Tomorrow, Margo and I head for New York because Wednesday night, Mike and I will be guests on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Here, for posterity, is the full lineup:

Yes, that’s right — Seth’s guests on Wednesday are Mike, me, and Emily Blunt.

That seems normal, right?

This will be my first-ever appearance on a late-night television talk show, so I’m nervous and excited. But it will not be my first ever time at a late-night show. A few years ago — OK, yikes, I’m looking now and realizing this was SIXTEEN YEARS AGO — I was doing a story on race car legend Jimmie Johnson for Sports Illustrated, and I went with him to the Tonight Show. This was during that all-too-brief time when Conan was the host of the show, and as I recall, the other guests that day were Christian Slater and, I believe, the Backstreet Boys.

Here’s what I remember most about that day: Before Jimmie went on, a couple of the show’s staff came into the room to talk with me. Yeah. Specifically with me.

And what they said, as I recall, was this:

“Hi. We just wanted to come in to tell you we’re huge fans of your work. Really big fans. Everybody here loves what you do. We’re such big fans, really, across the board, we just love your writing, just love your work, um, but hey, listen, we have a really strict policy here that you cannot talk to any of the other guests. It’s just a little policy we have, you know, to let the guests have their privacy, but mainly we just want to know just how big of fans we are of you and what you do and …”

They had come in specifically to tell me to lay off Christian Slater.

But in the nicest and most Hollywood way possible. It was delightful. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they had absolutely no idea who I was, but I enjoyed it all the same.

So my guess is that I won’t meet Emily Blunt. Sigh.

Anyway, we’re doing a bunch of other things in New York. Going to be on Katie Nolan’s podcast, which is amazing because I think she’s the greatest. We’re going to be on CBS Mornings on Saturday. And how about this? Margo and I are going to see the Broadway show Dog Day Afternoon on Friday night, which features a bunch of amazing actors, including my friend John Ortiz. I worked with John on the super-fun documentary The Diamond King about the incredible baseball artist Dick Perez.

Plus, I’ll see a bunch of other New York friends.

I often stop to ask myself: “How did any of this happen?” I don’t have a good answer, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately as amazing feedback about BIG FAN comes back, and I do the final edit on FIFTY SEASONS (coming out February! More news soon!), and I find myself in preposterous discussions with incredible people about future projects.

How did any of this happen?'

When I was in college, I was entirely lost. I’ve talked a lot about failing out of the school of accounting — and never being able to grasp the concept that debits were not inherently good, nor credits inherently bad — and then desperately writing letters to anybody I could think of who might have some advice. One of the people I wrote to was a talk radio host and sports announcer named Gary Sparber — he was such a nice man. He sadly lost his voice and left the business, but he was an excellent announcer, and I idolized him, and when I sent him a note asking for advice, he sent me back a five-or-so-page letter with all sorts of thoughts and guidance and inspiration, and he even told me to record a tape and send it to him, if I liked.

I did just that. He sent me another five-page letter with all sorts of thoughts and kindness and encouragement, but what I remember most were six words he tried very carefully to hide in the note so that they wouldn’t destroy me.

Those six words were “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but …”

And then he hinted that maybe I should focus on writing.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t consider myself a good writer. I had no reason to consider myself a good writer. I’d never had a single teacher or friend or anyone tell me that I was a good writer. But at that point, I figured: What did I have to lose? I switched my major to English (UNC Charlotte did not have a journalism major). I started sending articles out to magazines. But I had little faith that it would lead to anything.

And, yes, I’ve told this story before, but it changed my life, so … I took an English class — I’m going to get all the details wrong on this — and at some point we were reading, I believe, John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” and Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus.” And the assignment was to be a fly on the wall and write an essay about a conversation between the two protagonists.

Well, here’s what happened: I had never heard that expression “fly on the wall.” Or if I heard it, I didn’t remember it. I probably could have figured out the definition from context, but I didn’t. I wrote my essay as if I were a literal fly on the wall. I don’t remember much of what I wrote, but I do remember writing something like this:

“OK, these two guys are talking about something or other, but I see a hot dog there on the other side of the room that has my name on it.”

The two things I do remember vividly are that I did not get an A on the paper because it didn’t have any analysis of value.

And that the professor wrote, “Now I teach you in my class. Someday, I’ll teach you to my class.”

Those words changed everything for me. I’d already (out of desperation) devoted myself to becoming a sportswriter — had already started freelancing as a high school writer for the Charlotte Observer — but those words were the first signal that I could actually be good at anything. I think about what those words unlocked in me.

I think about how much I hope every young person has that thing unlocked in them.

And all these years later, I’ll be on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Mike Schur, and EMILY BLEEPING BLUNT. I definitely won’t bother her to say what a big fan I am. But I’ll always know that our childhood dreams, at least for one night, led to the same place.

Today is our 28th anniversary. That doesn’t seem possible since there’s a part of me that refuses to believe I’m older than 28, but the calendar keeps insisting. Also, the kids refuse to stop aging and are now out of the house. Also, we are in Raleigh to celebrate the occasion, at least in part because the Raleigh Pen Show is going on here.

When your beloved is perfectly happy to go to a city to celebrate because they have a fountain pen show going on, you are on at least your 28th wedding anniversary.

The only thing that I’ve really learned about getting older is that the years that seem so recent keep growing more distant in the rearview mirror. I do not really believe that 1998 was 28 years ago. And then I remember that we spent a good portion of our honeymoon watching the NBA Finals between the Bulls and Jazz. That was Michael Jordan’s last Finals.

Jordan to Wembenyama.

That’s our married life. Jordan to Wembenyama.

Margo and I met on a basketball court. These were the days when we both worked for the Kansas City Star, and there were enough people in the sports department to play a weekly basketball game. Margo was assigned to cover me. I’ll keep my feelings about that to myself. In our very first conversation, Margo told me that she grew up in a tiny Kansas town called Cuba, where her high school was so small they played eight-man football. She said that her high school graduating class was 12.

There seemed to be only one question worth asking when I heard that.

“Were you valedictorian?” I asked.

She was. That was a relief. The salutatorian in her class didn’t finish in the top 5%.

We were married on a Friday evening at a historic Kansas City house. The fantastic brass band we hired for the ceremony played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” because they just felt the moment, and the fantastic jazz band we hired for the dinner refused to play the Chicken Dance. That was one of our first fights. Margo wanted the Chicken Dance at our wedding. I did not. She thought it would be fun. I did not. I went to the bandleader just before the wedding began and said, “Listen, people will request the Chicken Dance tonight. It’s even possible the bride will request the Chicken Dance. I want to be very clear: I do not want the Chicken Dance to be played at my wedding.”

The bandleader was more than happy not to play the Chicken Dance.

They did play “The Way You Look Tonight.” That was our first dance.

Twenty-eight years. Almost half a life ago. We had no idea what was coming. No one ever does, right? I would end up traveling the world because I just so happened to be among the last generation of newspaper and magazine writers who did such things. In the early days, Margo would often come along. Australia. London. New York. River Falls, Wisconsin. No, the trips were not always glamorous, no. Our older daughter, Elizabeth, took her first step in a Best Western in Hutchinson, Kansas. Our younger daughter, Katie, spent so much of her childhood high-fiving Big 12 mascots.

When the girls got older, we found ourselves apart a lot, especially on weekends, and especially on holidays. That’s the thing about being a sportswriter; it’s all weekends and holidays. New Year’s, I was at bowl games. Christmas, I was at holiday tournaments. The hardest was Halloween; I would be at the World Series. I missed trick-or-treating once, when the girls were little — just so I could watch the Yankees beat the Phillies 8-5 in a dreary three-and-a-half hour slugfest.

“It’s OK,” Margo assured me because she heard the despair in my voice that night. “We took lots of pictures.”

I called my editor the next day and said that, no matter what happened, I would never miss trick-or-treating again. And I never did. I would leave the World Series, come home, take the girls out, then return to the World Series the next day.

But we couldn’t do that for everything, and so I would be gone for weekends in Denver, or Green Bay, or Buffalo or Stillwater. I would be gone for a month in Beijing or Torino or South Africa. I would be gone for the Stanley Cup Finals (happening right here in Raleigh now — what a game last night!), or the Masters, or U.S. Open tennis. I was gone. We would talk on the phone every day.

Sometimes that was enough. Once, a day or two after Elizabeth had her tonsils out, she had a rough night, and I was somewhere or other, and Margo called, and together over the phone we calmed her down by reciting each of Barbie’s 12 Dancing Princesses again and again:

Ashlyn. Blair. Courtney. Delia. Edeline. Fallon. Genevieve. Hadley. Isla. Janessa. Kathleen. Lacey.

More often than not, though, the phone couldn’t bridge the distance.

And we did the best we could.

The world changed on us because that’s what the world insists on doing. Newspapers faded. Magazines faded. Technology shifted. The girls grew older. It’s different. But not all different. Sometimes 1998 feels like forever ago. Sometimes it feels like yesterday.

But here we are, still in love, still best friends, still getting ready to watch the NBA Finals together. Jordan to Wembenyama. And when someone asks the secret, I tell them it comes down to two things: One, you need to be lucky enough to find someone with a good heart who cares about you as much as you care about them. That’s how you get through the hard times. And that’s how you enjoy the good times.

And two: Don’t play the Chicken Dance at your wedding.

Unless you both want it.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the delightful boxscore email that comes to my inbox every morning, and it really does take me back to my younger days, when waking up meant going to the driveway to get the newspaper, wandering back into the kitchen, casually pulling out the sports page, pouring myself a bowl of cereal (with the box always right next to me because one bowl was never enough) and just meandering through the box scores until it was time to take the girls to school.

We’re in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, because last night we moved our youngest daughter into her senior year apartment.

I rarely eat cereal anymore.

There’s no newspaper anywhere to be found nearby.

I really don’t like how this age thing is going.

But at least there are old-fashioned box scores, even if they are on my computer.

Let’s see how baseball is going today.

Looks like nobody in the American League East is playing well — the Rays have lost three in a row, the Yankees two, the Blue Jays four. But look who is playing very well: The Chicago White Sox! They have the best run differential in the American League Central. In fact, the only American League teams with a better run differential than the Pale Hose are the Yankees and Mariners.

Don’t you love it when people call the White Sox the “Pale Hose?”

I’ve long thought that people should call the Red Sox the “Blush Hose.”

Looking at the American League Leaders — Yordan Alvarez is on Triple Crown pace! This used to be one of my favorite things to look for in the box scores; the whole idea of someone leading the league in batting average, home runs AND RBI was mind-boggling. From my earliest baseball memory, I knew that Yaz had won the Triple Crown the year I was born, and nobody won another for the first 45 years of my life.

