The Annual: Let Us Handle the Commas for You

Image credit: © JANAE WILLIAMS/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY NETWORK

The Baseball Prospectus Annual doesn’t use a serial comma. This is a frustrating and counterproductive reality stuck in the past as a result of convenience and general indifference, much like the Electoral College or the existence of the Yankees. I prefer the serial (or Oxford) comma for reasons that should be self-evident; if you’re an anti-serial comma apologist, you know who you are and what you did. It’s Annual season, however, and that means that over the past few weeks I’ve been methodically rejecting the Google Docs suggestions of our numerous and heroic backreaders who are all too eager to insert a serial comma where I have already wistfully excised it. Much like the perfect soldier, to reach perfection in this process can only be found in the quiescence of thought—the Annual has its mandates, and I am simply the hand that types them out.

Okay, well, except in the million ways that the editing process requires constant, all-consuming thought. It’s well-documented that those who spend a lot of time in repetitive activities or thought patterns can have those preoccupations transfer into their dreams, a phenomenon commonly termed the Tetris effect. I’m convinced I’m soon to start experiencing the Comments CMS effect, and my dreams are going to start looking like this [spoilers for the 2025 Annual comment of Calvin Faucher to follow].

I know, I know. You’ve been shown that the book that you are dutifully preordering at the present link is but a shadow on the wall of the real book. Unless…the book is the real thing and I’m stuck reading by candlelight?

A REBUTTAL, by P. Dubuque.

Commas are fake. Style guides are houses built of straw. The concept of clarity in writing is a sweet little bedtime story we tell our children and our freshmen undergraduate students, a modern morality tale provided to make them behave, linguistically, as benefits the state. The notion that we as writers have in our depths, through the application of our protocol some secret power to make ourselves understood by the reader, some control over the process, is adorable. Children do not think of the tree when they pick the cherries. The meaning they make is theirs, and theirs alone. We are powerless. Commas are a simple oratorical device, slapping one’s palms against the side of the podium, and nothing more.

Did the paragraph above include a serial comma? If you even thought to notice, you’ve already failed. To even consider grammar when absorbing ideas is a willful abstention from the process of reading, a separation of one’s self from truth. It’s no better or different than the irony poisoning of a YouTube-obsessed pre-teen, reacting to a reaction video. Don’t pretend that the serial comma is some final bastion against the corruption of language, a pure beam of light. No one actually eats grandma, or thinks Hitler and Stalin are strippers. We are not lawyers and these are not wills. Your commas are not so powerful. You just want to impress people by being correct, and grammar is a way to dress up your ideas in a nice clean suit.

And if that’s what you want, go ahead. Enjoy overdressing. (There isn’t even any sarcasm intended there, not that a millennium of grammatical advancements can help you discern it anyway. Wear what you want to wear.) But the Annual is not wearing a suit. It’s wearing a polo and khakis and sitting a dozen rows up in the scouts’ section, tossing out little insights and jokes and chatting away the middle innings of every single ballgame in existence, averaged together. And that’s why we write the way we talk, because reading about baseball should feel like watching baseball, and when people watch baseball they use contractions, they’ll let a sentence run on, and they’ll pause whenever in the sentence it feels right. The ballplayers wear pants that match their shirts. We will not take this too seriously.

A COMMENT, by C. Goldstein

I think if P. Dubuque had the courage of his convictions, his paragraph wouldn’t include any commas at all.

,,,

Last thing: Please do consider preordering the Annual for yourself or someone you love (or both)! It’s a real labor of love, not only for the editors but for the dozens of talented experts who write, comment, and provide feedback for their peers. This is certainly not the easiest environment for print media, and orders as well as word-of-mouth are invaluable; you’d be hard-pressed to find a guide to the 2025 season imbued with more collected insights of people who know a lot about baseball (and, unfortunately, commas). That can only happen thanks to our readers, whether it’s those who have been buying since the beginning or the newcomers we hope to turn into loyalists. This will be the 30th edition of the book and we like to think it’s getting better every year—and readers tend to agree! We’ll be sending the book off to print soon, and copies can be expected in your hands well in advance of the season.

Order the 2025 Baseball Prospectus Annual Here

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