The Center

The difficulty of a transition season is that we've already been doing both at all times. Every game recapped, different components and players analyzed, 'what-if' scenarios considered: these aren't living in the moment but trying to make our immediate past anthologized. Yet because the Diamondbacks were clearly not going to compete for the postseason, every step came with the caveat of how this would change the future.

Trade for a player. Trade away another. Dump a top prospect to get shed a large contract. Get back a player you didn't think would have any positive value. How does this affect the team today? How does it affect it in 2016, or 2017?

These questions can't really be answered right now, and might not even really be known until next summer, or the summer after. Of course, that won't stop it from being discussed ad nauseam, both here and on other sites. The only things that matter are endlessly analyzing the past, or reading the birds.

I've been in the trenches of Content enough to know how it works. Ride the cycle, make a hot take, make trade proposals. If I was smart I'd write a scorching take on the Bryce Harper/Jonathan Papelbon scuffle, but here I am.

Understanding where we came from is great, I like history, too. Trying to understand where we're going or where we could go is also good; I like statistics and forecasting as well. But I don't want to get lost, out of time, when the game is right there to be consumed.

Sports are entertainment, and a visual one. When you play a sport, it is physical, but when you watch it transcends the body in favor of aesthetics. There is always ends-based desire, as in you'd rather be an ugly winner than a pretty loser, but it doesn't change that a beautiful game is better when taken on the whole.

Baseball is a beautiful game, or at least it is at its core. At its core it's a winding of a spring that when will explode into action. The beauty lays in that anticipation of the winding, and then the release as an action happens (the pitcher throws to the catcher, the batter gets a hit). With these discrete actions, the whole field springs into action, even the umpires move and make rotations depending on what is happening.

Strip away the endless interruptions, the attempts to take away your attention, the goofy broadcast boost full of trivia but rarely information, and just focus on the visual.

We have a less than a week. There's been plenty of time to argue and analyze endlessly about what has happened. There will be plenty of time to worry about the future. Let's be here, now.