Best of BP: And Oh, My Dreams, It’s Never Quite as it Seems

This article was originally published April 6, 2023.

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“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.” 

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

After a 10-hour drive back from Phoenix post-WBC, I quickly passed out in my bed back home. Then I was at my favorite Hartford cocktail bar with a good friend and decades long drinking buddy. They had a pop-up going on one half of the bar, a Thai speakeasy in residence. One of their drinks came with what I believe was a free Japanese music ‘zine. For reasons that eluded awake Jeffrey we instead opted for their popular brunch tipple, some sort of gin and vodka split base pomegranate screwdriver thing.

It had been dusk when we had started walking from some indeterminate place that felt like an industrial road off I-91 a few miles north of downtown. The route was all wrong, jump cut in places. I found myself in the same generic neighborhood that pops up in my dreams now and again. The bar didn’t look right, only an outline of what I remember. It was definitely more well-lit than normal.

The interpretation of dreams has been an obsession of humanity for its entire recorded history. Messages from the divine, messages from our subconscious. Religion, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, all have tried to piece together meanings behind half-formed recollections from a third of our lifetimes. 

Honestly, I probably just needed a drink.

Friday

I’m harried as usual. I’ve had months to prepare for the first game of the season, which is not in fact the first game of the season as I’ve been back from the WBC for a couple weeks now. I caught an Arizona State game and a bit of Giants minor league camp too. I did remember to order a new Accusplit to replace the one I lost sometime in February. Naturally, I rediscovered the first one in the back of my office chair a week ago, slightly dustier and reading 99:59:99. It’s easier to reset for a new season than my brain. Just hold down the button for two seconds. 

I haven’t made up sheets. I’m running late. The car needs gas. There’s an accident slowing down traffic on I-15 south of the city by the IKEA. I’m down to Orem a half hour later than I told the SID I’d be there, but in plenty of time for first pitch. Even after 12 years, I’m still always a bit anxious about picking up a media credential, although my anxiety dreams nowadays find me more often back in high school, a few credits short of graduating with my homework forgotten. I don’t really dream about baseball.

Now to be fair my credentials do get misplaced or forgotten about 10% of the time or so. It’s never an issue. Everyone wants to be helpful. No one really thinks you are bullshitting your way into a Utah Valley game on a cold Friday night anyway. This time it’s waiting for me at Will Call. It’s the only one. No one is pursuing this game through legitimate channels either. 

I’m here to see Jacob Wilson who is a likely first-round pick in town with Grand Canyon. If you need to see Jacob Wilson for work, you probably live somewhere in the Phoenix metroplex and have checked that one off in short sleeves and a bucket hat weeks ago. Anyone who has met me would smirk if I claimed to be from hearty New England stock, but I’ve lived through many Connecticut winters. And to paraphrase not-actually-Mark-Twain, the coldest winter I ever spent was opening weekend for the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. 

You can quibble about the evaluative usefulness of watching baseball in hoodie-under-the-uniform weather. And the Salt Lake Bees opener earlier that day was postponed due the kind of lake effect snow showers we’ve gotten three times a week or so for the last four months. It’s a reliable 1-3 inches that doesn’t really stick to the roads, but it skirted north of the Utah Valley field, and anyway not all baseball is played under a sunny 70 degrees in the desert. 

Wilson is slick at shortstop, but his sidearm throws are merely solid-average, although he has an uncanny ability to give you a 55 shoulder high no matter the angle or how much he’s on the move. At the plate it’s more complicated. He starts from an upright, wide open stance that he dips and twists and then uncoils out of. He’ll make contact, but I’m not sure how much damage he’ll do when he does, especially once he has a wood bat in his hands. 

Wilson isn’t the only nepo baby on the GCU roster. Homer Bush, Jr. is their leadoff hitter and center fielder—a solid enough draft prospect himself. He shows off some nice bat speed when he can get extended, the ability to pop it over the second baseman’s head if you get in his kitchen, and plenty of range going gap-to-gap, further endorsed by a 70-grade run time. There’s stuff to dream on.

Saturday

The epigraph that opens this piece is one I’ve quoted at BP before. I got a nagging suspicion after I settled on it, so I searched the site. It—and I did not plan this—can be found at the bottom of a Jo Adell blurb, one of the more effusive ones I’ve written for the site, but perhaps not the most effusive things written here about Jo Adell. 

