For the sake of it

No point in doing something you hate

This wasn’t the first year I’ve ever consistently written about the Rockies, but it is the first year I did it primarily motivated by myself to do so. During the Football Friday days on Purple Row, I obviously was doing it for me first and foremost but I also had an obligation after joining the staff to create. Even if that obligation wasn’t paid (or paid very little), there was an obligation to not let anyone else down by just…no longer posting.

With this newsletter, which I’ve tried to start a few times, I always wanted to make sure I was doing it for myself, growing my writing, getting into the habit. It started with a thought that I would just write an opening day post every year. I would spend the winter researching or thinking about what would work best for the theme of the season, I would write the post, I would share it, and that would be that. But I still wanted to keep writing.

So I did.

But as I look back at the year and review the writing, thinking about what made me happiest to write in a 43 win season, I don’t know that I always captured it. I’m not sure that I always made the choice that was best for me, or if it was for a subconscious pull to try and get Rockies readers to like it.

Many things these days are disappointing me, obviously. A lot of things are moving into place that are, well, not good. One of those things is how we all have been trained to identify as a consumer first. That sounds very “annoying guy in your ethics 201 class” but it’s difficult to deny that it’s true. I’ve written about it before. The fundamental loss of someone’s cultural and political soul to consumerism is never more apparent than how we subconsciously operate with things like this. My thoughts, my writing, my understanding of baseball is just a hobby and a hobby it shall remain. In that regard, I don’t owe it anything. I certainly don’t owe it a subconscious restriction of what I write or write about or how I write. This is all for me, so why not make it for the sake of it?

This is all mostly for me and writing it down will force me to remember that. So if this sounds like a lecture at any point know that I am just lecturing myself. But I think, at my core, I want to believe this is something we should restore amongst ourselves. The core belief that humanity isn’t here to just make money for ourselves by monetizing every little hobby we have is an important one but also that we are not enjoying sports to simply add to our consumerist profile. Sports are, first, foremost, and always, about community. When Central American migrants packed up their homes and moved to Northern Colorado, they used sports to recreate what they had left behind. As we watch our world become isolationist, transactional, and adversarial there are places where we can make the change to something better. If you believe yourself to be a liberal or a socialist, then you believe that community is worth saving. If you believe community is worth saving, then you can’t think of community as transactional at any regard. That applies to yourself too, I think. Why monetize what you like to do at every turn? Why think that the only way to better yourself or your free time is to make money off of it or have an audience for it? Maybe I’ve been reading too much Vonnegut lately, but sports are not here to make everyone money. They are here to make us all share something.

All of this to say, the newsletter may change. I don’t know how it’ll change. I think one thing I liked about it was writing it every week. It made me pay attention to things. It grounded me, despite all the chaos in my life with two small children, to baseball. To something. Even if it was just to look at Connor Van Scoyoc’s last 28 days of pitching.

Ultimately, art is for the sake of it. If it’s true to yourself, then it can’t be dismissed. I hesitate to call baseball writing art sometimes but if that isn’t what is? I want this thing to be truer to myself. I want this thing to feel like something. Not something I worry about the audience or the reception. But just something.

This winter you may not see many newsletters. But come the other side of February, through hell or high water, it’ll be back in the inbox.

And maybe it’ll be something, I don’t know. But it’ll be for the sake of it.

-Connor