A Brief Celebratory Note

The attentive reader will recall how, recently in these electronic pages, I submitted a post regarding the very serious issue of Sam Fuld’s moral fiber.

Because I had no real opinion on Fuld’s contretemps with Alcides Escobar, I elected instead to leave the question of Fuld’s guilt/innocence to the readership via a slightly irreverant poll. While the results of the poll aren’t particularly important (although I’ll note that close to 50% of respondents believe that polls are a cheap way to drive traffic), what does deserve remarking, I think, is how it (i.e. the poll) garnered answers from 16 different countries — including, for example, Slovakia.*

This, if you’ll permit me a rare (and, I think, warranted) foray into the explicit, warms my fucking heart.

For obvious reasons, we at Team FanGraphs have been compelled of late to Dick Allen our lives a little bit, and that’s something that’s impossible for the present author to do without getting, like, 95% to 98% giddy as regards the Love Letter to the Marvelous that is NotGraphs.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, we’ve been permitted here to constantly publish a literature that, were it translated into French, would be indistinct from the most important works of the Surrealist movement — and which is also, turns out, about baseball.

I’d be lying directly to your funny, bespectacled face were I not to admit that part of the joy I feel comes from the fact that I’m compensated financially to contribute here — and that the early success of NotGraphs means that said compensation is likely to continue for the immediate future. This helps me to answer — and to address the attendant anxieties of — normal human questions like “How will I pay the rent?” and “Is it possible to eat food today?”

However, it’d be equally disingenuous not to acknowledge the pleasure I derive from working alongside people whose work both (a) thoroughly amuses me as a reader and (b) intimidates me as a writer, such that I feel constantly the need to improve my game. (This is even true of Navin Vaswani, who, despite having been fired, like, five or six times, refuses to leave. It’s impossible not to admire his spirit.)

Beyond that, there’s the question of this beautiful readership out there, doing any number of things that I have no idea how to do, yet condescending to participate in our totally useless dispatches from the front lines of enthusiasm. Because really, for all the things one can worry about in the world, it’s hard to approach anything like real despair knowing that literally thousands of people care about one portly umpire’s fake whereabouts or the state of spectacles, past and present, in our fair game.

Thank you.

*It’s occurred to the author that one explanation for the poll results might have something to do with proxy IP addresses. The author has opted, instead, just to have his heart warmed.