Alvarez leads the league with a .316 average, he leads the league with 21 home runs, and he’s second in the league with 44 RBI, one behind his teammate Christian Walker. The Astros having the top two RBI guys in the league would have been something that excited me a lot more years ago, back when I thought RBI were more important than they are. Still, it’s kind of cool, no?

The Yankees Cam Schlittler leads the league with a 1.89 ERA — and I’m reminded of how dismissive Mike Schur was of Cam’s electric performance against the Red Sox in last year’s playoffs. Schlittler, you might remember, threw eight shutout innings and struck out 12 without walking anybody, and that seemed pretty darned good for a 24-year-old rookie, but Mike was convinced (being the fan that he is) that the story was much more about how bad the Red Sox offense was than how good Schlittler was.

We fans are a funny lot, right?

Someone should write a book about that. Oh, wait …

Anyway, the Red Sox offense WAS bad, but Schlittler is also crazy good — sometimes the answer is “both” — and being a Yankees grump, it makes me crazy that this team will have prospect after prospect flame out, but then they will just find some Boston kid at Northeastern, take him in the seventh round on a lark, watch him plotz around in the minors for a couple of years and then suddenly see him develop the most unhittable fastball in the world.

Cleveland’s Gavin Williams leads the league in wins (9) and strikeouts (94), and yes, somehow, Cleveland has done it again. The way this team develops pitchers is just bananas.

Over in the National League, the Braves are crazy good again, which shouldn’t be surprising. The surprising part was how they fell off the last couple of years. Here’s how good the Braves are: When you look at their team, you don’t see a single guy — or at least I don’t — who makes you think: “Wow, he is playing way over his head.”

But you see a BUNCH of guys — like Austin Riley and, until recently, Ronald Acuña Jr., and maybe Spencer Strider — who make you think: “Wow, wait ‘til he gets going.”

The Dodgers have a plus-134 run differential. Because, yeah.

Philadelphia’s Brandon Marsh is leading the National League in batting average at .335, to which I say: “Wut.”

Ashby is leading the National League with nine wins. When I saw that name, my first thought, because I’m old, is “Wait, Andy Ashby is still pitching?” Obviously, he is not — news alert to old brain: Alan Ashby is not playing anymore either — and Aaron Ashby is Andy’s nephew. Aaron is also a left-handed relief pitcher with a 9-0 record, and wouldn’t it be funny if the first 20-game winner since 2023 was a left-handed relief pitcher who threw something like 70 innings?

Well, funny is one word for it.

Kyle Schwarber has 23 home runs! One of my favorite things to do when I was young was try to calculate the home run pace of early leaders. So let’s see, Schwarbs had 23 home runs in 63 games. That means he’s on pace to hit 59 home runs over 162 games!

Yes, I realize now that Schwarbs won’t play 162 games — he can’t, he’s already missed five games — but my younger self didn’t worry too much about the math.

OK, finally: THE BOX SCORES!

Marlins 4, Nationals 1 — First thing I do is go look for James Wood; he’s become a favorite. Ugh, he went 0-for-3 with three strikeouts. Did anybody homer? Yes, Miami’s centerfielder Ruiz homered. Wait: Who? I thought all Ruizes were catchers — Carlos, Keibert, … oh, it’s Esteury Ruiz. I hadn’t thought about him for a while.

Tigers 7, Rays 2 — How did my guy Chandler Simpson do? Ugh, 0-for-4 with a strikeout. Chandler, buddy, you aren’t allowed to EVER strike out. Your whole bunt and bloop and run thing doesn’t work if you strike out. Looks like Dillon Dingler had a good day — two for four with a homer and four RBI. Dillon Dingler is a Grade A baseball name.

White Sox 8, Twins 0 — Look at them Pale Hose go. How did my favorite Colson Montgomery do … NOOOOOOO … 0-for-6 with four strikeouts? What? Yikes. So how did the White Sox score all those runs? Oh, I see, Andrew Benintendi had a day — two for three with a homer and three walks.

Mets 7, Mariners 1 — Are the Mets playing a LITTLE better? I guess they’re not. Bo Bichette had a nice game — 4-for-4 with three RBI. The three Mets relief pitchers were Raley, Weaver and Gerber, which sounds less like a law firm and more like a company trying to make a healthier baby food.

Phillies 3, Padres 2 — So I was watching this last night because of Cris Sánchez’s long scoreless inning streak — it ended at 50⅔ innings, which is the longest such streak for a lefty ever and the fifth longest overall. Schwarbs homered — I always get such a thrill when I see that 3 1 1 1 line — so that’s fun too. Also, Walker Buehler started for the Padres and it looks like he pitched pretty well. I’m always rooting for Walker Buehler.

Red Sox 8, Orioles 1 — Every single player in the Red Sox lineup got a hit. There’s a beautiful look to a box score when every player gets a hit. The Red Sox almost had the box score mathematical double because all but two players scored a run. If I were a Red Sox fan, and this were the old newspaper days, I would have clipped out this box score and put it in a scrapbook.

Guardians 5, Yankees 4 — It’s always a happy day when Cleveland beats New York in anything. When I see Cleveland win, especially when they score more than a couple of runs, I immediately think: “José Ramírez must have had a good day.” Well, of course he did: three hits and a home run for José. The Yankees were without Aaron Judge again, and that lineup doesn’t really strike fear into the heart when Aaron Judge is not in it.

Royals 5, Reds 2 — The Pasquatch — Vinnie Pasquantino — homered, and that’s all you really need to know to be a little bit happier.

Braves 7, Blue Jays 3 — Just another Braves win … but wait a minute, who is this Holmes guy that pitched for Atlanta? It’s not Clay Holmes, right — he’s still on the Mets, isn’t he? Who is Holmes?

Oh. It’s this guy. Grant Holmes.

I have no further questions.

Giants 1, Brewers 0 — I see the teams and the score and immediately think: Ben Sheets vs. Jason Schmidt, right? This old brain never stops being old. It was actually Logan Webb vs. one of all-time favorite name conundrums, Robert Gasser, a crafty lefty who, in fact, does not throw gas at all. Webb gave up one hit in seven innings. Gasser struck out five in five innings.

Cardinals 5, Rangers 3 — The Cardinals’ lineup is filled with last names that I immediately associate with players from the past.

1. Winn — Randy?

2. Herrera — Kelvin, the old Royals reliever?

3. Walker — Christian? Larry? Todd?

4. Velázquez — Gil? Freddie?

5. Burleson — Rick? How about Nate?

6. Fermin — Félix?

7. Gorman — Tom? Or how about Thomas?

8. Saggese — OK, no names come to mind.

9. Scott — Mike?

Maybe I’ve been watching baseball too long.

Athletics 5, Cubs 4 — Boy, this Cubs team baffles me. I felt kind of sure they were good. But even Nick Offerman throwing out the first pitch can’t save them. There were FIFTEEN pitchers used in this game. That seems like entirely too many pitchers.

Astros 11, Pirates 9 — I would always get so excited when seeing a high score like this because that meant there would be some offensive numbers to celebrate. I immediately go to see just how good a day Yordan had, and he didn’t disappoint — 4-for-5, a run scored, two RBI. He didn’t homer, but you can’t have everything. I see Oneil Cruz stole his 20th base!

Angels 11, Rockies 4 — I care about one thing and one thing only when I see this boxscore: How did Mike Trout do? There are 11 runs to be parsed out, let’s go! And … Trout went 0-for-3 with a walk and a run score. Yuck.

Dodgers 7, Diamondbacks 0 — Shohei Ohtani reached base five times as a hitter, and he allowed three base runners as a pitcher, and it’s just another impossible thing to add to his pile of impossible things. Mike is right: No matter how much we talk about Shohei, we never quite talk about him enough. Ohtani’s ERA, by the way, is 0.74, and he’s also now hitting .300/.400/.500 and leading the league in on-base percentage, and crazily this just might end up being his greatest season, which isn’t so great for an author who is putting the finishing touches on a book called FIFTY SEASONS, which comes out in February and is a countdown of the most magical seasons in baseball history.

Ever since the Cleveland Browns traded Myles Garrett to the Los Angeles Rams on Monday for edge rusher Jared Verse and some draft picks, I’ve heard from so many people telling me how I SHOULD be feeling.

Most of these have followed this quite reasonable line:

Look, the Browns aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

They’re still paying dearly for the trade of He Who Shall Not Be Named.

They are going to have to rebuild their team from the ground up anyway, and they had what looks like a good draft in 2025 and maybe another one in 2026, and they got a good return for a 30-year-old Garrett. Verse is a Pro Bowler, and he’s young, and he’s a lot cheaper. The extra draft picks will help. Plus, it’s pretty clear that Garrett wanted out. He asked for a trade last year, and while he quickly backed off of that and signed an extension with a no-trade clause, well, he didn’t exactly invoke that no-trade clause, did he?

Sure, Garrett wanted out because of course he did.

So, yeah, the fan reaction I was told to feel was this one: “Yeah, it sucks, but it’s probably the right move for this team in the long run.”

And maybe there’s something to that.

But fandom, in my view, is not a logical exercise. It is a matter of the heart.

And I can tell you that was NOT the reaction I felt or feel now.

No, my fan reaction was much closer to that of Crash Davis in Bull Durham when he was sent to Class A ball to be a stable pony to a brilliant young pitching prospect.

My fan reaction is simply this: BLEEP THIS BLEEPING TEAM.

And look, I can give you some of the reasoning behind that, if you want. I firmly and deeply believe that this team is the worst run in all of American sports — and there’s plenty of evidence to back me on that — so, no, I don’t trust that they will do anything of value with those draft picks, and no, I don’t think they’re capable of rebuilding this team, and no, I don’t think it’s the right move to trade away the best defensive player in the NFL and the best defensive player in the history of the Cleveland Browns, and no I don’t think that as a fan who, for thirty-plus years, has had to endure this team’s endless stupidity, cravenness and lack of a moral center that I deserve to have the one source of enjoyment that this team reluctantly offered taken away.

But those are just words.

The truth is, it just teels like the Browns kicked me — and all the other people who actually care about this team — in the teeth AGAIN. The “this could be good in the long run,” line assumes that I believe that the team has a long run, which I do not. That went away when they signed HWSNBN minutes before the NFL suspended him for sexual misconduct and gave him the biggest contract to date in NFL history, which gave him the cash to settle the two dozen sexual misconduct lawsuits against him.

Now, they’re on the verge of making him their quarterback again.

Because of course they are.

After they signed HWSNBN, I publicly renounced my Browns fandom. I publicly went looking for another team. But then, because I do believe that fandom is a matter of the heart, I found that I couldn’t really root for another team, that my connection to Cleveland and the Browns was too strong, that I couldn’t walk away from that kid who idolized Brian Sipe and Ozzie Newsome and Bernie Kosar and Clay Matthews and Hanford Dixon and the rest.

