Howdy Deckies!

TL;DR Let’s have some baseball adjacent fun. Trident Deck will be running two fantasy baseball leagues (one traditional, one WeirdAss) for you, the Deckies, the Deckie-curious, and any merry pranksters you may know. Having made the term “deckie” (Tridentor? Deckhand? Idk we’ll make it up as we go) up seconds ago and seeing it on a screen is strange. Anywho, please CTRL+F on a personal computer, COMMAND+F on Macintosh, SIGN UP DETAILS to skip to the essentials. 1-3 high-velo finger-wooshies on your mobile device should also do the trick.

Looking forward to as a 25-week slogventure!

Mentally, at least for me, participating in the larger discourse this last year feels like redlining a sports car stuck in cement. Though, in a way, this is essentially Being Overly Online distilled to its base, this year has given the theoretical sportscar an infinite supply of gasoline and, in a macabre patch, r&g mechanics that will allow it to crash into a wall at any time. Though this is grossly oversimplifying, America by in large realized that the house in which we live, though equipped with granite countertops and a tasteful backsplash, contained multiple rooms designated for the out of sight out of mind storage of soiled diapers. This was the year where we finally woke up and smelled the sludge, and we rightfully got ticked. Angry people get stuff done, but folks, I am here to say, it’s an underrated skill to keep it between the mustard and the mayonnaise while being ticked off, and I’m going to make a bet you’ve felt more on edge than you’ve been in quite some time.

Roughly 3 weeks ago, or 6940 years in World Wide Web, Kevin Mather’d. I’m not going to get into the unique abhorrence and deeper meaning of a generationally stupid event as, quite frankly, I was pleased as punch at the inspiring and scathing work produced by Greater Marinerzonia. Petty grudges over statistical projections and athletic aesthetics were pushed aside to unite against a foe of the managerial class. Though I’ll never be able to prove this, from having lived through the “The New Moneyball Is Making Relievers Unpaid Interns” period in baseball discourse combined with the “edgy for the sake of being edgy” broader internet of let’s call it 2004-2014, I highly doubt this pushback against both labor suppression and cultural insensitivity would’ve been as targeted, effective, and ultimately actionable in any other period of recent history.

My personal takeaway of RotaryGate was it was something of Patterson-Gimlin video for folks who have both interacted closely with Baseball Dudes and the (gah, gonna break the classglass) PMC. We’d seen this before; we’ve heard this before (sidebar: go and pick up Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere by Lucas Mann. Nearing a decade old, have fun remembering some Mariner Guys Of Yore and also sadly, a fantastic guide to the language used by those in the baseball machine), and now we saw it in 8k, the casual cruelty of which (mostly) you and I are spoken of by our superiors. After things had calmed down, we saw yet again another person in a position of power (far greater than that of our fair Mather), know the camera was rolling, be of sound mind and body, and ultimately still pulling the “cackling while showing my ass” lever. Positively, I’d like to think that when Krysten Sinema got a lifetime achievement award for casual, unforced contempt of, you know, most folks, was combined with the constant state of mental rugburn that is life in early 2021, the best kind of idea, the cockamamie varietal, was hatched.

On second thought, let’s not give the K&K CringyFactory all the credit. Maybe it’s the mental exhaustion of **gestures broadly** parenting in a pandemic, perhaps it’s the uptick in children’s books consumed, and heck, it might just be the fantastic weather we’re having, but here’s the rub. The electrons between my ears started doing the polka, and this ensued…

…

“What’s the best way to combat this (sadly) socially acceptable (and in managerial circles, sometimes encouraged) auto-pilot contempt? “

…

Simple It’s fostering the natural opposite, intentional comradery & kindness.

And for me, one way I can do that may be being a tour guide to fake baseball on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Mariners¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Blog.

Group chats, mainly revolving around one of the very few subjects I know anything about (greater sportslandia), have given me the juice to keep going and, hey, pass the time during the past heckyear. There exists a darker timeline where the support structure around me was not nearly as strong, and I both shudder to think about this hypothetical ickiness and tip my cap to those of you who are making chicken salad out of the chicken gizzards. When you want to set fantasy sports on fire and get a caloric reading of them, that’s all they really are, a group chat loosely based around sporting events. Though it’s another topic for another day, the worst thing that fantasy sports industrial complex ever did was market itself as a sexy and conquest-based income stream instead of the silly little seasonal marathon meant to keep distributed friendships together that it is. 

