I met my wife while she was getting her M.F.A. in music composition. Twenty years -- and several more advanced degrees since -- I've been to a lot of concerts. Everything from intermittent loud bursts of electronic noise in a Brooklyn coffee shop to the literal Met. A lot of them have naturally featured her music. An early point of contention was that my favorite piece was one she considered a bit of a trifle, a piano and percussion piece she wrote shortly after we met. Later I landed on a larger piece for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra. Nowadays she mostly writes operatic works, so I'm always on the lookout for something that might make an interesting libretto. I'm not always a ton of help, as my favorite non-wife piece I've encountered over two decades is Frederic Rzewski's "Coming Together," a very different kind of vocal composition.

But last year I happened upon a speculative fiction short story "The Infinite Endings of Elsie Chen." You should go ahead and read it. I won't really spoil it, but it's far better than 1000 words of speculative prospect non-fiction, so I'll wait. You can kind of sketch out the libretto can't you? The big arias here and there, maybe some fun electronic stuff when the supercomputer gets involved. Anyway, Jess has a poet she works for with these things, so perhaps I'm just making a nuisance of myself. But the story stuck with me.

"I wanted to make a machine that determines the cause that comes before the effect."

On Monday we'll kick off the 2024 edition of Monday Morning Ten Pack. It's a themed one, our usual opening salvo: "What prospect are you most looking forward to seeing in 2024." It's a tricky question for me for two reasons. One, my local park is home to the Angels Triple-A affiliate. They were our 30th ranked organization -- that's last -- and tend to skip their prospects over this level. I suppose I might get Nelson Rada at some point. But Triple-A is not a prospect-laden level generally, and the Angels aren't prospect-laden specifically. Two, once we close the 2024 edition on Monday Morning Ten Pack, I'll be responsible for cataloging reports on a four-digit figure worth of prospects. It's impractical to play favorites. But if I were to have an answer, it would be Marco Vargas.

If you glossed over the back half of our Mets Top Prospects List this year -- or our Marlins list last year -- let me catch you up. He signed for a small, five-figure bonus just before the curtain rose on the 2022 DSL season, perhaps because the Marlins needed another infielder for a complex team. His seasonal line in the low, low minors was pretty good, but not particularly notable on its face. That offseason was slim pickings for Marlins prospects so I did my due diligence and asked our Monarch what it had to say. It responded with the kind of contact rates and exit velocities that portented prospectdom.

I covered my concerns about that before our 2023 list cycle even started. But these are just the table stakes now, you'd be a fool not to be plugged in to the supercomputer. Every model has a human factor though, someone to determine what the inputs are -- and as such, kind of determine what the outputs are. Well, you are putting your thumb on the scale at least. And I know my biases after 13 years at the park, and Vargas fits very neatly into a profile I like a bit too much. The hit tool first shortstopbutgonnabeasecondbaseman is not my ideal prospect, but it sings to me. I also catalog my misses with more efficiency than any quantum computer you can conceive of, I will absolutely beat it, John Henry style (the steel-driving man, not the Fenway-Sports-Group Man). And the echoes of Luis Carpio haunt me. I wonder if I have my thumb on the scale.

It was 2015, I wasn't working for BP quite yet. I didn't have the Monarch spitting me out contact data -- and no idea how you'd install a Trackman unit into the brick and sticks at Hunter Wright Stadium -- but I'd wager all the money in my pocket for the money in your pocket that Carpio had a very good contact rate and exit velos below-average for a major-leaguer, but pretty good for a teenager. And yeah, then he tore his labrum, and anyway this isn't a Mea Carpio, been there done that. But this is a tough profile, and how much will he really hit? Luis Carpio topped out in Double-A, but is somehow still only 26. Marco Vargas is 18 for another month, but how much will he really hit? I will be waiting patiently for the Low-A data.

"And I don't miss her, not really, but I miss everything she could have been. I miss something that never happened because of a broken umbrella rib, and everything that hurts me now is nothing but a daydream of an AI too smart for its own good."

I honestly don't remember what opera we saw at the Met, I think it was The Tempest, I think we went because Jess wanted to get a look at it before she brought her students from the mostly business school she was teaching at. We had a really good pre-concert meal at one of Daniel Boulud's 17 NYC restaurants beforehand. They really do have that pre-theater prix fixe down to a science. Of course I know which one. I have a better memory for that than the prospect stuff, but it's just a rhetorical flourish.