As I look back, though, I realize that I never REALLY came all the way back to Browns fandom. Yes, I watched them every week. I wrote about them often. I thrilled in watching Myles Garrett do impossible things, and I got an odd kick out of watching Kevin Stefanski’s spectacularly boring press conferences, and I enjoyed the brief but entertaining Joe Flacco renaissance in 2023.

But, well, here’s the thing: I spent the last month or so passionately watching the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA playoffs. And THAT was a fan experience. I felt highs. I felt lows. I screamed at the television (and James Harden). I cheered the television (and James Harden). I felt that nervous tension that you feel when the score is close, and the clock is ticking away, and the next play will decide everything, and you have NO IDEA what that next play will bring. When the Cavs went into Detroit for Game 7 and, shockingly, blew out the Pistons, I felt unmitigated joy. When they blew a 22-point lead in the fourth quarter against the Knicks, I died a little.

That’s a fan experience.

I have not felt ANY OF THAT for the Browns since they traded for HWSNBN.

I felt no joy when they won. I felt no pain when they lost. I watched them and followed them with interest, but that’s not the same thing. The Browns really had severed the emotional connection I have felt for almost 60 years.

And Monday, by trading away their most remarkable player — the most remarkable player they’ve had since Jim Brown, I’d say — they severed it further.

I’ve known all along that the Cleveland Browns don’t give a damn about me as a fan.

But by dealing away Myles Garrett, they are saying they actively despise me. They want me to get absolutely no pleasure out of watching this team play football.

Or anyway, that’s how it feels to me.

What does any of this mean going forward? No idea. If you ask me right now who I want to win the Super Bowl, I’ll tell you the Buffalo Bills without any hesitation. And then I’d probably list a bunch of other teams — the Lions … the Bears … the Chiefs (for my wife and oldest daughter), the Bengals, maybe. Heck, with Myles on the Rams, they move closer to the top.

My answer would definitely not be the Browns, because even though the fans deserve it — as much as, or more than, any fan base in America — the organization does not.

Not that it matters. The Browns are not going to win the Super Bowl.

Not now. Not soon. I’d say not ever, but at some point, maybe, this guy sells the team, and the front office changes course, and this team finds a core worth something. Maybe. I had a friend send me a note saying that the Garrett trade could work because after HWSNBN is gone at the end of the year, this team will have a bunch of draft picks and payroll flexibility, and a chance to take a giant leap forward.

And I responded that if HWSNBN plays even half decently, the Browns will re-sign him. Because that’s who they are.

Bleep this bleeping team.

Just as Friday’s unimaginably brilliant match between Novak Djokovic and Joao Fonseca entered the fifth set, I got a text from a good friend that went like so:

Is Novak going to escape this one? Please advise! … I know you know already … out of sheer prescience.

It is true, I think — and I don’t believe it is bragging — that as a fan over the last 20 years, I have developed a highly attuned connection to Novak Djokovic’s psyche. As someone who thinks about fandom all the time, I deeply believe in this power, deeply believe that when you care about something deeply for many, many years, you do begin to build something of a cosmic sense. I think longstanding Brewers fans understand the Brewers in ways the rest of us can’t. Knicks fans, too. Canadiens fans. There’s an unspoken knowledge that builds up inside you.

This is especially true in individual sports for all the obvious reasons — while I do think that there’s something that bridges all Knicks teams, the 2026 Knicks team is entirely different from, say, the 1999 Knicks team.

But 2026 Novak is bound to 2011 Novak, even if he can no longer do so many of the things he did then.

I never intended to become a Novak Djokovic fan — I was as caught up in the splendor of Roger Federer and the gallantry of Rafael Nadal as everybody else. One day, it just happened. Djokovic was playing Federer. The crowd was against him. I was against him. And then for reasons I can’t fully explain, it turned, suddenly, without warning. I found myself rooting for Novak. Looking back, I think of it a lot like the wonderful early scene in Babe when the farmer first saw the pig:

Narrator: The pig and the farmer regarded each other. And for a fleeting moment, something passed between them. A faint sense of some common destiny.

Not long after that match, I switched from a one-handed to a two-handed backhand.

I don’t know that I connected this to Novak at the time. I understand it now.

No, Novak Djokovic has not always made it easy to root for him. There was the vaccine thing. There were the meltdowns on the court. Coaches and others around him have talked about how difficult he can be away from the court. He never had the cool grace of Roger, or the friendly warrior persona of Rafa, or the ironic mischievousness of Andy Murray.

To so much of the world, he was a villain right out of central casting.

But he has brought me so much joy as a fan. There are many surprisingly wonderful things about him. For instance, Novak is, I believe, the most gracious loser in the history of tennis, a remarkable thing considering how rarely he has lost. I think sometimes about Federer breaking down after he lost to Nadal at the 2009 Australian Open, and I think about how I understand that. It’s the most human thing in the world. Fed put so much into it, he cared so much, and losing felt a little bit like death.

How many times have we seen that in sports? I remember when the Kansas State football team lost in the Big 12 Championship Game — losing their shot at the national title — their head coach, Bill Snyder, compared the feeling to that of losing his mother. He took some “get some perspective” criticism from many, but I never thought that was fair. That was how it felt TO HIM. I don’t believe we have any right to tell others how they should process their feelings.

The point, though, is that Djokovic NEVER reacts that way, not even after the most devastating losses. I’m sure he reacts privately — he is a perfectionist, after all — but publicly, he makes no excuses, and he throws out praise, and he often sounds like he’s oddly PROUD of his opponent for rising up in the moment.

And as a player, Djokovic’s ability to get a little bit better every year — even after he became the greatest player on earth — is simply astounding. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours (we’re probably well into the thousands by now) watching Djokovic play, and to see how he turned from a slightly robotic baseline machine into a tennis artist is, well, it’s unprecedented. In 2011, he won three Grand Slam championships and was the No. 1 player in the world. A decade later, his forehand was better, his backhand was better, his serve was better, his netplay was at a whole other level, and his imagination on the court — his ability to dazzle a player with dropshots and lobs and angles that aren’t in any geometry books — simply boggled the mind.

It was as if Tom Brady, after becoming the best quarterback in the world, improved every part of his game (which he did) but also somehow added Lamar Jackson’s open-field running and Patrick Mahomes improvisation.

Over all those years, I’ve lived with Djokovic and died with him … but mostly lived. His ability to meet the moment, to adjust to whatever his opponent is throwing at him, to shapeshift into whatever player he needed to become is what makes him, in my view, the greatest tennis player — and maybe the greatest individual athlete — in history.

All of which finally brings us back to Friday at the French Open — perhaps Djokovic’s last French Open.

I will admit that I was more than a bit bummed to see Djokovic matched up with Brazilian wonderkid Joao Fonseca in the third round. I believe Fonseca is one of maybe three or four players on earth with the firepower and will to break the Jannik Sinner-Carlos Alcaraz stranglehold on tennis. His forehand is like something out of comic books. I went into the match feeling pretty confident that Fonseca, at 19, would simply be too much for Novak, at 39.

But Fonseca, at 19, is still learning how to harness his powers, and so Novak simply played to the kid’s inexperience and inconsistencies and outmaneuvered him for two sets. At that point, a lesser force than Fonseca would have wilted. Instead, he dug in, and he began outhitting Djokovic, and he took the third set with some ease, and he took the grueling fourth set by simply being a better player than Novak is right now. And that led to the fifth set, and the text from my friend:

Is Novak going to escape this one?

My first thought was: Yes. He will escape because he always escapes, because that’s his greatest gift. A stat came across the screen that Djokovic is 38-10 in Grand Slam five-setters, and as incredible as that statistic is — he also has winning five-set records against both Federer and Nadal — it doesn’t fully capture his specific talent for breaking the spirit (and the serve) of his opponent at exactly the right moment.

And, sure enough, he broke Fonseca’s serve early in the set. Over two decades, that has been enough to sink the hopes and dreams of so many players on the other side of the net.

But Fonseca is made of sterner stuff. And he’s young. He broke right back, powered by that dream of a forehand, and suddenly I had to reevaluate. Djokovic looked so tired. Fonseca looked like he had just woken up from a refreshing nap. And I knew, even if I didn’t want to say it out loud, that this time, Djokovic would not escape. He is 39. He has been too injured to play. His legs and lungs carry the weight of the years.

Djokovic played brilliantly. That last set was the highest level of tennis imaginable, with Fonseca hitting rocket launchers and Djokovic countering with impossible winners he learned somewhere along the long road. But the ending was becoming more and more clear, even to Djokovic himself. He would stop and smile now and again, and I think there were two meanings behind that smile.

The first, I feel sure, was his almost disbelieving admiration of Fonseca’s play, as if he was saying: “What more can I do? Every shot I hit, he answers. How can anyone defeat youth?”

And then, second, I hope, was almost disbelieving admiration of his own play. I’d like to think he was thinking, at least a little bit, “Wow, look at me, after all these years, still playing heavenly tennis against someone less than half my age.”

Fonseca got the go-ahead break with a drop shot that was too good to even chase. And then, when Djokovic got a break point to even the match, Fonseca dashed hopes with an ace … and then another … and then, yes, another. He rocketed three aces to knock out the greatest returner in tennis history. Djokovic rushed to the net to praise the kid because that’s what he does. And Fonseca, when he realized what he had done, broke down in happy tears.

No one knows — probably not even Djokovic — if this was the last time in Paris. I imagine Novak will go to Wimbledon with a bit of hope that the grass can bring out his youth one more time, and then maybe he will go to the U.S. Open with a vague belief that he has a chance, but by then Carlos Alcaraz should be back, and Jannik Sinner will be locked and loaded, and the kids will be a little bit older and better, and Novak is not much for self-delusion. When he no longer believes he can win, I suspect he will stop. That moment is coming. It always comes. But it has been one helluva ride.

Bill James talks all the time about something universal and eternal about baseball: We always think we know more about the game than we do. This is because we always think we know more about the world than we do, about the universe than we do, about OURSELVES than we do. That’s the human experience. We are adrift in a black sea of ignorance, and we are carrying handheld flashlights.

The funny part of this in baseball is that our confidence never falters.

Baseball fans in the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s were SURE that the game was 90% pitching, that batting average was the key statistic, that RBI men were of greater value than those who walked, that batters who struck out too much hurt the ballclub, that speed could kill, and that it was worth an out to move a runner from first to second base.

Oh, we scoff at those fans now — even if we were those fans at some point.

Well, we were young. We were foolish. We didn’t know.

On-base percentage, not batting average, is what matters, we learned. You really don’t want to make outs by being too aggressive on the bases, we learned, and you certainly don’t want to give up outs. Pitchers do not control nearly as much as we had thought. The RBI is a wildly overrated individual statistic because it’s context-driven. And so on.

