I was nowhere around Barstow near the other edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Fifty milligrams of tramadol and THC—massive amounts in every form: resin, rosin, terp sauce, sugar, distillate, budder, batter, live diamonds, and flower.

One glass water pipe. Four bags of gummies. A blowtorch. Four THC chocolate bars. Two THC sodas and RSO tablets. I could handle all of those items in heavy fashion, except the RSO tabs. RSO is of the devil's making even if it's THC, and regrettably, I knew I'd need them soon. Hang on. This all feels….so familiar. Yet I only read about shit like this in Hunter S Thompson novels. Was this real life? I think so. Most of it was I think. Whatever. Never mind. 

This mostly legal stash had been plucked off the Vegas strip near the Stratosphere hotel in a rented black BMW SUV not dissimilar to what I'd imagine the actual MIB get to drive. I was a sports agent after all and there are appearances. The Stratosphere hotel is a one thousand one hundred and forty nine foot tall concrete Bellend that has the clientele that is best represented by literal Mos Eisley on fucking Earth. 35-dollar smoke-filled rooms from 1973 that you'd have to be an absolute moron to not get comped upon entry to the point I'm not even entirely certain they accept legal tender for rooms. Degenerates like gamblers pimps and hookers fill most seats in the lobby throwing away all their money on video roulette and casino war. The pimps and hookers would fit in the baseball business but there are more pressing issues to cover before wasting space on pimps and whores. I digress. But I will return for the pimps and whores later. We have work, man!

Vegas, unlike Nazi Germany (Florida), had no marijuana laws so once I was there it was imperative to get my hands on absolutely all the THC products I could get my hands on just to try to get me through this godforsaken contractual experience. This was the deal of a lifetime, and I had to be ready for all possibilities. Pop culture and life have taught me as much. I got a lot, and I used it all. And it was all needed. And I did it in Las Vegas. And all it cost was money. Money is money. Life is easier with it but never conflate rich with smart and poor with stupid. It is an easy tell when someone does this to others. Avoid them like the fucking plague and let them all die on Ivermectin. The world will turn, I promise. My life ain’t even that important but man….what a life.

I had only started smoking weed at 30 after 44 surgeries and at the start of my failed first marriage. Until 30, Johns Hopkins had fed me a steady diet of pills to keep me alive. Intestinal damage is trash. It ain't death. I drank ‘til I found weed but was never a drunk. I hate booze. Lucky me. Weed was new. It was legal and did not fuck up my brain. Weed saved my life. I'm fairly sure every DARE kid became a pothead. Fuck you Nancy Reagan. It isn't an opiate. It isn't fentanyl. My life is better for it. I digress.

It was the year of our Lord 2018, and I was deep inside the heart of Las Vegas, there to escape life like any 36-year-old sports agent would, mid-simultaneous divorce and mid contract talks for my biggest client at the time; escape from the Israeli Victoria's Secret model hustling me for work I met on tinder at home and tried to date (respect, I was dumb), escape from my players, escape from the media, escape from my friends, escape from the wreckage of the last five years of my entire life. I had gone to escape from fucking everything, but a far worse reality would greet me at the end of this journey. I loved baseball my whole life. It has saved it countless times but to my forever lament, I had personally borne witness to the death of the American dream that was baseball. The death of America's pastime is very real and it was a long, long, long time coming.

  And it was fucking slow. So slow you don't even notice ‘til they've taken what it was and replaced it with something new to sell. "It's a business." You hear this over and over like it's a prayer from a fucked-up financial religion. As if one person can have two lives. These monsters separate business from reality because it's easier than suicide. These are the walking dead for real. Money has never been a reason to do or not do something for me, even at a great financial cost. Everything eventually becomes a memory, and then you die. Nothing matters, so it's a choice to not be evil. That kinda does matter. My bad.