But it was penned over four years ago. Since then, I’ve learned to triple check minor league zone-contact numbers before putting a prospect that high on our Top 101. Since then, I’ve had access to minor league zone-contact numbers. And since then, Adell has had an injury-plagued minor-league season, and fits and starts in three major-league ones. All told, he’s hit .215/.260/.356 with a near-35% strikeout rate for the Angels, underpinned by a 70% z-contact rate. That is how he has found himself back in Salt Lake as a 23-year-old. 

This felt inevitable after the Hunter Renfroe trade, so I fully expected to wring 1,500 words out of Adell playing in a ballpark that had a 20-foot banner of him out front, next to the 20-foot banner of Mike Trout. But as I hustled into Smith’s Ballpark just as the anthem started, I noticed both banners were gone. Probably for the best.

I had reason to be a bit harried again today. The start time for Salt Lake/Sacramento got moved up to noon to accommodate the doubleheader, and that bumps up tight with the kid’s Saturday swim class. Still in my seat for Chase Silseth’s first warm up pitch. Silseth looked every bit the part of an average-or-better starter, sitting 95, getting whiffs with a sharp slider, and leaning heavily on his above-average split. Casey Schmitt flashed some leather on the other side. Heliot Ramos appears to have stopped trying to pull everything and will actually go with a pitch. It’s very early April, hope springs eternal. None of these are reports yet.

Jo Adell is no longer a prospect, but he gets a heading in my little notebook. After a four-pitch walk to open his 2023 season, he swings through 95 right at the top of the zone. Four years ago, the best I could have hoped for was a moment of presque vu, but now it just stings a little. A slider off the end of the bat and he flies to left. Even that is louder than you’d expect. He collects hits all weekend. But I saw Adell swing through other fastballs in the zone Saturday, and you can’t actually live in dreams forever.

Then again, the universe has other means to try and tell you something. Tuesday morning I deleted and redownloaded the MiLB app off my phone to try and get rid of the Yard Goats thumbnail. Still trying to fake it until I make it as an SLC Punk. I didn’t get a Bees one, just a generic minors logo, fair enough. I must not have unsubscribed from the team notifications, because as I finished up this section of my column, my phone vibrated.

A different coda this time:

“The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.”

Waking Life

Sunday

Back to Orem. My strategy was simple: get two games on each series, pick up the other one on video. Well, if I’d picked up the UVU/GCU video Saturday night, I would have known that Jacob Wilson got in the hand and was removed from the game. Instead, it’s a surprise to me when he’s not announced in the starting lineup on Sunday afternoon. Okay, let’s grind a Homer Bush, Jr. live look. The gaps start to show. You can get in his kitchen with better heat, and he doesn’t consistently get the ball off the ground. He runs a mile in center but clangs the catch. He makes a bad read on a ball directly over his head. In between, the mind wanders. I’m on Twitter more than I should be, I’m checking in on the major league slate. The Utah Valley starter didn’t record an out. A sidearmer throwing in the 80s replaces him. It’s one of those games. 

Eventually I notice that the sidearmer has held the line. Utah Valley, trying to salvage the last game of the series have clawed their way back in it. So many baseball stories pass right under my nose while I’m contemplating Homer Bush, Jr.’s center field projection. I run the gun and he’s still hitting 88. Of course I start to pay attention just as he starts to tire. He hasn’t been stretched to a fifth inning all season. He leaves a lot of traffic on for the next guy. His name is Nick Sims, something I don’t register at the time despite a very large scoreboard at the ballpark and have to look up later. 

The next guy gets us three pitchers into a Sunday afternoon WAC game. But I know when it looks firm. And it looks firm. Let’s run the gun. 95. Okay then. It’s heavy, a couple ground balls. The traffic scores but the damage is minimized as he… flashes a decent change to get a K? Really now?

Some research on the spot. Casey Anderson. He pitched for Eastern Arizona, Utah, Southern Idaho, before landing in Orem. He’s technically a junior. One thing you learn quickly out here is that the college kids can be 25. Baseball Reference says born in 2000. The slider flashes in the second and the third innings as he settles in at 93-94. No one is elevating it. 33rd-round reliever pick? See what he can do in the Appy? Oh, that all doesn’t exist anymore. Too bad. Nice outing though. If it was up to me your dreams would live on a bit deeper into the summer, but I’m also gone by the time you’re coming out for a fourth.   

The idea of dreams as premonition or prediction was common in Western antiquity. Aristotle wrote an entire text about it, but concluded almost all instances were “things of chance.”  But what is my job but to be the Pythia for prospect hounds. I can even be suitably obtuse about it. I’m very good at that. So while I don’t dream about baseball, all my baseball exists in dreams. 

Welcome to our 2023 prospect coverage. The view (from behind the backstop) never changes.