And then we started getting more information, so much information, about bat speed and launch angles and barrels (the perfect blend of bat speed and launch angles) and spin rates and sprint speed and outs above average and so much else, and maybe we started to realize that, yes, we figured out baseball! Our little flashlights had become giant beam lights.

And we make the same mistake that we always make.

The black sea of ignorance is still overwhelming us.

Consider a baseball team. They are dead last in hard-hit percentage. Dead last. They are also, as you might expect, last in baseball in average exit velocity. They have hit many fewer barrels than any other team in the game. This is also team that doesn’t walk much. They are in the bottom three in home runs.

And they have more sacrifice hits than any other team in the game.

They’re actually trying to win in 2026 with stolen bases, bunts and bloops.

This team stinks, right?

Well, wait, I should also tell you they are not a particularly good defensive team, minus-10 outs against average, not quite at the very bottom, but in the bottom third.

And their pitching? Meh. Bottom third in the league in expected batting average and expected slugging percentage against. Their ace starter is a 35-year-old journeyman who spent his prime years pitching in Japan. Their closer is a 31-year-old reliever on his third team who was never a closer before.

This team REALLY stinks, right?

This must be the Colorado Rockies? The Los Angeles Angels? The 1962 Mets?

Yeah, these are the Tampa Bay Rays.

And they have the best record in the American League.

For almost 20 years now, the Rays have confounded expectations by more or less doing the George Costanza, which is to say doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing. It’s not quite that straightforward, but close enough. And they remind us that we still don’t know diddly about this wonderful, expansive and unknowable game.

Sure, it’s still early in the season, and yes, they might fade — they are 9-1 in one-run games, and we all know how hard it is to keep up that sort of pace — but in a moment when teams pray at the altar of exit velocity, it’s utterly striking to see a team go in entirely the other direction. The Rays play more like the 1982 Cardinals than they do any modern team. They put the ball in play (the Rays have struck out way fewer times than any other team in the game) and their whole offensive strategy seems to be to get runners into scoring position and then knock hits to score those runs.

In this way, Jonathan Aranda is the perfect Tampa Bay Rays player. He leads the league in RBI in large part because he’s hitting .356 with runners in scoring position — but here’s the fascinating part. He has exactly ZERO home runs with runners in scoring position. All seven of his home runs have come with nobody on base.

It looks like Jonathan Aranda is, um, purposely trying NOT to hit home runs in clutch situations.

It looks that way because, best I can tell, he IS purposely not trying to hit home runs in clutch situations. The whole team is like that. As a team, they’ve only hit eight home runs with runners in scoring position. But they are hitting .285 in those situations, the best average in the league.

It sure seems like the Rays are doing EVERYTHING wrong.

And yet, they’re somehow scoring enough runs to win games.

Again, this all may fade. But it’s worth remembering that we probably don’t have baseball figured out, that 25 years from now we might look back and laugh at the idea that anyone ever thought launch angles and swinging for the fences and playing station to station baseball was the way to win. That’s the beautiful thing about baseball. We’ll never figure it out.

I’ve written often about my dear friend Dan McGinn, the smartest guy I know and my partner on some incredible projects like Tip Your Cap and Honor Your Hometown. Well, Dan has quietly been one of America’s leading crisis counselors over the last 40 years — quietly is the key word; he’s very carefully stayed out of the limelight. Well, he just gave a wonderful interview to Malcolm Gladwell on trust, and he talked more about how he went about his work than he ever has before. I give this my highest recommendation. You’ll feel a lot smarter after the next 40 or so minutes (or less if you listen at faster speeds):

Listen to Revisionist History: The Trust Diagnosis

One of the craziest things in tennis history happened a few minutes ago: Jannik Sinner — the odds-on and overwhelming favorite at the French Open — up two sets and 5-1 in his French Open match against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, started to cramp up.

The heat in Paris has been unrelenting in the first week, and Sinner’s one weakness as a player is his inability to endure the heat and grueling long matches. He has never won a match that lasted at least 3 hours and 50 minutes.

Fortunately, he rarely plays such matches. Sinner is a steamroller. He blasts through opponents like no one since the young Federer. He came into this match having won 30 matches in a row, almost all of them in straight sets, with most of those sets finishing 6-0 and 6-2.

And that was the match he was playing against Cerunolo — 6-3, 6-2, 5-1, and then the heat caught up with him, and he started to cramp up, and what followed was terrible and fascinating and earth-shaking for the sport: Sinner was utterly helpless. He framed overheads. He hit forehands out by 10 feet. He tried drop shots that buried in the bottom of the net. As the match went on, it seemed like every single part of his body seized up, including his tennis brain.

It’s a jarring thing to watch the best tennis player on earth turn into a weekend hacker right before your very eyes, especially at a tournament like the French Open.

But that’s what happened. Cerundolo won 18 of the next 20 games. He took the last three sets 7-5, 6-1, 6-1. For Cerundolo, this wasn’t just the biggest moment of his tennis life — he came into the match ranked 56th in the world — it was a momentous display of tennis intelligence. He simply kept the ball in play. He understood that the man he was playing was not Jannik Sinner, and that this diminished version couldn’t stay out there much longer.

The tournament is now wide open, utterly wide open, no Sinner, no Carlos Alcaraz, and there are countless juicy possibilities. Novak Djokovic could win his 25th Grand Slam title. An American — Ben Shelton, Learner Tien, Tommy Paul, or Francis Tiafoe, or somebody — could win a Grand Slam for the first time in more than two decades. The Spanish phenom, Rafael Jodar, could, at 19, follow in the footsteps of Rafael Nadal.

But in this moment, I am not thinking so much about the possibilities as I am about human frailty. The greatest pitcher in the world is just an elbow twinge away from disappearing from the scene. The greatest running back on earth can be sidelined because his big toe turns the wrong way. One wrong step can end the season — or even the career — of the most heavenly basketball player or purest goal scorer. We, as human beings, can teach our bodies to do seemingly impossible things.

But we cannot teach our bodies to not break down.

I kept watching Jannik Sinner’s face as he tried to go on. At first, it seemed like he felt some hope that his body would recover — if not entirely, at least enough for him to put up a fight. But soon, even that hope was gone, and he played on because that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s quite a thing to watch someone battle on long after they know the battle is lost. I suppose it’s just what we are born to do.

From Brilliant Reader Charles: 1994 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice Cal Ripken Jr #240

• Pitch: an inner circle hall of famer, a graceful shortstop and a powerful hitter, but instead of an action shot, I want to stage a dugout photo op where he holds the newest phone technology so he appears to be a C-villain, and he’ll have a gold chain too

• Response: no notes

From Brilliant Reader Nathan: Joe Kerrigan, Expos, Topps 1977

I was a huge baseball fan growing up , and I collected baseball cards. So, of course, my little sister collected them too. But she knew pretty much nothing about the game. So while I sorted my cards by team, by position, and so on, she sorted them by things like “biggest smile.” And the winner was this Joe Kerrigan card, which I still think of fondly today.

From Brilliant Reader Seth: Pee Wee Reese, Dodgers, Topps 1958

I’m 21. In three weeks, I’ll be moving from New York to Los Angeles. I’m chasing a dream. I’m absolutely petrified.

Aaron, my big brother, hands me a graduation present. A 1958 Topps Pee Wee Reese.

“He made the move. So can you.”

Suddenly, I’m not so scared.

Before we get to today’s huge hit — the most fun baseball player on every team — a few quick announcements.

— Our book BIG FAN is now available wherever you get books — Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. — and it’s such a joy for us to be out there talking about. The energy has been absolutely amazing. We just found out that BIG FAN is 22nd on the USA Today Best Seller List, which is bonkers because that list includes ALL books — fiction, non-fiction, kids books, paperbacks, hardcovers, the whole gamut.

And we don’t even have “Dragons” in the title.

Mike and I are going to be on Seth Meyers on June 10 and CBS Mornings on June 13, and by then, we’ll need to find a trimmed-down version of the Mookie story. It’s my favorite story in the book, I think, and it’s been a huge hit on the road — especially for longtime fans — but I think it ran like 15 minutes in St. Louis. That’s like my “I Really Didn’t Need That Stew” story (also in the book!). Maybe I should travel the country and tell stories like Mark Twain.

I think Mike and I might record the full Mookie story just for you, JoeBlogs readers.

I do want to share this comment from Brilliant Reader Tom on BlueSky because it so matches our hopes for what reading BIG FAN will be like:

Started reading Big Fan today. Every couple paragraphs there's something else that I think will be my favorite moment of the book (Dean Martin! Random Hiaasen reference! Fatuous Owls!). Then I got to the Pickleball chapter, which is absolutely the best thing Joe has ever written (ok probably not, but it IS my favorite thing Joe has written). And so many miles to go.

— Our older daughter, Elizabeth, is now running the JoeBlogs store, and she’s added some fun summer clothes and maybe my favorite item in the store, the Grilli Grill Apron, which celebrates Steve and Jason Grilli’s combined 82 big league saves. We think (we’re not sure, but we think) that Steve Grilli has purchased one. Anyway: Perfect for Father’s Day!

— I don’t want to jump the gun and start talking too much about my next book, Fifty Seasons, which doesn’t come out until February. But it’s already out there for sale, and I’m doing the edits and rewrite on it now, and I think (and hope) that when I’m done, it might just be the best baseball book I’ve written.

It’s a countdown of the fifty most magical individual seasons in baseball history, and it’s also a fresh look at some of the greatest players in baseball history, and it’s also a bit of a personal journey through baseball. I have wrestled so hard with this one because I want it to go to places that the Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball didn’t go. We’ll talk plenty about it going forward — we have a cover reveal coming, we’ll announce a cool preorder campaign, and all that. But just so you don’t worry, yeah, Mark Fidrych’s 1976 season is definitely one of the fifty.

Now, for The Clubhouse, I use the Fun Score formula to determine the most fun player on every team in baseball this year, based on the first two months of the season. It’s long and meandering, just like JoeBlogs posts should be.

The Clubhouse is where we go a little deeper. If you’re in The Clubhouse, the door is open! If you’d like to join, we would (of course) love to have you:

Read more

Some of you might remember: A couple of years ago, Tom Tango and I (well, mostly Tom) came up with what we called the Fun Score — where we determine who is the most fun everyday player in baseball based on the things they do.

I’ve made a few adjustments to it to suit my own personal feelings about fun, so here is the formula that I’m using:

• Unintentional walks and hit-by pitches: 1 fun point

• Singles: 4 fun points

• Doubles: 8 fun points

• Triples: 15 fun points

• Home runs: 12 fun points

• Stolen bases: 6 fun points

• Caught stealing: 1 fun point

I have made triples more fun than home runs — even though Tango’s surveys have consistently found that fans prefer homers to triples — and I have removed the strikeout from the fun formula, even though I do follow Tango’s logic about including them (his idea is if we think strikeouts are fun — and we do — then the batter’s contribution to the strikeout has to be part of the formula).

