Please Read This for Me, GM of My Team

A recently re-broadcast episode of This American Life begins with host Ira Glass in conversation with author Neil Chesanow. Chesanow is respsonsible for Please Read This for Me, a self-help book that, as the show’s website explains, “doesn’t just give you general advice. It gives you actual scripts to use in various difficult situations: Pre-written speeches to deliver if you’ve fallen out of love with your boyfriend, say, or if you’ve decided you want to have a baby.”

Chesanow reads a bit from the preface, as follows:

When you have something very important but really tough to tell the man in your life, wouldn’t it be great if you could just reach for a book that starts the conversation for you. Imagine being able to turn to the appropriate page, give an open book to the man you love, and ask, “Please read this for me.”

“What is it?”

“Just read it, okay. Page 73. It’s only a few lines.”

Once the man you love has the book in his hands, a glance will do the job. Each page is an emotional telegram.

It occurs to me that such a book — or, at least, a very thick pamphlet — could be written for baseball fans, so that they might have a civil way of beginning difficult conversations with their respective teams.

Apropos of definitely nothing in particular, I’ve written a sample entry for such a book.

The title of this particular telegram really rolls of the tongue, I think. It goes:

Hey, GM, You Just Traded Away Two Decent and Relatively Cheap Pieces for Basically the Worst Contract in Baseball, And It Confuses and Hurts Me

And it goes like this:

I’ve been a fan of this team since before you were GM, and I’ll likely be one after you’re fired (a contingency whose occurrence you’ve almost certainly hastened), but I feel very much as though you’re explicitly testing my allegiance now by trading away these decent and relatively cheap players for one of the most obviously bad contracts in baseball.

You’ve made some questionable moves before, but have generally demonstrated a keen eye for player development — and perhaps I haven’t always been as devout in my fandom as I could’ve been. I admit that. But I see literally zero logic in this recent move.

Honestly, I sort’ve hope that some kind of police officials find you in Mexico, out of your mind on mescaline and dressed only in the skin of a coyote that you killed recently by aid only of your own barehands. That would at least provide some sort of explanation to your strange behavior.

Excellent image by Brian Donnelly.