I first saw Jurickson Profar play in the 2005 Little League World Series, when the little guy was a two-way star for Curacao. I was passing through Williamsport, Pa. with a few friends as I moved back to the Midwest from Allentown.

I can’t pretend I remembered his name, but a few years later, I was reading the latest Baseball America Prospect Handbook — living in Portland by then — and came upon a 16-year-old Profar with a scouting report to dream on. I drafted him in my dynasty leagues and talked about the young shortstop like he was a sure-fire Hall-of-Famer.

Within a couple more years, he was considered the top prospect in all of baseball, and at 19 became one of the youngest players to ever homer in his first big-league at-bat. He played well for Curacao in the World Baseball Classic the next spring. He had arrived.

But then Profar hurt his shoulder, and it didn’t quite heal, and before you know it he’d missed two full seasons. For the longest time, it seemed like he’d lost the magic. He played a few more partial seasons in Texas and became more of a utility player, spent a few seasons in Oakland and San Diego, and then signed with Colorado in 2023. The Rockies were a bad team and Profar spent the season hitting so badly that he was released in August. I wondered if maybe he was done altogether.

He was almost never discussed without mention his status as a “former top prospect,” such that he seemed to be constantly considered a disappointment no matter how well he played.

Meanwhile, every season, Baseball America continues to produce a new list of its top 100 prospects, and a new handbook full of each team’s top 30. I continue to read them, and we continue collectively to quantify and measure and rank young people pursuing a dream. And as soon as they’ve moved on or missed our bar, we produce a new list of the same old thing — “the faces, the numbers, they change… but somehow it all stays the same.”

Then he latched on with the Padres, and in 2024 became their starting left-fielder and had the kind of season everyone had expected out of him all along. He was an all-star for the first time — at 31 years old — and spent all season looking like one of the best hitters in all of baseball. He was a charismatic, joyful leader on a Padres team that just about reached the World Series.

He had arrived… again.

This past winter, he signed a nice three-year contract with the Atlanta Braves, where he’s expected to be their leadoff hitter.

Through it all, Profar has seemed to play with a smile on his face, with a love for the game unaffected by expectations and untarnished by perceptions.

In baseball — and in life — we often find ourselves looking to the next season, the next day, the next man up. We always have an eye on the future, and there's always a scouting report, a set of expectations, a series of metrics. It gets forgotten sometimes that these are people's dreams we're dissecting, and that the soul of baseball needs no measurement.

And so this is a song about one of my favorite players, and about the cyclical nature of baseball, came out on Opening Day 2025. Every spring around this time, we start fresh -- right back where we started the season before. We update our lists and refresh our predictions, but we often get so caught up with what might come next that we forget to appreciate what we have right in front of us.

Baseball is a sacred game, something to dream on, and something to be treasured right now, just the way it is.