  It's that very all-encompassing evil I have raged against my entire life. Punk rock taught me well. "Hate your enemies, save your friends, find your place, speak the truth," Kurt Cobain yelled in 1993 to 11-year-old me. That one line mattered more to me my entire life than religion. No going back after Kurt Cobain. Or Hunter S. Thompson. Or Nietzsche. Or Henry Wallace. Or Heath Ledger. Or Norm MacDonald. Or Mitch Hedberg. Or Greg Giraldo. Or Elliott Smith. Or Jeff Buckley. All my heroes are dead. My rigid worldview was forged young. And it is not malleable. This shades every interaction. Always.

And that worldview as a young man in baseball is dangerous to anyone interested in keeping the status quo. That worldview is dangerous, period. There's no value in martyrdom. To paraphrase a nameless host of SportsCenter, "I don't want to be famous; I want to be rich." It's hard to change the world without money. It's worse seeing the world collapse in its absence because we all work for the fucking owners. Agents. Players. Media. Vendors. Ticket reps. It doesn't matter who you think you are. We all work for the owners.

A very wise MLB person once told me that if owners could have publicly funded stadiums and then fill those stadiums with the taxpayers who paid to build the stadium and then only serve beer while playing 0 games, thus creating a very expensive bar, the owners would pick that every time. A fucking bar. A fucking laborious Fuddruckers. It is jarring even for me. The monsters are everywhere. Either die a villain or live long enough to leave your franchise to your kids.

These monsters I speak of can have any title or be on either side. Team or player. There is no fan side. This is peak capitalism. When you cheer for an owner, you're literally cheering capitalism and if l you start doing that you need to fix your broken fucking worldview. The owners only need your money. They don't know you or want to know you. They just want to know how to separate you from your wallet at every turn. MLB towels, MLB shirts, MLB foods, MLB video games, MLB drinks, MLB cards, MLB NFTs, MLB TV, MLB fucking condoms probably. But no dispensaries! The industry wouldn't want to corrupt all the kids they're fucking stealing NIL from as amateurs with MARIJUANA. I'm half surprised MLB network doesn't fucking air Reefer Madness in their dead time. They pantomime authority. This is the fucking sport that put Jackie in Cooperstown for breaking the color barrier. You know, the thing fellow Hall of Famer Cap Anson instituted. How the fuck does that even work? I can’t even say they have flexible morality as I don’t fucking see any. Mike Ehrmantout they are not.

You should never doubt Mike Ehrmantrout:

"I've known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves—you can be on one side of the law or the other, but if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word. You can go home today with your money and never do this again, but you took something that wasn't yours and you sold it for a profit. You're now a criminal; good one, bad one—that's up to you." 

And this applies to all walks of life. It really does. It's just worse in baseball. There are a finite number of players at all levels. From HS to MLB, there are only so many guys good enough to play at each different level. Which means at the MLB level there are a finite amount of earners. Earners: What agents derogatorily call paying clients. Coined by Greg Genske and Kenny Felder, formerly of Legacy. They fucked me up during my early years. I told Genske he's so tan he looked like Hulk Hogan's skin cancer's skin cancer and mocked Kenny Felder by saying you may have taken a client but I won't die of hypertension. A comedian's rage is all I had. They laughed. A comedian's job well done. They had my money and stomped my fucking teeth in as an agent. Total failure. I still ain't evil. We all have a little of both. Everything's a choice.

So, a finite amount of earners means every agent is after the same exact players. It's just business. It's cutthroat. It's not for everyone. It's hard. Not everyone's cut out for it. You only need one guy to make it. I have heard all the dumb shit from outsiders. It's all noise. It's not any of those false premises. It's only “do I compromise my beliefs for money and become a whore, or do I say fuck this and burn it all down, punk ethos and all?” Taking the money is easy. Living with it is impossible if you aren't a whore. The moral is we are all after the same pile of money, and some people will do anything for money. We all die. Nothing matters. This is baseball in 2018.

