Promisingly imperfect.

The wheels probably weren’t even yet up, and I was just 12 pages into the book. The author, breaking down Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey, noted that Melody Maker’s initial review of the 1993 release described it as “promisingly imperfect.”

Ten years ago I’d actually thrown in a comment in a Newberg Report about one Radiohead song’s “imperfect brilliance” (you’ll have to trust me on this, because the report is so badly written that I refuse to link it here). It’s a concept I’ve always been drawn to.

We didn’t know it as we took off Saturday morning, but we were about to be treated to a display of promisingly imperfect, and I swear there’s at least a tangential baseball tie-in coming.

Ginger and I had never seen a professional tennis tournament but it seemed like a good weekend to change that, and the tour had a stop in Memphis. Not a blue-chip field — among the 28 players at the tournament was just one ranked top 10 in the world, and only five in the top 50.

Also in the mix was an unseeded Wild Card entrant in just his third-ever ATP event, a high school senior from San Diego who was born four years after Pablo Honey was released.

We saw Taylor Fritz fire his way through his draw and land in the Memphis Open championship match on Sunday, the youngest American to reach a final since Michael Chang in 1989. It was pretty cool seeing it all play out, at a time when I imagine most of the couple thousand there to see him play (certainly us) knew very little about him. That’s about to change.

Forgive the sacrilege: Watching Taylor play, I thought more than once about that week in mid-March 1990 when I was nearly alone in Port Charlotte — the lockout meant that year’s spring training featured no big league ballplayers and just about the same number of fans — and saw 18-year-old Pudge Rodriguez (virtually the same age then as Taylor is now to the day) put his shin-guarded and chest-protected gifts on display in what would normally be fairly ordinary catcher drills.

Pudge was not in particularly great shape coming out of Low Class A, and there wasn’t thought to be much in the bat. Imperfect, to be sure. But man, the promise.

I’ve seen Pudge dance and throw at 18. I’ve seen Taylor Fritz show the same kind of power in a different sport at 18. I’ve seen Parker Millsap (who Elton John raved about two weeks ago in a Town Hall interview) sing in front of crowd of less than 100 at about the same age. I didn’t see Josh Hamilton take BP at age 18, but I did see Joey Gallo do it.

Taylor fired out of the gate in Sunday’s final against Kei Nishikori (number 7 in the world, and gunning for his fourth straight Memphis Open title), winning the first seven points of the Valentine’s Day match and 12 of 14, charging out to a 3-0 lead in the first set on the strength of a big serve and overpowering ground game.

It was the equivalent of Gallo’s two-run single/two-run homer/line drive double off Jeff Samardzija in the first three at-bats of his Major League debut. Pudge gunning down would-be base-stealers Joey Cora and Warren Newson in his first game in the bigs. Parker belting out “The Train Song” at The Kessler, making us forget instantly that we were there to see a different band.

Gallo ended up hitting .204 in 2015, striking out half the time. Pudge committed 10 errors in just 88 games behind the plate in 1991, and didn’t hit. Pablo Honey wasn’t very good.

Taylor Fritz ended up losing to Nishikori, 6-4, 6-4. After those first three explosive games, he dropped 12 of 17.

(Gallo’s first 11 big league games: .300/.391/.625. The 25 last year that remained: .147/.247/.294.)

Nothing to be ashamed, of course, or dispirited by.

Joey Gallo could be Kevin Maas or Gregg Jefferies, and Taylor Fritz could be the male Jennifer Capriati.

Or they could be Pudge Rodriguez, or Radiohead.

There’s a long story ahead, and we get to see it unfold.

At 18, Taylor reached an ATP final at an earlier age than Pudge and Adrian Beltre were when they arrived in the big leagues. He’ll need some work on his net game and his body language, but in spite of the few flaws in his game, like the holes in Joey’s swing, there’s enough overwhelming upside there that a casual tennis fan could see it, even if he’d been ousted in the first round in Memphis (like he already has this week at Delray Beach).

Just one more sleep before Rangers pitchers and catchers report, and there’s all kinds of awesome associated with that. If for some of you that includes the promise of less focus in this space on tennis and Radiohead and a retraining of all lenses on baseball, hey, I’m right there with you. It’s been a long winter since that seventh inning, but adversity and the opportunity to overcome it is part of what makes sports the best.

Baseball, regardless of how you look at it or who your team happens to be, is almost always imperfect, but that’s part of its greatness, and its promise. It’s time for the chatter, the carioca, the sweet music of slightly asynchronous long toss.

It’s time for baseball, and another first step on a year’s journey of sports peaks shaped by inescapable valleys that we hope leads to another one of those championship bouts, this time, just maybe, ending in that way which to this point has been narrowly elusive. It will happen at some point. The Texas Rangers will convert match point.

One more sleep until another year’s march begins. Perfectly promising.