Poring Over GIF of Prospect “Pretty Creepy,” Admits Blogger

Footage like this of Peterson tripling off tough lefty Javier Lopez is part of the problem.

JUPITER, FL – An internet baseball weblogger who is definitely not the same one responsible for this post acknowledged early on Tuesday morning that first making and then intently watching GIFs of a San Diego shortstop prospect — regardless of actual motive — was probably inappropriate in some way.

“Due to some research I’ve been doing lately, I got real excited about Jace Peterson,” the blogger told NotGraphs on the condition of anonymity. “Anyway, I happened to notice that there were recent some clips of him at MLB.com from spring training. So, yeah, I captured the footage, made some light edits, and exported them as animated GIFs.

“After what seemed like only a few minutes — but what must have been more than that — I realized that it’s 1:30am, everyone’s gone to bed, and I’m drinking deeply of three-second looped videos of an athlete more than 10 years my junior.

“It raised some questions I don’t particularly care to answer.”

Asked what his original intentions were in producing the GIFs, the blogger confessed he wasn’t sure. “Honestly, that’s part of the problem. I could say they’re for scouting purposes — but that’s only, like, 10% true. No one’s gonna believe that, really.”

As of press time, the blogger in question was using all of his willpower expressly not to meditate at length upon footage from a couple days ago of Marcus Semien making a really nice defensive play.