he is connected to the rest of me by nerves and tendons. But that’s not enough anymore.

And the budget’s been a mess. I was promised at least $50 to buy pointless magazines and other pre-season publications, and what happened? The owner said no, at the last minute. “We need groceries instead,” as if that’s an excuse. Why can’t someone else buy my groceries and I can go buy a FanGraphs+ subscription? Oy, what a joke. My team is never going to go anywhere as long as the folks in charge remain in their jobs. I need to replace them before next season if I want a fighting chance.

NEW YORK — The Yankees are interested in all of baseball’s remaining free agents, general manager Brian Cashman told the media, after Robinson Cano reportedly agreed to a 10-year, $240-million contract with Seattle on Friday morning.

“All of them, yes,” Cashman reiterated, when asked for clarification.

Players the Yankees are now in on: Everyone. Choo. Beltran. Infante. Tanaka. Drew. You. Me. Everyone.

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughSL) December 6, 2013

“Even the free agents we’re not really interested in, we’re interested in,” Cashman added.

For the first time in free-agency history, the Yankees stood firm, not relenting to Cano’s exorbitant contract demands, even though he was a homegrown star destined for Monument Park.

“Everybody is replaceable,” Cashman said. “With free agents. It’s the Yankee way.”

Cashman has a point: the club’s spent $254 million on free agents Brian McCann, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Hiroki Kuroda in the last two weeks. Second baseman Omar Infante will likely end up a Yankee, whether he wants to or not.

“We’ve already signed Infante,” Cashman said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“If you’re a free agent, we want to talk,” Cashman concluded. “More importantly, we’d like to sign you.”

While the author has attempted to argue — with his family, with his wife, with his own internal self — while’s he’s attempted to argue, on a number of occasions, that baseball isn’t merely a diversion from reality, that’s not to say that it (i.e. that baseball) isn’t sometimes a diversion from reality.

During the regular season of actual Major League Baseball, one feels particularly courageous so far as this point is concerned. “Ha!” one says. “I could very easily go without the Pastime. Probably take up cooking, or something not unlike cooking.” During the offseason, however — with its lack of ubiquitous programming options — one begins to realize that the human soul, rather than being strong, is actually weak. Like a person, for example, who’s weak instead of strong.

It’s with a view to addressing the crippling effects of this withdrawal from the Pastime, one assumes, that our kind, if maybe also criminal, friends in Australia appear to have provided something in the way of an antidote — which is to say, actual baseball, available to watch somehow.

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Guys, we did it! We have an episode of Back In the Game that is not actively entirely awful, which is kind of amazing for an episode whose title (Massive Election) is a dick joke. It’s still kind of awful, and it’s in no way even the smallest bit amusing, but I think we can all agree that an episode devoid of our usual fare of fat jokes, and casual racism and sexism masquerading as humor is a genuine step forward for this horrifying television program that has defied God and nature and remained on the air for almost three months already.

This week’s episode is about leadership, as Terry schemes to usurp Dick the misogynist league president as league president while Danny refuses to be the captain of the Angles. The Angles, you see, are having trouble getting everyone to practice, since their field times conflict with all the players’ other extra-curricular activities (including, as we learn in the episode’s one funny line, Dong’s job). Cannon thinks the kids need a leader to rally them and get them to attend, while Terry goes chasing after Dick’s golf cart to get their practice time changed.

Well, Dick can’t change the practice times without upsetting the other two teams on the schedule, and Terry’s follow-up attempt to get the schedule changed at the league meeting is also a bust until Dick tells her, if she were president, she could change the times herself. So Terry begins campaigning, quickly lining up four of the five votes she’ll need to take over the presidency by promising to end Dick’s various abuses of power. The final vote comes down to Stan, who abandons his high school buddy for use of the league’s golf cart, despite knowing that the league presidency is the only good thing Dick really has going in his life.

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A recent Online Internet Chatroom conversation with @theiri, lantern-jawed MLB editor at CBSSports.com and board-vetted Man of Action, leads me to make the following True Internet Confession: Sometimes, I conduct fake sports interviews with myself.

Consider this is a consequence of my being a sports enthusiast, scion of the computer age and consumer of leisured pursuits. All of this is to say, I have, largely since the point of sentience, partaken in sports or sports simulations of some kind. A corollary to all of this has been my only slightly daunted habit of conducting fake sports interviews with myself. Please allow me to explain in further depth.

When I was a lad, I would, say, complete a Pee Wee football game and then later, in sweet solitude, address the probing questions of the imagined media. “I saw an opening, and I went for it,” is probably something I said out loud yet to no one of the corporeal realm.

