The Long Winter

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. -Rogers Hornsby

I noted this morning that although the Twitter had been up and active for the season, my last post on this page was a year ago. 2017 was the third year that we've - actually,  I've (we'll get to that in a few minutes) been running Scorekeepers Union, and it was the trickiest one yet. First-time parenting will do that, as any of you who have been through it know.

"I help! I is blogger. I make no money, still live with parents."

My little guy arrived shortly after Opening Day. He is just awesome. We took him to his first two games this year; his very first was an afternooner at Nats Park when he was exactly three months old. 

Kiddo, at three months. Our hairlines have been moving steadily in opposite directions.

​Somehow, he slept soundly through this:

That would be five home runs in six at-bats. The dive horn was blaring, Chuck Brown was blasting, the fans were erupting, and the baby never even made a peep. Seven months later, it's a minor miracle if he sleeps until 7 AM.

As a result, I don’t think 2017 would have been an easy year for side projects under the best of circumstances; prying my face off the desk long enough to form a sentence was a constant battle, and that was just at my full-time job. And then they get mobile! Of the time I put aside to write this post, at least 90% of it was occupied away from the keyboard, attempting to stop my son from inverting all the furniture. If I could just get him to take a course in CSS...

It wasn't just the kidlet, though. Truth is, throughout the year I found myself wanting to log onto Twitter less and less for a variety of reasons, including less time staring down at my phone (which is more important when you've helped birth a small tornado who even at this moment is attempting to crawl towards the emergency door and out onto an airport runway). There are things I really love about Twitter but there are more I don't, and this was the year of Peak Social Media Hell, an Internet-borne toxic event. This past December I experimented with a "no bummers" policy, where the news of  the year had worn me down to the point where I was grinding my teeth every time I heard or read something new. Part of that policy was getting almost completely off of social media for the month. You can't bubble yourself forever, of course - nor should you - but getting out of the echo chamber for a bit comes highly recommended. I found I was happier, healthier, less likely to throw a phone through a laptop screen. God knows as scorekeepers we already spend a lot of time looking down when there's other stuff going on.

I mean, if you can’t get excited about this guy, there’s something wrong with you. Though I DO worry who will keep the Nippon ham populations in check with one less powerful Fighter. I worry more that I’m now making the same terrible dad jokes MY father did when I started listening to Dave Grohl.

I think part of the answer, beyond my culling of Twitter down to the minimum I need to stay active with the site and discover new posters, will be branching out into other places for the community. That probably means more on the blog, more on the Facebook group (which allows for slightly better moderation) and the Instagram feed (which allows a focus on just the pictures and cards).

But I think the main answer is the real reason I've shifted the pronouns in this post away from "we," which I've used pretty consistently since the founding of the site, and not just as an homage to one of my favorite bloggers.

This season, I really want to bring more people into the fold in active roles growing the site, the various feeds and projects, and the community. Even though it's been this way for three years, I never really envisioned this as a one-man operation - I just found it's easier to have one voice early on to establish a tone (and I will quickly admit that like most attorneys, I have a control-freak-streak). A bigger part of the reason I've used “we” was because I really do believe in the Union as a community of like-minded folks. Not only don't I want to burn out on this, I want more, new, diverse voices as part of this operation as well. Scorekeeping is for everybody, and that means we need more opinions on here that aren't just one random guy in DC.

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This has been an overly long way of saying: I'm back for the summer, and so is the Scorekeepers Union. And having said that in too many words, I'll close with some questions: 

• What do YOU want out of this site, the feeds, the Union?
• WHERE do you want to engage? Is Twitter still best? This page? The Facebook page? Instagram? Should we develop a dating app? (I smell Shark Tank money.)
• Do YOU want to get more directly involved? If so, how?

I'm always reachable via the comments section below, via the email address (scorekeepers643@gmail.com), or on Twitter (@scorekeepers643). I'd love to hear from all of  you, because you've been the best, most rewarding part of this for me.

More exciting stuff to come. Play ball, y'all.

​---Matt