One of the first questions that I often get about WHYGAVS is “Where did the name Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? come from?” When I’m in a particularly eloquent mood, I tend to answer that the name just kind of popped into my head when I decided to start a Pirate blog, and that I liked it because of the way that it (to me, at least) perfectly evokes the idea that nothing can ever be quite like watching sports and having a favorite player when you’re five or six or seven or eight years old. I don’t know if that’s exactly what I was thinking when I decided to become a 20-year old baseball blogger, but that’s certainly what it all means to me now that I’m ten years older.
In that vein, Ted Anthony wrote this wonderful story at Medium about his eight-year old son, his son’s love of Travis Snider, and the heartbreak that comes from a trade that looks minor to pretty much everybody else. It’s easy to evaluate a trade from a financial ledger or a sabermetric spreadsheet, but it’s much tougher to think about it as someone’s favorite player being sent away or as someone’s connection to home being severed just a little bit more. In the end, though, are any of us baseball fans without our own personal Travis Sniders? Anyway, go read the whole piece.
