Sometimes I even weep.

It’s been a minute, and I apologize for the long delay between newsletters. I’m back, and with my draft travel this spring now done, I’m hoping to get back to weekly editions again.

I’ve had a successful spring when it comes to seeing draft guys – I’ve seen more than half of the players on my top 100, around 70-odd guys who are actual draft prospects, enough of a cross-section to feel like I have a grasp on the class this year. It helps that it’s a college-heavy draft, and that the combination of the transfer portal and the surge in NIL money to players means that we’re seeing an increasing consolidation of top talent in the SEC and ACC. That may not be great for college baseball as a whole, but it does make my life easier, since I could just go see a college series in one of those conferences every weekend from mid-March to mid-May and probably run into 4-5 good prospects by accident.

One really dumb thing has made all this travel easier for me this year: I got a CPAP. I was diagnosed about six years ago with hypopnea, the milder cousin of sleep apnea, and tried a CPAP for a few months. I kept waking up after 3-4 hours and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I returned the machine and kind of gave up on it. When my family reported that my snoring had increased last summer, though, I got tested again and it turned out I was actually having more of these “events” (basically when you don’t breathe on time) each hour, and it qualifies now as central sleep apnea, the kind where your brain doesn’t send the correct signals to your lungs so you breathe regularly – as opposed to obstructive sleep apnea, where something in your body is blocking the free flow of air. Right around Christmas, I tried a CPAP again, with a new type of mask.

It’s been life-changing, and I hate it.

I am so much more awake and functional during the day now that it’s hard to remember what it was like before I started using it right before Christmas. I almost never need to nap or even want to nap. I can sleep seven hours and be completely rested. Most mornings when I wake up, I’m awake – sometimes I can’t even go back to sleep if I want to, because I’ve had enough. It’s crazy. Is this what normal people feel like? (Of course, yesterday was the rare time that I did fall asleep in the afternoon, invalidating everything else I’ve written here.)

The whole thing makes no sense. What do you mean my brain forgets to tell my body to breathe often enough while I’m sleeping? How the hell is this adaptive? Why wasn’t I naturally selected the hell out of the gene pool for this? Why are we even a living species if our brains that can’t even tell us to do the most important thing so we don’t die?

I hate that now I’m dependent on this thing, especially when I travel. My biggest concern with my fatigue was around driving; I know I’ve had a ‘micro-sleep’ at least twice while driving, and it terrified me. It hasn’t happened since 2018, because I have taken steps to avoid it, pulling over if I think I’m even close to nodding off, managing my sleep schedule to ensure I’d get 8+ hours if I had a drive the next day, etc. I haven’t had anything like that happen in the five months since I started CPAP treatments, even with some pretty dismal drives included – Arlington to San Antonio and back in a day, Atlanta to Tuscaloosa and back with a night drive involved. I’m checking a bag more often because the machine takes up so much space in the suitcase, which is a tiny-violin problem but I’m still going to complain about it, because this is my newsletter. I also know what a huge difference it has made in my quality of life and especially in my safety.

Anyway, bodies are stupid, brains are stupid, and now that I’m more awake I can better appreciate how stupid it all is. The CPAP has helped me handle a heavier travel schedule, even with some early-morning flights, and I think being just generally more awake during the day has helped me write more between the Athletic and the dish. It’s a good thing. It’s just so annoying that I need it.

(Of course, I wrote all of that, and then twice in the last four nights it hasn’t done the job. I am blaming allergy season, because I want to blame something and I am sticking to my belief that the CPAP is magic.)

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Me on the San Antonio Riverwalk. It was underwhelming, but the day was nice.

There’s no way I’m going to list everything I’ve written since the last newsletter, which is my usual practice, so here are some highlights. On Thursday, I posted my first mock draft for 2025, running through the first round (27 picks), and on Friday I did a Q&A on the Athletic to talk about it.. I posted my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the draft class a few weeks ago; I’ll expand that to 100 either next week or the week after. I’ve done a little minor-league scouting as well, posting this notebook on some top Yankees pitching prospects & some prospects from the Nats and Rays and this one on some Mets and Orioles prospects. I tried to see Rays prospect Aidan Smith, acquired from Seattle in the Randy Arozarena trade, but he was scratched between the time I left the house and when I reached Ripken Stadium, so that was great. He played the day before and the day after.

I will list everything I’ve written at Paste, though. My game reviews there include the lighter spinoff of Wingspan called Finspan, the two-player auction game Floristry, the legacy game Ticket to Ride: Legends of the Old West, the fast-moving game Creature Caravan, and the remake of the out-of-print farming game Harvest. I also wrote about the best duel games that spun off of existing multi-player titles after trying and disliking the new Azul Duel game.

Some highlights over on the dish include new music playlists for April, March, and February; food posts for Atlanta & Tuscaloosa, the Raleigh/Durham area, Nashville & Knoxville, Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coast, Arizona, and San Antonio & Arlington; my ranking of the top 50 pizzerias in the U.S.; my review of I’m Still Here, which includes my ranking of my favorite films of 2024; and my review of Percival Everett’s James, which just won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (and is well-deserving).

Anyway, thanks for reading and bearing with me. Here’s to hoping that being off the road means more time for lots of things, including this newsletter.

Keith