So I down eight RSO caps, THC soda, and mix the concentrates with flower, then blowtorch. The concentrate mix hits hard. GI pain gone. Back pain gone. Time slows. I can work. I find music. Music and pop culture permeate my entire life. Always has, especially while stuck in a hospital bed for 7 months at a time with a ruptured intestine and a feeding tube in your neck. It carries. I have no idea if Nirvana or Elliott Smith or Massive Attack or Biggie or MF Doom or Eyedea or Godspeed You Black Emperor! or Cypress Hill or The Pixies will help me at this moment. I go to my usual. The Fight Club soundtrack by the Dust Brothers. Track 9. Jack's Smirking Revenge. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

  I saw Fight Club for the first time recovering from an intestinal rupture at Johns Hopkins in 1999. It was my first DVD. I was 17. It changed my life. My grandmother mailed it to me instead of visiting. As John Oliver would say, “Cool.” Looking back, it’s no surprise I used the line "you met me at a very strange time in my life" line in my fucking wedding vows; can't believe that marriage didn’t work. Whatever. The songs are emblematic of a lot that I admire.

  In the book and the film, you have this nameless narrator (Rupert? Cornelious?) self-flagellate himself to the point of oblivion versus a very guilty corporate suit. That's a powerful lesson when facing the guilty. You can do or say anything to the guilty outwardly or inwardly and there is nothing their money or power or influence can do in life that can change reality for them. This isn't the Matrix and they aren't Neo. They don't get to rewrite reality as they see fit. That's a delusion. They are people. Same as me. Money cannot change the absolute power in knowing we all die and nothing can change that one fact for any of us. Steve Jobs knew this. I know this. Everyone who has ever lived has died and every cemetery is full of irreplaceable men. Business isn’t scary. Knowing the color of your own small intestine is. What the fuck are any of these people gonna do to me? When they come for you, and they fucking will, jam your thumbs into the eyes as hard as you fucking can until they burst in your bloody palms like Jim in 28 days later. Do that. Do exactly that. I am Rorshach to these idiots. Don't they know he was a conservative? Fuck that. Office Space was better.

I wait for the call from the not-so-evil baseball executive I know from my 20s.

It is 10 a.m. in Las Vegas. It is noon in Wisconsin. My phone rings. RSO hasn't kicked in, so I'm a little down, but whatever. It's three hours ‘til the non-tender deadline. My client is unsigned. He has a history of arrests, DV, DUI, and two drug suspensions. He also throws 100 mph. This last fact matters most. Nothing matters. We all die. Baseball is nihilism.

I did all the dirty work so he could have a career. Every fuck up. Every suspension. Every arrest. Every DUI. I wrote every apology and stood in front of every camera promising he'd changed this time for real. I fucking enabled this. And everything that was created in its wake. You own mirrors so you know all this. You were proud too? Don't act like one of them because you are not like one of them. You justify it at the time saying a familiar toxic mantra "it's just business" but it isn't the truth. The truth is that you still did it for money and that was bad. Perspective past 40 is a motherfucker. Nothing matters. We all die.

The phone rings and I pick up, and it's the club's front office member I have come to know over decades. We go back many years due to our proximity in age. We both started at 20. He went the club route. I went the player route. His ladder climb was long and arduous but he made it in a way I could never do. He works with a team. I am alone. This is for the best. I admired Steve Jobs' ability to make a better product than himself and putting that fact above all else, even interpersonal relationships. It is an isolating existence borne out of the need to show people what could be well beyond what is. It is not for everyone as it costs you everything. I think the truth is worth that. Not everyone agrees. Whatever.

I respect this guy on the phone. I don't respect most baseball men. The rapey ones. The pedos. The pushers. The vultures (I did my time here) and the fucking criminals. The bigots suck too. The ones who long for a pre-Curt Flood, pre-Marvin Miller, pre-Jackie Robinson game. Fuck them.

