The date is November 21st, 2041.... about 5:40am. A buzzer goes off inside the bedroom of GM Alan Ehlers. Realizing that he exceeded the amount times he can hit snooze and still make it to work on time, the tired GM gets up and heads off for a quick shower to try to wake up.
Afterwards he heads out to the kitchen for his ritual Pork Roll, egg, and cheese breakfast... a jersey staple. He opens his phone to find 30 new messages from hungry BBA GM's looking to make terrible trades, from league officials telling him to vote for this and that, and the BBA police telling him he needs write more uninspired articles that nobody wants read anyway. Ehlers puts the phone down, takes a bite of his sandwich and realizes that he needs to clean the kitchen. Empty bottles of Jack Daniels and Pepsi litter the island from his birthday bash the night before.
"Man, I'm getting too old for this life."
After a few minutes of collecting his keys, wallet and what not, Ehlers exits the house and heads out to his 1988 Camaro so he can tke the road less traveled to work. Though his tricks don't seem to work anymore. Advanced navigation technics have caught up to his tactics and he is stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the Garden State Parkway. A strategy once known as Moneyball 2.0 has been eclipsed by launch angles, spin rates, Grady effects, and even banging on trash cans.
"Sigh, I'm never going to make it where I want to be at this rate"
Aggravated from the traffic, his lifestyle and the heavy metal he is listening to, the GM switches over to the classic rock station to hear a catchy Journey tune right as he crosses the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise. A tear runs down his eye.
Entering McDermott Park at Red Robin Field, Ehlers decides to walk through the Robins Hall of Fame for the first time. As he looks around, there is some confusion in his face. He asked the attendant why there is so much Baltimore Monarchs stuff and hardly any Brooklyn Robins memorabilia. The kid, not knowing he was talking to the teams GM had said that it's because there hasn't been a lot of memorable things that have happened over the past 16 years.
"But what about the 2026 Landis winning team?"
"Everyone knows that team was just flat out lucky! lol", said the kid
"Yeah... Lucky. That's what they say right?"
Usually Ehlers would get upset and tear the kid a new one. But here he just shrugged his shoulders and slowly walked away. He had a meeting to go to. One to discuss off season plans. He enters the meeting room to find a fold out poker table and some plastic stacking chairs. A note on the table says that due to budget cuts caused by the team losing millions upon millions of dollars the past several years... there will be no coffee and donuts this year. Luckily a rival GM was kind enough to send some banana bread to the struggling franchise in exchange for a player to be named later.
"ugh, I don't even like banana bread."
Onto the war room meeting. Team execs sat down and got to work on the 2041 plans. The 10,000 pound elephant in the room is Bobby Lynch. Should he stay or should he go? The team appears to have stepped in shit when they traded low for him. After a rock solid 2041 campaign, with pitching at a premium around the league and Brooklyn still building for the future... The situation screams sell high. But Ehlers is a nostalgia buff. On more then a handful of occasions he's tried to resurrect the careers of past their prime starting pitchers. A front office members suggests trading Lynch for 3-4 young stud RP and dusting off the cyclone.
"The cyclone only works when lineups have deficiencies. Now a days every lineup is full of 9/8/9/7/8 hitters. The cyclone is dead."
The more bullet points the board makes, the more apathy Ehlers shows towards a team that he once micro managed more then any other GM in the history of the BBA. When the meeting came to a close the GM stood up and said he had one more thing to add.
"I know I haven't had the same drive lately. We probably won't win the Landis. But let's raise some hell this year. Cause this is my finale."