If all goes right, that’s what the Trident Deck Fantasy? Baseball? Experience! will be. We’re lookin to get a real yeasty culture of of positive, loosely baseball adjacent vibes first and some friendly competition second. We here at Trident Deck are all about normalizing and promoting “Doing Things That Are Fun With Your Freetime>All” and have zero cares about your experience level or performance as long as you’re having a grand ol’ time and getting some social and edutainment bennys. Though more and more people are saying “Trident Deck why must you be such a KING of STING?!” (more and more folks, more and more) the sting is always directred upward, and the gentle sidweays ribbing is encouraged. We’re here to create a community, never punch down, and we’ll leave the crowning of The Monarch of Fantasy Mountain to someone else. 

There will be zero monetary gain or loss for performance in these contests, and let’s call the prize “IDK, a t-shirt or something.” To make it both EZ and PZ for all, we’re doing points scoring with weekly lineups and a cap at 27 adds. The goal here is to max the fun & interactions, min the effort, try your best, and make a bud or 12.

In true Trident Deck MarinerGoofBlog fashion, along with our traditional offering, we will be running a Baseball Champions League (aka The WeirdAss Option). Essentially it’s going to be backward baseball, where you’re scoring points for goofs, gaffes, boners, and general TOOTBLANity. If your first thought is, “Woah, this paradigm-shifting format sounds fun, but golly-gee, I don’t see any roadmaps or cheatsheets, and I like most people, let a sense of suspicion and hate creep in when this dissonance enters the equation!” I’d say, “Woah, that’s way too much deeply rooted emotion for me! I’m simply a Local DumDum!” and offer you the assurance that sometime within the next 0-4 years, we’ll write a cheat sheet for you, and let’s take some deep breaths and revel in the moments of goof that make baseball baseball.

If you’ve made it to this point, congrats, and we’re almost done with the word salad appetizer, and the sign-up steak is being prepared. But know this, the suggested donation to this league is an act of intentional kindness and/or comradery. You don’t need to go out and drop your hard-earned clams on a gift to a charity (though that’s cool too!); just pick something that you’re gonna do that you know is gonna fight that casual cruelty that’s been allowed to germinate for too long. It could be a one-time event, forming an intentionally positive habit, or heck, just being kinder to yourself. In short, deliberately attempting to put out the energy you want to see in the world is all we’re asking.

SIGN UP DETAILS

Alright! You made it! Please email the following to shanehall@tridentdeck.com

• Preference of Trident Deck Fantasy?Baseball? League (Standard), Baseball Champions (WeirdAss), or both. No worries, as there’s going to be enough space for everyone.
• How experienced you are with fantasy baseball on a scale of 1-5 (anticipating we’ll get roughly 7-14 folks interested, but if this blows up and we need multiple leagues, I want to keep things as even as possible)
• To combat spam, please copy-paste the following credo into your email.

Fantasy Baseball

Is a game to be played with your buds

And games played with your buds are meant to be fun.

I will treat players (and my compatriots) as people. 

And not number generation machines with human names

I fully realize

The ultimate outcome is determined solely by my managerial choices.

And I will behave in a way that encourages a jovial online environment.

OPTIONAL

-Preferred chat platform

-Preferred name & pronouns

-Your Intentional Act of Tridentness (with your consent, there’s a possibility we could do something neat with this later)

-Tshirt size

In short, scoreboard: ants, eat dirt, grasshoppers. We kept it on the road, and we’re plowing ahead to what is shaping up to be a rollicking 2021. Let’s remember there’s more of us than there are of them, atomized we are weak, but bonded we are strong. Let’s have some gosh darn fun playing a 25ish week metagame loosely based on baseball performance while putting some good out there into the world.

Looking forward to enjoying the shared suffering and subsequent suffer-giggles with y’all!