Anyway, that’s the simple formula. And here, based on their 162-game projections, are the 20 most fun players in baseball this year.

1. Bobby Witt Jr., Kansas City, 1,496 fun points

Witt projects to have 43 doubles, 21 home runs, and 49 stolen bases this year. I think the formula nailed this one … Witt is the most fun player in the game right now, and that’s BEFORE you take into account his defense. The Royals have been a disappointing bunch in the first quarter of the season, but if you watch them play for an entire game, you WILL see Bobby Witt Jr. do something jaw-dropping.

That’s saying something, by the way. I’ve been paying closer attention to the NBA playoffs this year because of the soon-to-be-eliminated Cleveland Cavaliers, and what strikes me about basketball is how much the game is built around the stars. Wemby is EVERYTHING. SGA is EVERYTHING. Donovan Mitchell is EVERYTHING. Jalen Brunson is EVERYTHING. You are constantly aware of them, even if they aren’t on the floor. The NFL is like that, too; it’s obviously a team game but the quarterback is the protagonist.

Baseball, as we know, doesn’t work that way: The biggest star is just one of nine. He comes up only when it’s his turn, and he will likely only come up four or five times. There might be runners on base. There might not. The pitcher might challenge him. The pitcher also might pitch around him. On Sunday, Shohei Ohtani came up five times. He went 0-for-3 with two walks. He didn’t score a run. He didn’t drive in a run. And the Dodgers won easily anyway. That couldn’t happen to a mega-star in the NBA. The shape of the sport is just different.

So a baseball player like Bobby Witt Jr., who gives you something memorable on offense or defense in just about every game he plays, is a gift.

2. Jordan Walker, St. Louis, 1,478 fun points

Sky Walker projects to hit 35 doubles, 48 home runs and steal 22 bases. He leads the National League in OPS+ and total bases. I was pretty critical of how the Cardinals developed Walker — calling him to the bigs at 21, sending him down almost immediately to work on his defense, bringing him back up, and then having him bounce up and down from the majors to the minors for the next two years. But this is the wonder of youth: Walker is still only 24 years old, and he’s figured out some things, and now he’s just a blast to watch.

3. Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati, 1,473 fun points

Projects to hit 37 doubles and 37 home runs. He’s not really gotten it going on the bases yet — he’s stolen nine bases and been caught five times — but Elly is a party every time he takes the field.

4. Corbin Carroll, Arizona, 1,466 fun points

I’m not going to lie — I thought Carroll would be on top of this list because of the triples. He has EIGHT already, more than double anybody else, and is on pace to hit 25, which would be the most for any player since, get this, Kiki Cuyler exactly 100 years ago. A few years ago, in 2019, Nick Offerman, Mike Schur, and I became obsessed with Nick Castellanos and all the doubles he was hitting. He ended up with 58. I think we need this year to concentrate all our energies on Corbin Carroll and triples.

5. Oneil Cruz, Pittsburgh, 1,406 fun points

We’ve all been saying for years that if Oneil Cruz ever figured out how to play baseball, he would be one of the most thrilling players in baseball history. Well, it wouldn’t be exactly right to say that he’s learned how to play baseball — he’s on pace to strike out an almost unthinkable 257 times, and his defense can be quite gruesome, but he’s pointing toward a 30-homer, 50 stolen base season because that’s the sort of talent we’re talking about.

6 and 7. Washington’s James Wood, 1,377 points, and CJ Abrams, 1,359 points.

I’ve been awfully hard on the Nationals for many, many reasons … but I have to admit that this team is better — and a lot more fun — than I was expecting. Wood is, of course, a treat; he’s on pace for 39 home runs, and Wood’s home runs are rocket ships. Abrams leads the league in RBI and is on pace for 30 homers. One negative: They have struggled defensively — they are both in the bottom 10 in outs against average. With Wood, I suppose you live with that, but I’m not sure how long the Nationals can keep Abrams at shortstop.

8. Otto Lopez, Miami, 1,356 fun points

I’m not sure who saw this one coming, but Lopez leads the league with a .337 batting average, and he’s on pace for 42 doubles, 6 triples, and 12 home runs.

9. Randy Arozarena, Seattle, 1,344 fun points

I come into every season thinking, “Is this the year that Randy Arozarena gives us the super-fun season we’ve been waiting for?” Well, maybe this IS the year — he’s on pace for 42 doubles and 42 stolen bases, and the American League West looks wide open, so there’s an opening for Arozarena to be the hero Seattle needs.

10. José Ramírez, Cleveland, 1,321 points

He’s off to a sluggish start, but even so, he leads the American League in stolen bases — he’s on pace to steal 60. José always finds a way to deliver.

11. Brice Turang, Milwaukee, 1,319 points

Someday, we’re all going to appreciate just how good and fun Brice Turang is. I mean, some of you might already appreciate it, particularly those of you in Milwaukee, but the rest of us will need to catch up. He was a six WAR player in 2024, he leads the league in on-base percentage right now, he’s on pace for 36 doubles, 23 homers, 29 stolen bases, and he’s a terrific defender.

12. Aaron Judge, New York Yankees, 1,302 points

You might have heard the Judge has been in a death-defying slump — that is until he hit a walk-off home run on Sunday. What you might not have heard is that even so he’s on pace to mash 52 home runs this year.

13. Sal Stewart, Cincinnati, 1,301 points

The Cincinnati Reds have a 22-year-old rookie named Sal Stewart who is on pace for a 30-homer, 30-stolen base season, and in his official photograph, he looks like someone who played for the Cincinnati Redlegs in 1887.

What I’m saying is that we are not talking NEARLY enough about Sal Stewart.

14. Xavier Edwards, Miami, 1,299 fun points

Wait, with Edwards and Lopez, do the Miami Marlins have the most fun double-play combination in baseball? Is that possible?

15. Matt Olson, Atlanta, 1,290 fun points

On pace for 51 doubles and 42 home runs. Olson just keeps trucking along.

16. Yordan Alvarez, Houston, 1,287 fun points

I’ve long contended that when Yordan’s right, he’s the scariest batter in baseball to face — scarier even than Aaron Judge — simply because there doesn’t seem to be any way to pitch him. That’s not to in any way knock Judge, who I think might just be the greatest power hitter we’ve ever seen. No, it’s just to say that with Judge, the fear is that you will make a mistake because nobody destroys mistakes the way he does. With Alvarez, you don’t have to make a mistake. He can pulverize the best pitch you have. He’s healthy again and leads the league in OPS.

17. Kyle Schwarber, Philadelphia, 1,286 fun points

The formula, alas, doesn’t take personality into consideration or Schwarbs would be even higher on the list. He’s on pace for 61 home runs.

18. Nick Kurtz, Sacramento, 1,276 fun points

Kurtz has now reached base in 47 consecutive games. This guy’s such a force; he leads the league with a .448 on-base percentage. He hasn’t really started stroking the ball yet, but he will. Here’s the call: Nick Kurtz will win the MVP award in the next five years.

19. Byron Buxton, Minnesota, 1,255 fun points

Alas, the years and injuries have taken away Buxton’s otherworldly athleticism — this guy was once Eric Davis, Usain Bolt, and Tyreek Hill rolled up into one — but he can still go on astonishing stretches. He has clubbed 11 home runs in his last 19 games.

20. Bryce Harper, Philadelphia, 1,251 fun points

It never really occurred to me that Harper is having a fun year, but I guess he is — he’s on pace for 31 doubles and 37 home runs.

Next 10 on the list:

21. Shea Langeliers, Sacramento, 1,247

22. Miguel Vargas, Chicago White Sox, 1,246

23. Cody Bellinger, New York Yankees, 1,230

24. Andy Pages, Los Angeles, 1,223

25. Ben Rice, New York Yankees, 1,216

26. Zach Neto, California, 1,212

27. Gunnar Henderson, Baltimore, 1,208

28. Chandler Simpson Tampa Bay, 1,204

29. Daylen Lile Washington, 1,197

30. Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles, 1,197

Fabulous night in Kansas City as we wind up our first week on the BIG FAN Tour. Saw so many old friends. Relived so many old memories. Told the Mookie Story (which is clocking in at 15 minutes now … we might get to the point where the whole show is just us telling the Mookie story).

We kid Jason Kander here a lot, but Jason’s a good friend and a good man, and he did a great job running the show. My favorite part was when he read a long passage I wrote in the book and tried to make the point that I tend to get away with writing long, discursive, absurdly intricate sentences. He then asked Mike, “How does Joe get away with it?”

And it was a good question, with only the slight catch that Mike actually wrote the sentence he’d read.

He managed to save the question somehow. The guy’s a pro.

The first week tour ends tonight in Los Angeles — Hermosa Beach, specifically — and it’s going to be a lot of fun with our pal Justin Halpern at the helm. I’m not going to lie, though: I’m tired. We’re tired. Dave Barry always says that the one sure thing that happens on book tours is that sooner or later, you, the author, will end up hating your own book. We’re not there, but we are tired. Travel, interviews, shows, being on all the time will take it out of you.

But the funny thing is, I never feel tired on stage or when meeting with Brilliant Readers. I think it’s something I picked up over the years from Buck O’Neil. Behind the scenes, I’d see him be SO tired. I mean, he was 93 years old when I traveled America with him.

But when he was speaking, when he was meeting people, when he was telling his stories, he was alive, he was vibrant, he was so energized. I used to think that this was just Buck being Buck — he never wanted to disappoint even a single person he met — and in some ways that was true. Buck was always Buck.

But there was something else: People powered Buck. Stories powered Buck. Being out there powered Buck. I feel that. There is something that supercharges you about being among people, telling stories, hearing laughter, connecting. At every stop, people have told us how much we mean to them — how Parks and Recreation got them through the pandemic, how my writing made them want to become a writer, how The Good Place is their happy show, how they read the Baseball 100 or Why We Love Baseball to their children at bedtime — and it’s so humbling that neither Mike or I can quite process it.

And yet, it’s also exactly why we wrote this book about fandom together.

The whole point is to pump some joy into this crazy world.

And being around that joy is the best. It will be just as wonderful tonight in LA as it was last night in Kansas City, as it was the night before in St. Louis.

Hopefully, I can sleep on the plane.

The Angels have the worst record in baseball, and Mike Trout is eighth in the American League in WAR, and this will never stop being so sad.

Do we need to start talking about Matt Olson as a Hall of Fame candidate? I mean, you don’t want to jump the gun, but he just hit his 300th home run, he’s played in like 800 straight games, and he’s leading the league in doubles, RBI and total bases. He’s at 42 or so WAR — four or five more good seasons puts him pretty much on the Paul Goldschmidt road to Cooperstown.

Freddie Freeman is already Cooperstown-bound — and while Freeman wasn’t technically swapped for Olson, he sort of was. I was trying to think: Has there ever been a one-for-one Hall of Famer trade?