This dude on the phone isn't that and he isn't them. He is wise and tenacious. I had braced for this opportunity my entire life even if his approach is personally unfamiliar. I knew what to expect. I had practiced this like most kids practiced their buzzer beaters. That's hard to do from a hospital bed so this is what made me. I am ready. An MLBPA lawyer is handling the arbitration prep just in case the club files. This wastes thousands of dollars. I hate the MLBPA. My sole job was to max out a multi-year deal.

  Earlier in the month, the club had only offered me a one-year deal with three club options attached with zero buyouts. They knew the player had zero leverage, and it was a unique opportunity to exploit a player with deep off-field issues. I found it to be personally abhorrent, but I respected the gambit. I raged. It did not make a dent. He who holds the money wins and leverage is all.

The front office member calls me off the record with a few hours ‘til the non-tender deadline and says to me, 

"Hey, it's me. Not work. Just you and me for real. Pick up now. We got like 30 minutes."

I say, "Okay, cool. Dude, what the fuck is this?"

"I'm gonna tell you this off the books. Just don't tell the PA."

To which I agree, as I trust this person implicitly. 

"Your guy's a fucking junkie, and we're gonna non-tender him if you fucking say no."

"Oh, word? Yeah, we're good. Say less. Done deal."

Pantomime over. He shoved all in and I had to call. There was no check-fold or check-raise. This wasn't the final table and for all of the magic in Las Vegas, that fact wasn't changing. I then called the player. Zero no-trade clause. Zero guarantees. He is enraged. The player calls Rick Shapiro at the PA. The player has a bad call and calls me to tell me, "Who the fuck is Rick Shapiro? He's making me hate white people," but ultimately stands up to his own PA and takes the deal that ultimately helped him turn into a 2018 MLB All-Star. Without that deal, that never happens. And yet still the MLBPA regrets my 20 years. Good. Fuck Rick Shapiro.

I finished my first multi-year deal on my own while locked in a room in Las Vegas. That happened. I exhaled when it was over. I finish the Views-askewniverse stash of weed I have left in the room. I take a couple calls and do a few media spots. One such person becomes my business partner in 2024. My only witness to that day. Even if by phone and separated by the Canadian border I could not take that risk. He's awesome to work with. Glad he was there in 2018 to bear witness.

While pulling away from the city the next morning at sunrise six am local time, my stepbrother and I see the famous Barstow sign upon leaving Las Vegas. I had to stop to smoke a joint and take a video of me uttering the opening line to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in front of said sign. It is exactly 5 years to the day of my own wedding and I leave Las Vegas with my step brother and drive towards Los Angeles to attend MLB player Cody Decker's wedding to comedian Jenn Sterger. 

Yes. The FSU cowgirl. Yes, the Jets reporter Brett Favre and Deadspin abused. Cody asked me what the odds of us picking the same wedding day are to which I deadpan in a Norm-like remark: What are you serious? It's 1 in 365. I have never had a faster math quip in my life. While at the wedding I saw WWE diva CJ Perry. I had no clue who she was nor did I realize her WWE husband Rusev was an inch from me before a friend saved my life and stopped me from approaching the diva with my newly divorced weak ass game. I rebounded though to hang out with a Bravo starlet from Vanderpump Rules! that night. Life’s weird.

My Mount Rushmore that has impacted my worldview will always be Kurt Cobain, Frederich Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norm MacDonald. It was HST who wrote for ESPN and had a background as a sports journalist. And a political reporter. And ran for sheriff. And rode with the Hells Angels. And who was a comic. He got his teeth kicked in only to rebound and achieve every single time with an aplomb so obvious to me that he became my model. He represented professionally everything I wanted to be for myself within sport. Dr. Gonzo who invented gonzo journalism inspired the first gonzo MLB player agent. This is my claim. Our little group has always been and always will until the end. Cobain echoes in my head daily.

But it is Hunter S. Thompson that echoes in my baseball head by the second, and it permeates my being and my perception of the world I existed in with this dagger:

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

America’s Pastime is fucking dead.