Talkin' Presents: Football Friday, A Baseball Newsletter

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Welcome to Football Friday, a Baseball Newsletter. Your #1 alliterative titled source for all baseball news, insights, analysis, and takes. Each Friday, the newsletter will be delivered to your inbox with all the pomp and circumstance of a 35% off Jeans Sale at Old Navy. Get it while it’s hot folks!

For those that don’t remember or maybe weren’t around, this is a 2.0 version of Football Friday. A reboot, if you will. The first iteration lasted three seasons on purplerow.com and dove into the quirks and stories of following the Rockies during their last successful contention window. Some of my favorites include an art critique I did of Brandon Barnes’s Arenado paintings, a fake oral history post on a 20 year losing streak, how to make Spring Training safer, and how to win the World Series if all other teams were turned into infants. The column was really a way to take a breath and laugh at the face of this very stupid sport dominates so much of our lives and determines many of our moods.

Now, here we are in 2021. A very different world than the first iteration of Football Friday. For instance, Donald Trump is no longer president. How about that? Another difference? I now know a lot about trial efficacy and herd immunity. Such great knowledge to have.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the only stuff Talkin’ will produce. There will still be times I need to be Talkin’ about things that aren’t baseball. Those will come separately. Keep it locked in.

Well, without further ado, let’s get to Talkin’ Football Friday (a baseball newsletter).

For more reasons than one, 2018 feels like a lifetime ago.

The world has changed, permanently, over the past three years. This isn’t the first or the last thing you’ll read about that so I won’t droll on about how it’s unprecedented or list the things that have changed. You know what’s changed, I know what’s changed. Things have changed, is the point. Rapidly, insanely, completely. We are living in a completely different world than 2018.

This stretches to baseball, to the Rockies.

It’s hard to remember now but 2018 was still the most fun I think anyone can have as a baseball fan. The Rockies were good, yes, but they were fun on top of it. Gerardo Parra would drive into the clubhouse on a scooter, beeping at news media, and pranking German Marquez. Carlos Gonzalez would constantly post a photo of him smiling or laughing with his teammates, the team would seemingly pull wins out of nowhere against the former villains of their past. In 2018, the Rockies were one exact win away from the team’s first division title. For being less than three calendar years, that type of Rockies team feels like a distant memory, a time capsule of highlights from a past life. The players that built them, all but gone, that culture of fun positivity and scooters, replaced by leaked reports of locker room arguments and mean owner emails. For the 2021 Rockies and Rockies fans, the 2018 Rockies are less a fun memory and more a cruel joke now. A reminder that you can have good things too, but right now you’re not going to and you should’ve done a better job appreciating them.

Much of the debate around the 2018 Rockies surrounded their refusal to acquire a single impact bat at the deadline in 2018 that could’ve won them one more game, could’ve won them the NL West. When the standings get that tight at the end, you start to question every little thing that happened in the games they lost. Could a catcher that could hit have won them a random April game in San Diego? Could an actual first baseman have propelled them to a title? Who knows, it’s like asking if high school you had actually had self confidence your life would be different now. You’ll drive yourself crazy. Maybe that’s why the Rockies shifted the debate away from the “why didn’t they just do one extra thing?” and into “holy shit have they really let half that team leave?” We won’t break our brains trying to find a game they lost by one run that would prove our point because now all those players play on teams that will beat them by 5 runs. Instead of angry we can just be depressed.

The short period of time (less than 30 months) since this team look the field for the last time and the amount of things that have happened since makes this feel like a fever dream. Things we believed then we would be laughed out of the building for believing now (for example that America has worthy infrastructure, a functioning government, and noble civil servants). This includes any faith or trust that Jeff Bridich knows what he’s doing or has a plan. In October 2018, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think Jeff was at least doing an ok job. Maybe his free agent purchases hadn’t panned out perfectly but he’d traded for German Marquez and knew it was Trevor Story’s time to shine! Like him or not, the team had won 170 games the past two seasons and was built around some very, very good players.

Now, try to tell anyone about Jeff once being regarded as “not an incompetent asshole!” and it’s like telling them there was a time when Netflix made quality content (blammo! bing! bam! got ‘em!). Bridich has since staked his reputation on being outwardly antagonistic to fan’s feelings and reporter’s thoughts while also blowing up relationships with just about every good player that played on that team. From letting DJ LeMahieu walk for pennies on the dollar to now trading the team’s superstar third baseman, Bridich has decided the best way to handle the post-2018 honeymoon is to anger literally everyone he can, and who can blame him? It’s not like the world has a recent reputation of rewarding the nice people with care in their hearts.

When the Rockies were swept on a cold October evening by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2018, we had the positive Polly’s of the world asking you to remember that they still could do it next year. Pleasantly reminding you that they still had some good players on a good team! We’re 28 months later (whoa like the movies) and it’s impossible to see how we could’ve been so blinded by that. It feels stupid to remind yourself you felt that way about the team, though it isn’t your fault. It’s the same optimism we’ve all felt at different times before the cruel reality that we have no power and decisions are made by dickheads sets in. The Rockies WERE in a good spot in 2018, they WERE a good team with good players.

Now, they are a bad team. Beyond that, they are not fun. There are no scooters, there are no smiling CarGos.

If 2020 felt like baseball in purgatory (fake, short, guilt ridden), 2021 feels like baseball in hell. It’s here, but it won’t be fun, and you probably won’t be able to enjoy it. Even hoping the Rockies will be good feels wrong, after all if they’re good it just proves the absolute worst possible theory: Jeff Bridich is justified to do what he does. Each win proves the worst people right, each loss is depressing to watch. This is Hell for a baseball fan. And such a short fall to get there.

Three years feels like one hundred and it’s not just because of the events we’ve lived. The Rockies have taken a monumental opportunity, a Scrooge McDuck like pile of good will, and an exciting talent base and turned it into a winter of discontent. A Greek tragedy of a baseball team, we’ve watched as an audience in awe as they’ve torn down everything we thought it could be. Let’s hope they never invent time travel because lord knows what I’d tell my 2018 self.

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