Speaking of one-for-one Hall of Famer trades, someone asked Mike a fascinating question: Let’s say that the famous Joe DiMaggio for Ted Williams swap had happened. How does Mike think that would have affected his fandom?

Mike said it probably wouldn’t have affected his fandom at all — he’d still be a Red Sox fan and still abhor the Yankees — but I said that it WOULD have affected his fandom in this way: He would now be the one walking around telling everyone that Joe DiMaggio never threw to the wrong base and totally deserved those MVP awards over Williams because of his all-around game.

It’s such a wild quirk of fandom. In 1992, the New York Yankees selected Derek Jeter with the sixth pick in the draft, and Derek Jeter is the baseball player that Mike loathes most of all. When someone asked Mike on Thursday which player he would consign to the bad place, he said “Derek Jeter” without even hesitating.

But what if Jeter had come out in 1993 instead? The Red Sox had the seventh pick. What if they had taken Derek Jeter?

If that was the case, I feel certain Mike Schur would have 500 Derek Jeter jerseys in his closet right now.

We met a lovely woman on Thursday named Becky Beck.

I told her she must really love him to take that on.

The less said about the Knicks’ destruction of the Cavaliers Thursday night, the better. But it’s worth pointing out again just how weird a player James Harden is. On the surface, he didn’t have a bad game. After his turnover-palooza on Tuesday, he didn’t turn it over even once. He scored 18, grabbed six boards, made three of seven from three-point land, had a couple of assists and a couple of steals, etc.

He was minus-22 for the game.

That’s not always the most meaningful statistic, but in the case of Harden, I think it is. The Cavs were just not any good with him on the floor, particularly on the defensive end.

We figured that out that this was the first time Mike had ever been to St. Louis, which is nuts because he had been to every other MLB city already. St. Louis is NEVER the last MLB city; it’s too centrally located for that. Finding out Mike has never been to St. Louis is like finding out that someone has been to 49 of the 50 states and the one he’s missing is Ohio. Anyway, he got to finally see the Arch in person.

His reaction to that was pretty much the reaction Albert Brooks had when he saw the Hoover Dam in “Lost in America.”

Nice dam. Nice arch.

Wednesday night. Shohei Ohtani threw five shutout innings (dropping his ERA to 0.72), and he homered on the first pitch of the game (he’s slugging .888 for the last week), and it’s like, yeah, that’s what he does. I mean, they should be breaking into live programming to give us breaking news updates on Ohtani because he’s that amazing, but he also does this stuff so often that we barely even take notice anymore.

This, actually, is one of my favorite parts of Superman. At some point, it just kind of becomes normal to people that there’s a guy out there, in blue tights and a cape, who CAN FLY and also is bulletproof and is also strong enough to lift planes and also can make lasers come out of his eyes and also can blow such cold air that he can turn water into ice. I mean, just the flying thing, every time he did that, people all around should be shouting, “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THAT GUY CAN FLY! DID YOU SEE THAT? HE CAN JUST LIFT OFF AND FLY! HE DOESN’T HAVE WINGS OR ANYTHING! HE CAN JUST FLY WHENEVER HE WANTS! THAT GUY CAN FLY!!!”

Instead, they just calmly say, “Thank you, Superman, for saving my cat from that tree.”

That’s where we are with Shohei. He performs daily miracles and we’re left saying, “Thank you, Shohei, for saving my cat from that tree.”

I’m sure there’s a scientific reason for this, but: why is the water in an airport bathroom so much hotter than you expected? Every time you turn on the water from the sink, hot lava comes out.

We’re driving to Kansas City for our big Rainy Day Books event tonight at Unity Temple on the Plaza — tickets still available! — and I’m so looking forward to what I honestly believe to be the most boring four-hour drive in America. I’ve probably made this drive, I don’t know, 40 or 50 times, I would guess. That means I’ve spent roughly 200 hours of my life on I-70, driving by adult store and personal injury lawyer billboards and, so often, telling passengers (especially kids), “We’ll stop for food in Columbia!”

This will be Mike’s first St. Louis-Kansas City drive. I so envy him. It’s never quite like the first time.

Jason Kander will be moderating tonight’s show in Kansas City, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, I will tell you we have something special and maybe even a little bit touching to share with him tonight.

I’m probably going to save this for when I get back — though I might write it on the plane to Los Angeles Friday: I’m putting together an all-21st Century Baseball Team Ballot for your enjoyment.

As part of that (ht to Tom Tango) I went back to look at the 20th Century Ballot — and see how many of the players there were in the Baseball 100 (and how many Baseball 100 players were NOT on the ballot).

Here’s what that ballot looked like:

First Base

• Jimmie Foxx (B100)

• Lou Gehrig (B100)

• Hank Greenberg (B100)

• Harmon Killebrew

• Buck Leonard (B100)

• Willie McCovey (B100)

• Mark McGwire

• Eddie Murray

• Geoge Sisler

• Bill Terry

B100s not on the list: Johnny Mize.

Obviously, I’m biased, but I think Mize is a huge oversight. People talk all the time about the war years lost by Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Feller, and that’s as it should be. But Mize missed three prime years and still put up 70-plus WAR. On the flip side, I’d say I often get asked why Eddie Murray didn’t make the Baseball 100

Second Base

• Rod Carew (B100)

• Eddie Collins (B100)

• Frankie Frisch

• Charlie Gehringer (B100)

• Rogers Hornsby (B100)

• Napoleon Lajoie (B100)

• Joe Morgan (B100)

• Jackie Robinson (B100)

B100s not on the list: None

I should probably explain that if a B100 player spent any part of his career playing after 1999, I do not count him as eligible for 20th Century Ballot. That is to say, Robbie Alomar, who is in the Baseball 100, was a strong candidate for the 20th Century Ballot — he was a 10-time All-Star in the 20th century and won eight Gold Gloves and posted 54 WAR and so on. But he played on past 2000 — he is therefore eligible for my 21st Century Ballot.

Shortstop

• Luis Aparicio

• Luke Appling

• Ernie Banks (B100)

• Joe Cronin

• Cal Ripken Jr. (B100)

• Ozzie Smith (B100)

• Honus Wagner (B100)

• Robin Yount (B100)

B100s not on the list: Arky Vaughan, Pop Lloyd.

Vaughan is, of course, tragically underrated. But John Henry Lloyd is the real miss here — he’s No. 25 on my list, making him the highest-ranked player not to make the All-Century Ballot.

Third Base

• George Brett (B100)

• Eddie Mathews (B100)

• Paul Molitor

• Brooks Robinson (B100)

• Mike Schmidt (B100)

• Pie Traynor

B100s not on list: Wade Boggs

Huge, huge, huge miss here — how can you possibly have an All-Century Ballot without Wade Boggs? I guess they felt they HAD to put Pie Traynor on the list because he was (absurdly) named the greatest all-time third baseman in MLB’s 100-year celebration, but leaving off Boggs is just baffling. And Molitor as a third baseman? He played 791 of his 2,683 games at third base.

Catchers

• Johnny Bench (B100)

• Yogi Berra (B100)

• Roy Campanella (B100)

• Mickey Cochrane

• Bill Dickey

• Carlton Fisk (B100)

• Josh Gibson (B100)

• Gabby Hartnett

B100s not on list: Gary Carter

I don’t understand why Gary Carter doesn’t get more love. I guess there’s some controversy in New York about whether Carter’s number should be retired by the Mets. I get why they might not; he only played five years with the team; his best years were definitely in Montreal. But, I mean, they’ve retired all the numbers of the stars from 1986 — Strawberry, Gooden, Hernandez — and Carter was the heart and soul of that team, I think.

Outfielders

• Henry Aaron (B100)

• Cool Papa Bell (B100)

• Barry Bonds (B100)

• Lou Brock

• Oscar Charleston (B100)

• Roberto Clemente (B100)

• Ty Cobb (B100)

• Joe DiMaggio (B100)

• Goose Goslin

• Ken Griffey Jr. (B100)

• Tony Gwynn (B100)

• Harry Heilmann

• Rickey Henderson (B100)

• Shoeless Joe Jackson

• Reggie Jackson (B100)

• Al Kaline (B100)

• Wee Willie Keeler

• Ralph Kiner

• Mickey Mantle (B100)

• Willy Mays (B100)

• Joe Medwick

• Stan Musial (B100)

• Mel Ott (B100)

• Frank Robinson (B100)

• Pete Rose (B100)

• Babe Ruth (B100)

• Al Simmons

• Duke Snider

• Tris Speaker (B100)

• Willie Stargell

• Paul Waner

• Billy Williams

• Ted Williams (B100)

• Carl Yastrzemski (B100)

B100s not on the list: Monte Irvin.

There were SO many outfielders on that ballot. Wow.

Pitchers

• Pete Alexander (B100)

• Three Finger Brown

• Steve Carlton (B100)

• Roger Clemens (B100)

• Dizzy Dean

• Dennis Eckersley

• Bob Feller (B100)

• Rollie Fingers

• Whitey Ford

• Bob Gibson (B100)

• Lefty Grove (B100)

• Carl Hubbell

• Walter Johnson (B100)

• Sandy Koufax (B100)

• Greg Maddux (B100)

• Juan Marichal

• Christy Mathewson (B100)

• Satchel Paige (B100)

• Jim Palmer

• Eddie Plank

• Robin Roberts (B100)

• Nolan Ryan (B100)

• Tom Seaver (B100)

• Warren Spahn (B100)

• Ed Walsh

• Cy Young (B100)

B100s not on the list: Bullet Rogan, Phil Niekro, Kid Nichols, Fergie Jenkins, Bert Blyleven, Gaylord Perry, Smokey Joe Williams.

This is where we disagreed the most. On my side, I’ll admit I’ve gotten more complaints about Jim Palmer being left off the list than any other player, so that’s probably a miss on my part. On the other side, I think my seven pitchers — particularly the two Negro Leaguers — should definitely have been on the ballot.

Hello from the sky somewhere between Boston and St. Louis. Fantastic night at The Brattle Theater in Boston with our pal Howard Bryant — he introduced our conversation for Big Fan with a story about Malcolm X and Paul Robeson as only Howard can do, and as Mike said, he somehow landed that plane. Incredible.

The funniest part of the night might be that we kind of had to cut it a little bit short because, and this is true, they had to clear the theater for an 8 p.m. showing of, I kid you not, Desperately Seeking Susan. Yes, the 1985 Madonna film.

As such, we didn’t get to tell my favorite story in the book — the Mookie story.

We’ll try to tell it tonight in St. Louis.

Oh, hey, here’s a little essay about BIG FAN that I wrote for Barnes and Noble!

It was roughly 248 degrees in Boston on Tuesday, which I felt deeply because I decided to walk from our hotel to Fenway Park and the Red Sox store to get a hat to wear (and then give away). That’s normally a walk I love. The heat made me love it a bit less.

