My name is Grant, and I’ve written about the Giants for almost two decades now. There was a lot of dumb and beautiful Giants baseball packed into those decades, and I wrote all about it. That is, until last year, when I made the decision to stop.

That was a bad decision. I’m coming home.

Before the 2018 season started, I had to make a choice. I had a chance to cover the Giants full-time, which is an opportunity that I had always dreamed of. Except I had another chance to focus on Major League Baseball in general, which was going to be unfettered freedom. Instead of getting sucked into the sausage-maker every day, worrying about the relievers and 25-man rosters of one team, I could float around, picking whatever stories I wanted from all 30 teams. It was entirely liberating, and I charged into the season with a fresh mind and a thousand ideas.

It didn’t hurt that the Giants were awful. Just absolutely abysmal. The 2017 season was suffocating, and that was just in a part-time capacity. It’s not like the 2018 season was going to make me wistful, and guess what? It didn’t. I wasn’t wistful about the Giants, and I was glad that I’d escaped the daily slog.

At least, it shouldn’t have made me wistful.

There was no reason to be wistful.

But yeah, I got wistful like a big ol’ idiot.

Imagine the kind of brainworms it takes to get wistful about the 2018 Giants. Well, I have them, and last season was when I realized just how terminal the brainworms were. There’s no coming back from the decades of accumulation, the hoarding of Giants trivia and minutiae. I needed to have a platform where I could write non sequiturs like, “Pedro Feliz was the left fielder when Barry Bonds was out for the season” and “The Giants have had a different left fielder on Opening Day in every season since Bonds left.” I was at the Joe Morgan and Bob Brenly games, and I need the attention of people who care about that sort of thing. It’s all I have. My life is so, so very uninteresting, and you can’t take these kinds of anecdotes away from me.

More than this, though, was the realization that the future of baseball coverage is somewhere down these rabbit holes. There will always be a home for strong national coverage, and I’m planning to fill whatever voids might appear on that side. When a pitcher hits a batter with a baseball because of a silly unwritten rule and causes a Twitter kerfuffle, I’ll do my best to be there. I have ideas for Major League Baseball coverage that I’ve toted around for years, and I still plan to work my way through the list.

But those team-specific rabbit holes are what really fascinate me, mostly because they fascinate you. The odds are great that you’re not interested in 30 teams. You’re not keeping a running list of AL Central middle relievers in your head. No, your time is finite, and you’ve spent it thinking about Todd Wellemeyer, Darren Lewis and Kim Batiste. The name “Ryan Spilborghs” still makes you wince and you’re still mad at Bruce Bochy for pinch-running Eli Whiteside on the Fourth of July.

There are levels to dig through when you’re a fan of a baseball team, and I want to be the guy at the bottom, with a bizarre Baseball-Reference Play Index search and an anecdote about Rod Beck. It’s not the most useful skill to have, and I’ll be the first person they’ll use for food when the crops fail, but it’s all I’ve got. It’s best to ride that wave while I can.

And if this is my goal, to wade through this strange, hilarious world of partisan sports — to cover the Giants with the eye of a fan, but also with an ability to take a step back and not take everything so seriously — there’s no better place to do this than The Athletic. They’ve figured out that people will care about baseball in general if the writers are talented enough (looking at you, Ken Rosenthal, Jayson Stark and Eno Sarris), but they also understand that regional appeal. Baseball has always been tribal, but it’s only going to get more so with every new app, video game, Netflix movie, Instagram post or whatever else is fighting for your attention that didn’t exist 15 years ago. There’s so much in this hyper-connected world to keep up with, the only choice if you’re interested in a baseball team is to stay in your very specific bubble and keep digging.

The Giants probably won’t be very good this year, but that’s not really the point. There will be walk-offs to cover, and there will be spectacularly goofy plays to celebrate. There will be decisions to mull and regrets to share, and if you’re going to stick around and follow a baseball team for 400 hours or so this year, you might as well read someone who has the same brainworms as you.

My goal is to be honest, silly, thoughtful, self-effacing and rational, not necessarily in that order. I’ve done it before. And after a year off, friends, I’m excited to do it again.

Also, you should subscribe to The Athletic because I’m here now. It’s about time that some of you stopped freeloading and paid for my content, especially the ones who have followed me for more than a decade. You know who you are.

You get 40-percent off with this link: theathletic.com/welcomegrant. Everyone likes saving 40 percent.

That’s theathletic.com/welcomegrant, and I hope you’re excited for the 2019 season. You’d better be, because I think you’re playing left field. Grab your glove and get loose.

(Photo: John Hefti/Icon Sportswire/Corbis via Getty Images)