Another damn rabbit hole

Like any good addiction, it started with something like “Pssst… Hey kid, try some-a this. It’s good. It’s on me.”

Or in this case my buddy Dave, dammit Dave, whispered, “Yeah man, it’s Lookout Landing. I get all my Mariners news there. It’s free… You should try it.”

“That’s right… good, good… use the force…”
– Darth Vogelbach

So I snorted a hefty dose of Lookout Landing, and sure enough. Down the rabbit hole I went, hooked for good.

Good thing is, I don’t wanna go to rehab, I’m happy right here, with the hookah-smokin’ caterpillar, can ya dig?

Dammit. I’m hooked.

I’m still grinning like the Cheshire Cat at this gem on the happy topic of Mariners starting pitching from Lookout Landing’s Kate Preusser on March 22:

“To not address a part of the team that everyone across baseball… saw as a glaring weakness is mind-bogglingly gutsy (many would say is mind-bogglingly foolish). It is a radical show of faith in the players they have already brought here, the coaching staff they’ve brought in, and the development they have in place. It is also, undeniably, a little cheap. The refusal to spend the merest amount of physical coin while shoveling a fortune of intangibles at the team could result in the high-payroll, small-window, thin-farmed Mariners being universally sneered at by the baseball community (more so than they are currently being sneered at, I mean). It could also end up with Seattle being praised as the hotbed of one of the game’s next great innovations. Unfortunately, if the team does fail, the culprit will be all too obvious.”

Psst, hey Jerry. She’s talking about you. Maybe the Mad Hatter, but I think it’s you.

Swear to God, if you need deep analysis of every player on every play of every game, with new stat categories like rWAR, dWAR, oWAR, oRAR, OPS+ and RF/9 flying at you like golfball-sized hail on a Texas afternoon, well then Lookout Landing is kinda cool. Especially in the comments section, but who reads the comments section anyway? [raises hand meekly] Then you get tired of it, like when you go look at your pockmarked car after the hailstorm and the windshield’s shattered. Your brain is dented, you need a rest, and you go, man, how about a little levity.

And Lookout Landing is listening. They go way beyond the wonky, nerdy space-geek SABRmetric stuff, even though that stuff is cool in a wonky, nerdy way.

Like Playin’ in the Dirt (though we’re not worthy of mention in the same breath), Lookout Landing gets enchanted by a player like Daniel Vogelbach and they ride that phenomenon with gusto.

Or this bag of sweets from yesterday, a reader poll on 2018 baseball premonitions, including “What’s your bold Mariners-specific prediction?” (hint: Playin’ In The Dirt’s had something to do with Vogelbach and Kawasaki.)

Prediction? Say what? There’s your MVP right there.

There may be someone around the next corner screaming “Off with Jerry’s head,” or Servais’s, or Zunino’s or God forbid, Vogelbach’s. But for now it’s go-time, Opening Night just two days away.

It’s my un-birhtday. I’ll just watch from down here at the tea party.