But along the way, I saw one of my favorite places in Boston — the Temple of Groom barber shop/hair salon. I’ve never been in there, but I love that someone wanted to open up a hair salon, and they undoubtedly batted around many, many name ideas before finally going, “Wait! The Temple of Groom! Of course!”

And every time I see it, I immediately try to think of as many movie/hair puns as I possibly can. A few I came up with on this walk to Fenway.

• The Follicles of Narnia

• No Country for Bald Men

• Dye Hard

• Shaving Private Ryan

• Weave In Las Vegas

• Funny Curl

• Comb Alone

As I said, it was very hot.

We are talking nightly about the fan experience, so it was only fitting that Tuesday night, I had one of the worst of my life. After the delightful event, meeting as many of you as we could (again, apologies that was cut short, but Desperately Seeking Susan!) and a glorious dinner with Mike’s family, I made it back to the hotel in time to catch the final quarter of the Cavaliers-Knicks playoff game.

As you now know, the Cavaliers were up by 22 with about seven and a half minutes left, and I was in total shock. I have totally written off the Cavs team multiple times during these playoffs because they are such a weird team, and time after time, they have pleasantly surprised me by becoming their best selves just when it seemed like the ride was ending. I honestly don’t think the Cavs match up with the Knicks AT ALL. But then they not only matched up with the Knicks, they were blowing the Knicks out of Madison Square Garden. Their defense was suffocating. Donovan Mitchell was Superman. Evan Mobley was everywhere. James Harden was … well, lousy, but it didn’t matter.

The Cavs were up TWENTY-TWO WITH SEVEN AND A HALF MINUTES LEFT IN THE GAME.

And then, it started to go wrong. Here’s what made it a terrible fan experience — I could see it happening in real time. All Cavs fans could. Probably all basketball fans could. The Knicks went on a little 8-0 run, and the lead was just 14, and it felt like absolutely no time had gone off the clock. Larry Munson, the wonderful old Georgia radio announcer, used to shout, “Somebody’s poured molasses on the clock.”

Somebody had poured molasses, and superglue, and tar on the MSG clock.

What do you do as a fan in that moment? There’s nothing you CAN do other than to hope that someone on the Cavs — a player, the coach, somebody — will step up and do something to change the momentum, shift the direction. disrupt the flow. But no one did. I don’t know if Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson fell asleep or froze or somehow (this seems impossible to me) didn’t fully understand the danger of the moment, but he just watched on with this semi-glazed look on his face.

What possibly could have been going through his mind as he watched the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson blow by Harden time after time after time after time? Was he thinking, “It will probably be fine?” What thoughts popped in his head as he watched the Cavaliers offense downshift into “Let’s miss free throws and turn the ball over and settle for Harden taking long jumpers” mode? I mean, there’s only so much any coach — particularly an NBA coach can do — but at some point you have to do SOMETHING, don’t you?

He did nothing. He didn’t even call timeout.

And the Knicks just kept coming back and coming back, and Madison Square Garden turned into the Roman Coliseum just as the lions were let out, and the fan in me knew with all my heart that the Cavs were going to blow it, and all that was left to see was how they would do it.

They did it by having Sam Merrill’s final three-point shot go halfway down and the, like gas station sushi, come right back up. How close was it to going down? Unless I am mistaken, it sounded to me like the fabulous Mike Breen said “BA-” like he was going to shout out his signature call “BANG!” but managed to stop himself like a batter checking his swing.

The Cavaliers were so shell-shocked they decided not to even show up for the overtime. I couldn’t really blame them. James Harden did make a final behind-the-head pass to nobody, leaving everybody with a compelling image of what collapse looks like.*

*Harden finished the game 5-for-16 from the field, 1-for-8 from three, with three assists, six turnovers, and five fouls. I’ve written this before — I’ve never rooted for any player quite like him. He’s one of the greatest players in NBA history. And when he’s bad, he’s break-your-spirit bad.

So this is the fan’s life. I fully expected the Cavaliers to lose Game 1 — and frankly, I didn’t see them winning more than one game in this series. I was ready for it. I was fully prepared to think, “You know what? This Cleveland playoff run has been so much more fulfilling than I ever could have expected. I’m going to just enjoy the ride from here on in.”

And then the team pulled me back in only to tear my heart right out of my chest.

Sports!

It’s so weird to be out on tour with a new book when I’ve already fully written my next book. I’ve been on tour before when I was WORKING on my next book, but Fifty Seasons: Stories of the Baseball Player Years That Echo (working subtitle), is already for presale, it’s essentially done (with some notes and edits to come), we’ve got a cover (to be revealed soon!), and it’s obviously buzzing around in my head because I’ve been slaving away on it for the last year.

I love telling the stories from BIG FAN, of course, and I’m deeply in love with the book, I think it’s so fun and so uplifting and so perfect for our time, but there’s also a part of me thinking, “Hey, let’s talk about Fidrych in ‘76!”

Being an author is such a wonderful but weird thing.

One of my heroes, Gerald Early, will be moderating our panel tonight at the St. Louis County Library — Gerald is one of those incredibly smart, incredibly thoughtful, incredibly cool people that I find it amazing that we are friends. Anyone who has seen him talk on any of Ken Burns’ documentaries probably thinks the same two things I thought:

1. What an amazing guy!

2. I wish he were my friend!

And I can’t wait to see the direction that Gerald will take tonight’s panel. That’s the really fun part of this tour; it’s a different show every night. It was one thing when Seth Meyers moderated Monday, another thing with Howard, it will be its own thing with Gerald tonight, entirely different when Jason Kander moderates tomorrow in Kansas City, and something else when Justin Halpern moderates Friday in LA.

Well, that was fun. Monday, Mike and I hit New York — we appeared on Morning Joe (I wore a tie! Mike did not — my mother wrote me that we should coordinate better), we had a great conversation with Pablo Torre for his podcast (coming out Thursday), and then we had a great event at The Strand with Seth Meyers. So many friends. So many laughs. So much fun.

We even had a little bit of a PosCast Holiday Draft photo — with Alexis Gay, Ellen Adair, and Alan Sepinwall!

We’re on the Acela now, heading for Boston.

Tell me if this is weird: The driver from JFK used one of those old-fashioned Garmin navigation systems to get me to my hotel — you know, one of those boxes with the suction cups on the back so that it sticks to the window. I suspect that the map on that box was last updated in, I don’t know, 1956? I think it still gave directions to the Polo Grounds.

What made it weird, at least to me, was that the guy had a modern phone — I'm pretty sure it was the latest iPhone — that he used to find the exact address of my hotel so that he could manually punch it into the Garmin. It was totally wonderful; he was very happy to have this new-age device that would give him the exact address of any hotel he entered on demand and seemed entirely unaware that this same device could also give him an up-to-the-minute map.

On the way to one of our stops, we passed by a store called “Varick News International,” an old-fashioned newspaper and magazine store. When you’re in New York, you pass such places fairly often, but for some reason, I felt such a wave of nostalgia hit me when I saw it. I loved everything about newspaper and magazine shops; I loved the way they smelled, I loved their disorderly nature, I loved just browsing through the sports and general interest magazines in search of something strange or fascinating.

Hmm, a magazine called “Bow and Arrow!” What kind of stories do they have in a magazine called “Bow and Arrow?”

Anyway, we didn’t have time to stop into Varick New International, but we will be back in New York in a couple of weeks, and I’m going to try to make a pilgrimage.

There are too many things to say about the awesomeness of Victor Wembanyama, but I think maybe the most awesome thing is how many points he prevents without doing anything at all. We will never know exactly how many runs Roberto Clemente invisibly prevented simply because runners didn’t want to challenge his arm, but there is a number.

Well, how many times does an NBA player begin to drive and then remember, “Oh, wait, Wembanyama is there,” and then stop? Mike thinks there should be a stat called “Aborted takeoffs” that measures the number.

As planned, I bought a Mets hat for the Strand event on Monday Night. It was a 1986 anniversary hat, very cool looking, and after I picked it up, the guy in the Lids said, “Hey, do you want Francisco Lindor’s autograph on here? We have the right to MLB players’ autographs if you want it stitched in.”

And I said, “YES I DO!”

And now that I know this is a possibility, I might just start buying random hats and having random players’ signatures stitched on the side. I don’t know how far I can take this. Like, could I get a Rockies hat with Paul Skenes autograph stitched in? Could I go cross-sport — like get a Bruins hat with Patrick Mahomes signature on it? The possibilities feel endless.

My intention (if I can find the time) is to find a Lids in Boston to get a cool Red Sox hat … I’ll have to figure out the signature thing (do I dare get a Mookie Betts signature on it?). My idea is to give away the hat at the end of the night; Margo thinks this is a terrible idea because nobody will want a hat that I was wearing. But I won’t be wearing it for long!

Seth Meyers, it will not surprise you to know, is really, really good at moderating stuff. They should give him a show.

Tonight’s event at The Brattle Theater will start at 6 p.m., and there are apparently still a couple of tickets left. If you’re around Boston, we’d love to see you. I feel fairly confident that we can get Mike to rant a bit about the Red Sox this year. He’ll be doing it all day anyway.

BIG FAN Book Tour: Day 1 — New York City

Hi everybody. The BIG FAN Tour begins! I’m in my classically tiny New York hotel room — How small is it? It’s so small, you put the key through the keyhole, and you break a window! I tell ya! — and I’m about to get ready to head over to appear on Morning Joe. Then we’re doing Pablo Torre Finds Out. Then we’re doing our sold-out event at The Strand tonight with Seth Meyers. The tour is rolling!

I actually did my first event Sunday in Charlotte, and it was fantastic. We had a small get-together at the house, and as you can see above, Margo got a BIG FAN cake! Yeah, that book in the middle is cake! And we ordered Buffalo Wild Wings to celebrate that most American establishment where Mike and I started the book — we spent eight hours in a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas on the opening Sunday of the NFL season. Then we all hung out for a little while at the Barnes & Noble, just a few minutes from our house. Good times.

This week will obviously be pretty scattered and wild, but I’ll try to offer some quick thoughts from the road.

— I was absolutely stunned by Cleveland’s blowout victory in Game 7 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series against Detroit. I went in entirely sure that the Cavs would lose and probably lose big. Cleveland had bombed out in Game 6 at home, the Pistons had been all-but-unbeatable in Detroit, the Cavs’ James Harden had shot something like 9% in Game 7s, and so on.

But it’s easy to forget as a fan that sometimes the other team will stink up the joint.

And the Pistons did just that. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the Cavs played beautiful basketball. Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley were monsters. Donovan Mitchell went into Superman mode when needed. Sam Merrill, of all people, took over the game at times. And while Harden went 2 for 10 from the field and 0 for 6 from three — I mean, his Game 7 shooting woes seem to happen too often to be a coincidence — he was a steadying force. He turned the ball over just once all game and was plus-31.

