In the Year 2000 ...

Published Aug. 20, 2015 3:38 p.m. ET

foxsports

It's been a pretty good week for Triple-A pitcher Matt Buschmann.

OK, so he hasn't pitched lately; Buschmann exited his last start with shoulder soreness, and will miss at least one start.

Wednesday, though, the 31-year-old right-hander was profiled in Grantland. And Thursday, ESPN.com published his column about "what baseball might look like in the year 2045."

It's pretty obvious that Buschmann, who's the active minor-league strikeout king, doesn't have the stuff to start in the majors. I do wonder why nobody's yet sent him to the bullpen for a stretch, see if he can add some heat to his fastball and join the long list of fungible, replacement-level relievers who can make a pretty good living doing that for a few years.

Anyway, about Buschmann's 2045 piece ... He mentions a LOT of things, too many for me to summarize. So instead I'll just say this: He's probably right about almost everything. I've seen a bunch of stories written in the 1960s and '70s, predicting what baseball would look like in 1980 or even (gasp) 2000. And they usually were pretty accurate, at least 50 percent hits.

But Buschmann's timing is all wrong. I don't believe that anybody's smart enough to know what baseball will look like in 30 years; everything around is just changing too quickly, the pace speeding up all the time. I think Buschmann's 2045 should be more like 2025 ... with 2045 practically unknowable.

Still, if you want to really talk about 2045, then you just gotta get weird. No baseball at all. Or baseball without ballparks. Or holographic ballparks in your living room, placing you in the middle of the diamond (or anywhere else you'd care to be).

2045? There aren't many people alive right now who are smart enough to figure that far ahead.