We’re over three weeks into a brand-new season of baseball and nary a new word appears on this website. So, what gives? I did not give up on this little outlet yet, but I have struggled with what to say at this moment. Every day there is some new horror on the front page of every newspaper. We are speedrunning to full fascism, and it seems like no one really cares.* The most my co-workers could muster was a bit of shock that a government contract we work with had clauses forbidding segregation and discrimination removed. Every day it gets a little worse.

While 77.3 million Americans choosing the worst option in a no-win scenario certainly accelerated our systemic breakdown, that lack of rationale by no means ignited the feeling that everything is falling apart, that we are in the thick of societal entropy. I am far from the first person to acknowledge this overwhelming sense of decay.

In 2022, blogger Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe one facet of this new phenomenon, specifically the ruination of online platforms, primarily due to the rise of algorithmic decision-making. I hate this term. It screams Reddit. To use Reddit as an adjective invokes Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s statement regarding obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” It is hard to formulate a concrete definition of when and how something “is Reddit,” but the word “enshittification” screams it. If you are a frequent visitor to Reddit, godforbid a self-described “Redditor,” you know what I mean. You hear the word and immediately your mind goes to a page full of dorks typing out Linkin Park lyrics line by line in a litany of replies to a thread about Hunter Wendelstedt.

Prior to his vernacular contributions, Doctorow was the perfect avatar of the Obama era: a guy whose witticisms and observations were repeated and reformulated on every subreddit in existence. He appears in a 2007 xkcd comic. He is British. He is an exquisite representation of a period where it seemed some things around the edges needed smoothing, but in general, Paul McCartney got it right: it’s getting better all the time.

I write this a day after Stephen Miller floated the idea of sending people to concentration camps in El Salvador for their political leanings. Those days of feeling generally good while a wedding party in Afghanistan got obliterated by a drone strike? Forget ’em. The violence of the American state knows no bounds, neither internal nor external. Not that it ever really did know any restrictions, but it was easier to be naive in the halcyon days of the noughties.

The early weeks of the baseball season have me thinking about Doctorow’s cringy neologism. MLB.TV–a platform many people praise as reliable and affordable–went down during the first two games of opening day. As myself and thousands more frantically tried to get our first fix of actual baseball, we were left refreshing browser pages, rebooting Chromecasts, and scouring Reddit for tales of simpatico suffering. This platform that most of us liked suddenly seemed, well, shittier.

After those opening day kinks got worked out, MLB.TV as a baseball game delivery service seems as indefatigable as ever. I have yet to experience any other outages or inability to access the game I want to watch when I want to watch it.

The game being displayed on my screen, that is a different story.

I am not referring to the quality of play nor the entertainment value of the game itself. Those attributes are better than they have been in a long time. The pitch clock and the shift ban are fantastic additions, and few people would disagree. What I am referring to is the new advertisement displays that are everywhere this year. The Nike swoosh and the sleeve patch advertisements were already egregious. However, you need to see the latest atrocity I am talking about, so here’s a screenshot from a Red Sox broadcast:

Look at this slop! The awful digitally overlaid Ricola ad on the backstop, with the actual ad tearing through near Garrett Crochet’s head. The additional digital overlay on the mound is a lesser crime but rest assured: we can commit felonies in this space too.

Not only do teams now feel the need to paint an advertisement on the back of the mound, but if you are watching the opposing team’s broadcast, that ad may need to be blurred out. Don’t worry ad fans, we’ve piped in a digital ad next to the blurred ad. The ads will change every half-inning too, so you won’t get bored of one!

This looks like shit. I am thankful that this visual nightmare is not present in the Mets broadcasts. At least not yet. This is the part of the piece where I have to remind readers that while the Mets are owned by Steve Cohen, their regional sports network, SNY, is still under control of the previous regime: the Wilpons. I have to hope that Jeff Wilpon does not see these atrocious digital overlays. If he does, he will be on the phone immediately.

I am willing to guess that the Red Sox network, NESN, and the Phillies network, NBC Sports Philadelphia, are not hurting for whatever relatively paltry sum these eyesores bring in. Yet here we are, the wealthy making something we pay for worse, all in service of lining their pockets just a tad bit more. I may hate Doctorow’s term, but I cannot argue with its relevance. I threw on a Cubs game a few nights ago via MLB.TV. Every ad break served me up a commercial for the upcoming Cubs/Mets series at Citi Field. The algorithm saw I was watching the Cubs while located in New York. It figured I better get pelted with the same commercial 18 times, just to be safe.

I hate the term enshittification. I hate that it conjures up visions of unfunny post after unfunny post by the most self-assured, milquetoast guys on the internet. I also hate that I don’t have a better word to offer. Even our slang gets worse as time goes on, I guess.

*I know there are plenty of people who do care, and they care a great deal. I am glad they exist.