You’ve heard of influenza, and probably affluenza (afflictions of the chronically prosperous). I want to talk about “EFLuenza”: affluenza in the form it takes when it infects the EFL.
In the olden days of the EFL, when I left the free agent draft with a hole in my roster, I could ALWAYS find a way to fill it by trading with someone who had a different hole in his roster. I could spend a few happy hours concocting ever more creative offers, until eventually I’d hit the sweet spot with someone and come away with, say, Corey Kluber. Or maybe he’d bilk me of a Jose Altuve days away from his offensive breakthrough, or a Shelby Miller about to be transformed into three top prospects, and leave me holding clay Homer Baileys already crumbling into dust. *
But that’s the thing: you never really knew! It was exciting. You’d feel for a moment like you’d fixed two teams’ problems at once. There were the warm feelings of charity for your less fortunate fellows, the satisfaction in good trading craftsmanship, and the thrill of racing in the early dawn along barely visible cliffs.
Alas, such things are relics of a day when most teams could not quite fill up their rosters adequately just by drafting. We had shortages. Our rotations covered the mound like comb-overs, and our infields had missing teeth.
My nine-man rotation would leave someone else with only 4 starting pitchers. That gave us the basis for a bargain, a reason to reach out to one another, something to talk about at faculty meetings besides dreadful faculty stuff.
But this year my nine-man rotation is par for the league’s course. I asked a colleague with 7 outfielders to trade me his 4th best one (or maybe his 7th best one, if you take a long-term perspective), but he already has ten starting pitchers, so why would he need one of my spares?
We are all too fat and content, I tell you, unmotivated to make trades. We sit in our comfy silos with our well-stocked larders and don’t even get out to talk to one another.
This is why Jesus refused to make stones into bread, or the planet into a kaiser roll: we would stop depending on each other! Nothing would be riding on our inclination to love our neighbors. How do you show love when everyone already has everything they need? We’d sit around and watch TV, or write insane blog posts at 1:30 in the morning.
What this league needs is 4o days in the desert. Or at least to go on a diet.
If only I could get the Commissioner’s attention. Or someone would trade me a useful outfielder for one of my spare pitchers.
* (I believe that’s how I broke up my all-time most alliterative rotation of Miley, Miller, Milone, Minor, and Moore. As you can probably tell from the names, that rotation was never actually used in game action, since its members were never all healthy at once, neither while they resided in Old Detroit, nor at any time since.)