Some years later, I probably said, “We emphasize ball movement here, and that’s why I passed up the shot.” I was not at any kind of locker with any kind of towel over my head and was not blinking into any kind of glare from the hot lights.

Still later, I probably said to a non-nest of no microphones, “I’m not sure why coach didn’t play me. You should probably ask him.” He didn’t play me because I was not good and toiled for a low-grade football powerhouse, but to the imaginary press corps, the explanation was something darker, something conspiratorial.

Mostly, though, the fake sports interviews I have conducted with myself have been the residue of computer simulations. What good are these labors if I go about them in mute drudgery and do not grant them wings with which to rise above their contrived essences? Call it pretend, but pretending is an act and an act is real. That’s why I shall always make time for the press that isn’t there.

Take the possibly no longer extant Lance Haffner suite of sports games, for instance. What is it about my patient tutelage of Dave Yarema and convention-toppling schemes that allowed me to guide the 1986 Michigan State football team to a most improbable national championship? Let me tell you a bit about that, credentialed media members crowding about me.

As architect of a Diamond Mind colossus, I was asked about my prevailing organizational philosophies. Out loud, I would say, somewhat condescendingly, “Obviously, that was part of the thinking when we made that trade. Those considerations always inform our baseball decisions.”

In the X-Box era, I returned Nebraska football to the glories of yore, while also being a vociferous social critic of the depredations of the NCAA system. How could I continue to make a sheik’s ransom coaching these young men while speaking out against their exploitation? “I’m not at ease with these contradictions,” I would say, disconsolately, “I want you to know that. But we’ve got a football game to win.”

While shooting basketball at my in-laws, I addressed questions about the elite athlete’s mindset when burying a clutch three, which I had just done. “Muscle memory takes over,” I say to the yard, who earnestly wants to know. “You’re a bit of an automaton at that point, at least if you’re properly prepared and moderated in your instincts. If you’re in that space, that swath of the mind, then the on-ball defender has nothing to do with the outcome. I am the author of every shot I take.” What kind of athlete talks with such piercing eloquence, the scribes wonder in chorus.

I conducted this interview over Thanksgiving. Next month, I turn 42.

What I’m saying is that sometimes I conduct fake sports interviews with myself.

As drear-nighted December sets in, that direful monster, with its sleety whistle; as clouds their storms discharge, upon the airy towers; as the nigh thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, and the burn roars frae bank to brae; ’tis now that the feeble baseball writer stalls and stammers, quailing before his mighty task. Luckily, yours truly is no such writer; he, like the thrifty squirrel, has stored away toothsome morsels of blog-fodder for the lean season; and at just this happy moment, he has recalled where one of them is located.

Namely, it is his oft-postponed duty of introducing a new colleague. Readers, you may struggle to recall a time before Zach Reynolds. Like Jim Leyland or venereal disease, he seems to have always shared our world. That is in part because he announced himself in such a meek and self-effacing manner, with such a lack of trumpetry, as is his wont. And it is in part because he has so penetrated you with his intellect, titillated you with his wit, and indeed, blinded you with his science.

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This, as it happens, is apropos of everything.

“Morning, dear.”

“Morning, Paul.”

“What a sunny day. Did you check the mail?”

“I did, honey. Nothing too interesting. Nuclear power bill, new brain chips for the kids, some kind of subscription solicitation from the Chicago No-More-Sun-Times, and, oh, something from the White Sox.”

“The White Sox? What do they want? If they’re asking again about taking over for Robin Ventura, tell them there’s no way I can replace a guy who’s led them to 7 straight Galactic Series victories.”

“No, it looks like a check.”

“A check?”

“Yeah, from that contract back in 2013….”

“Ha, yeah, I remember that….”

“A million dollars!”

“Oh, a million. That’s cute. Want to use it for dinner tonight?”

“Sure– can I take another couple million from your wallet to cover the rest?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

“Ah, inflation.”

“Ah, indeed.”

Reproduced below and definitely not edited is a newspaper clipping from the Palm Beach Post, July 1, 1973. Click to embiggen. Click to discover. Click to be (a/be)mused.

The reader is young and clueless and in need of guidance — not unlike a toddler with a checking account. Peter Gammons, for his part, is like a man that is also a chalice that is presently running over with capital-W Wisdom.

What Peter Gammons says to do, today, is “Triple it, maybe” — advice which the reader will ignore definitely at his or her own terrible, deadly peril.