What was Steely Dan Rather? A journey through minor league baseball memories

The last time I wrote here on Medium I had the best of intentions to write once a week on any topic that came to mind. I set out a content schedule, lined up topics of interest…and proceeded to do fuckall in the writing department. I re-posted something I wrote for another job, and that was it. No new output.

I wish I could blame the fact that the world went to hell in a handbasket between Feb. 7(the date of my last entry here) and now, but that’s barely impacted my ability or desire to write. In fact, being locked up in my apartment for weeks on end should be the perfect time to write. But no, because that’s not what happened.

What did happen is I left a job I hated, worked at a temp job that I thought I wanted and then realized was way below my station (but allowed me to gain some valuable experience working in the public sector), accepted an offer to join a series-A cybersecurity startup, all in the course of about six weeks. Six weeks out from my first day at the new job, I’m back again with the promise of new content.

Well, new-old content.

Over the course of a very long and very enlightening conversation with a colleague at my new role, I decided to resurrect some of my old baseball journalism writing here on my Medium space. I’ve been telling stories about why I wrote about (and still talk about) sports in the way I do for years; I’m always looking for the story behind the story. Athletes have a lot more to share with the world than just their performance on the field or their stat lines. Whenever I put words on a page in sportswriting, I tried to bring something compelling and relatable about each person who would talk to me.

The problem started a few years ago, when I couldn’t find the pieces that a certain sports media company sanctioned by a professional league (not ESPN, although I did write microcontent for them for a hot ass minute) originally published under my byline. It didn’t matter that I had interviewed Ken Griffey, Sr., you see. Because I didn’t have an active link to the story. It’s the journalism version of “pics or it didn’t happen.”

Even when I could find the link to one of my stories on Google, every link redirected to the current sports media company homepage. Every one of my bylines, 4 seasons worth of minor league baseball stories with 3 years of feature interviews with some of the league’s up and coming stars, were lost to time.

Except for the drafts I’d saved on my computer, which recently migrated over to Google Drive from my old dying MacBook. I never get rid of anything I write. Even the terrible fanfic that will never see the light of day. It still lives on in my personal cloud drive. Because of my tendency as a digital hoarder, my bylines survived the fate of many of my other professionally published works. I’ve lost stories about entrepreneurs who started and grew businesses against all odds. I’ve never been able to recoup the in-depth fantasy baseball advice I wrote on a Canada-based weekly website where I was the only non-man writer and only American. But these, the things I’ve always considered the crown jewel of my writing, are getting a second life.

So, if the certain sports media company sanctioned by a professional league won’t commit to hosting the content that they technically owned (and maybe still do, I’m not sure because I didn’t read my contracts all that closely), I consider it fair game for me to publish here. And if the certain sports media company sanctioned by a professional league really wants to bunch its collective underwear about it, I’ve decided to run these stories on my Medium space in their original format, without the certain sports media company sanctioned by a professional league’s edits, likely with additional quotes that I had to cut to meet their stingy word counts. If I kept the transcripts (which I likely have).

I’ll be posting the first of these stories starting this week, and once every week until I run out of stories. No particular order, no reason that one gets prioritized over another, and I may not publish them all. Some aren’t all that interesting. But I’d venture a guess that you’re interested in reading about the guy who played minor league baseball while pursuing a masters degree at Stanford and designing low-cost prosthetics for kids in Africa.

Why post 10 year old stories about a bunch of minor leaguers who didn’t make it (and some high profile guys who did, but you actually do want to read that)? Because I can. Because I’m proud of my work in sports journalism, and because these stories deserve to be told all over again. Because the game I used to love with everything I had and everything I was is in shambles, and the minor leagues are at the most risk. These stories, players, and people matter.

And because fuck Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball Advanced Media LLP.

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