The Cavs had 31 assists in the game. The Pistons had 30 total field goals in the game.

But let’s not kid anybody: The Pistons were awful, horrendous, no energy, no defense, terrible shots. Cade Cunningham scored 13 and didn’t make a three-pointer. Tobias Harris didn’t make a shot all game. The only reason the Pistons lost by 31 is that the Cavaliers missed 16 free throws. It should have been even worse.

Maybe it’s the Cleveland in me — or maybe all fans feel this way — but I truly expected the opposite to happen. This Cavaliers team is so hard to figure out, so wildly inconsistent, and that’s where my mind’s focus was. But the truth is that Detroit, even after winning 60 games this season, is ALSO hard to figure out and ALSO wildly inconsistent, and as a fan, you just don’t give equal consideration to the opponent. I saw Detroit as this big, scary, defensive monster that swarms and forces a billion turnovers and then lets Cade Cunningham and Duncan Robinson and Tobias Harris cut your heart out. They were that often in this series. But in Game 7, they were horrendous.

— It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t credit my pal Mike for calling it, by the way.

Our text exchange:

— I have subscribed now to boxscore — hat tip to great pal, , for reminding — and that means every day I get an old-fashioned, 1970s style newspaper baseball page, complete with the standings, the leaders, today’s schedules, and, yes, box scores from each team. It makes me very happy. Look, Shea Langeliers is leading the American League with a .337 average! Whoa, Kyle Schwarber already has 20 home runs! If only there were a way to print this stuff out on old newspaper newsprint and have it delivered to my doorstep every morning so that I could put on slippers and walk out to the driveway in my robe, while waving to neighbors, and then sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a danish and just read over the box scores. If only.

— Speaking of Tommy, Mike and I did a fun interview with him for his newsletter.

— It still blows my mind that FIFTY SEASONS is up and available for preorder BEFORE BIG FAN even hits the shelves. We’ll have plenty more to say about it in the months ahead, of course, but I think you’ll get a pretty big kick out of it.

— I’m going to wear a tie to Morning Joe. I know that’s random, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. I don’t wear ties often anymore. I’m not planning on wearing ties to any of the events because BIG FAN doesn’t feel like a necktie sort of book. It’s more of a baseball cap kind of book. My goal, actually, is to wear a baseball cap celebrating the local ballclub in each city; though I have to actually go out and buy one in each city, so it might not happen (I brought my trusty Cleveland cap just in case).

But I’m going to wear a tie for Morning Joe and the other TV appearances coming up because, well, because of my dad. I’ve talked about this before: My dad worked in a factory. He fixed and maintained sweater machines. It was a grueling and messy job; he’d come home with oil and grease on his clothes and his face. When I interviewed the wonderful Phil Niekro for the Hall of Fame movie “Generations of the Game,” he told me about his dad coming home from the coal mine, and Phil could barely even see his face, he was so covered in dirt and dust, and I nodded and understood.

My father put on a tie maybe five times in my entire childhood. It was always a big deal. And there was this understanding between us that wearing a tie meant, I don’t know, something larger. Success, maybe? He never said so, but I think he always wanted me to have a job where I wore a jacket and tie.

Anyway, I'll be wearing a tie on Morning Joe.

What’s your favorite ever baseball card?

Brilliant Reader John: My favorite baseball card is actually two cards — my 1955 and 1956 Topps Ted Williams cards. I bought them at a flea market in Nashville when I was 11 years old in 1977 for $20 each because he was and is my favorite player of all time. My mother about lost her mind when she learned what I paid. I still have them. Little did I know then that I would later be involved in the litigation over Ted Williams's remains in 2002-2004 (I represented Bobby-Jo, his oldest daughter, who wanted to carry out the terms of his will — cremation, not cryonics).

Brilliant Reader Robert: I was certain the Phillies had a future Hall of Famer. In hindsight, Kevin’s wearing a Henley shirt on the card. I still have it, encased in plastic on my bookshelf. You can get one yourself for less than a dollar on eBay.

Brilliant Reader Deepak: A friend gave me this 1959 Ernie Banks card two years ago. I hadn’t collected in 35 years. Now I collect again with my son. Banks is 28 here — young, resolute, hopeful, unaware of the decades of losing ahead. These days, that quiet optimism feels like something worth holding onto.

From Joe: The 1959 Ernie Banks card is absolutely one of my favorites.

A quick baseball card story: So you must know by now that Mike and I have been spending the week doing a bunch of interviews for our book BIG FAN, which comes out in THREE DAYS! It’s already so much fun. Here’s an interview we did with Mass Live.

Well, one of the interviews we did was with The Art of Fatherhood podcast, one of our favorites, and at some point, Art thought it would be fun to open a pack of 1989 Donruss cards while he asked us questions. One of the questions he asked was: What baseball player have you collected the most? Mike went first because his answer is easy: He has tried to collect every single Mookie Betts rookie card ever produced. He had not gotten there and never will, but as his friend Olivia said when she saw his Mookie stack: “I mean, I guess I would say, ‘That’s too many Mookie Betts rookie cards.”

In the middle of the book, we have a color photo insert, and this is my favorite spread:

In case you can’t read the words, they say: “These are some, but not nearly all, of the Mookie Betts cards Mike owns.”

Anyway, that’s not the story. Art then asked me the same question, and I said that I don’t collect the way Mike does now, so I have to go back to my younger days. And in my younger days, I collected Cory Snyder cards like a madman. I bought every one I could possibly find. I traded for them. I bought them in shops. I opened countless packs to find more. At one point, I’m pretty sure I had at least 200 Cory Snyder cards — had them both because he was my favorite Cleveland player at the moment and because I was sure he was going to be a Hall of Famer, which would make his card worth enough to ensure my retirement.

We know how that turned out.

But what was great was that as I talked about Cory Snyder — I mean LITERALLY as I talked about him — Art pulled a 1989 Donruss Cory Snyder card.

This is bonkers because, as mentioned, BIG FAN comes out in three days — my first BIG FAN event is in Charlotte in just TWO DAYS — but on Thursday, a new book popped up on the book sites.

Yep, Fifty Seasons is ALREADY available for presale.

I need to slow down. Enjoy life a bit more. My wife has started calling me James … after James Patterson. I think she means it as a compliment. Maybe.

Fifty Seasons publishes on February 2.

Here, by bWAR, are the six best starting pitchers in baseball right now:

1. Halos’ Jose Soriano: 6-2, 1.66 ERA, 61 Ks in 54 innings

2. Southsiders’ Davis Martin: 5-1, 1.62 ERA, 52 Ks in 50 innings

3. Redlegs’ Chase Burns: 5-1, 1.87 ERA, 55 strikeouts in 53 innings

4. Bombers’ Cam Schlittler: 5-1, 1.33 ERA, 59 strikeouts in 53 innings

5. Phils’ Chris Sanchez: 4-2, 2.11 ERA, 67 strikeouts in 55 innings

6. Guards’ Parker Messick: 5-1, 2.35 ERA, 58 strikeouts in 53 innings

That’s some list, right? I mean, other than Sanchez, could you have called any of them? Yes, they are followed by two familiar names — Sale and Ohtani — but after that comes 33-year-old Clay Holmes and 35-year-old Nick Martinez.

We’ve talked a lot here about the fading significance of starting pitchers, but it feels to me even more stark than we’ve discussed. There are still superstarters like Paul Skenes and Max Fried and the injured Tarik Skubal and Garrett Crochet, but, yes, the injury watch is always on for those guys, and so you can’t really count on any of them to be good for a decade or more the way you could count on Kershaw and Scherzer and Greinke and Maddux and Unit and, well, you know the names.

For instance, I watch Jacob Misiorowski’s impossible feats of strength with anxiety and worry. On May 1, MIsiorowki threw 23 fastballs 101 mph or faster.

Seven days later, he threw 29 fastballs at 101 mph.

Five days after that, he threw THIRTY fastballs at 101 mph.

I want to enjoy that the way I enjoyed watching Nolan Ryan or Rob Dibble or Justin Verlander throwing blazing pitches.

Alas, when I watch Misiorowski pitch, I can’t help but see the “Misiorowski Feels Elbow Discomfort; Will Skip Next Start” headline, followed by, “Brewers Optimistic That Miz Will Not Need Surgery,” followed by “Misiorowski Hope For Quick Recovery from Tommy John.”

But what can you do? Ask The Miz to throw slower? I mean, that’s not viable.

I sometimes wonder: Would baseball be a better game if teams were allowed to use only two pitchers on any given day? This is not a serious suggestion — it’s obviously not going to happen — but more like a thought experiment. What would happen if MLB announced: That’s it, starting immediately, teams are only allowed to use two pitchers.

In the short term, of course, there would be chaos. Offense would explode. Teams would run out of pitchers and have to use position players constantly. Pitchers used to maxing out for five innings would find it hard to adjust to their new reality.

But what would happen long term? I imagine that long term, velocity would drop, pitchers would develop more secondary pitches, the knuckleball would return into the game, star pitchers who could throw 250 or 300 great innings would become the most valuable commodity in the game. I think, in time, iptchers would adjust because they’d have no choice but to adjust.

I’m not saying that’s a better brand of baseball — in many ways, it’s not — but for people my age, it’s a more familiar game.

My fandom of the Cleveland Cavaliers has definitely gone up and down over the years, simply because my interest in the NBA tends to rise and fall based on where I am in my life. Right now, I’d say my NBA fandom is peaking because of Wemby and the surprising rise of the Charlotte Hornets and my friendship with Daryl Morey … and that has meant that I’ve been watching the Cleveland Cavaliers playoff run with a passion I haven’t felt since the LeBron days.

This Cavaliers team is hard to figure. They will go through dismal stretches — especially against a great defensive team like the Detroit Pistons — where it appears they have only just learned the rules of basketball. They will commit the most egregious of turnovers one after another after another. They will simply forget to cover that big guy standing right by the hoop. They will take shots that would make World B. Free — one of my all-time favorite Cavs and maybe the greatest ball hog in NBA history — blush.

And then they will go through heavenly stretches where you think that no one could ever beat them.

I suppose this comes down to their two stars, Donovan Mitchell and, especially, James Harden. This is not a two-man team. Evan Mobley is a 6-foot-11 wonder who does everything on the court — he was defensive player of the year last year, he’s a rebounding force at times, he brings the ball up and shoots threes now and again, he’s the energy that drives the team. Jarrett Allen is listed at 6-foot-9, but there are times when the guy just turns into Shaq. He was preposterous in Game 7 against Toronto; he scored 22 points, grabbed 19 rebounds, blocked three shots, picked up a couple of steals, and he just took over that game.

Max Strus is such a funny player to me — funny because I absolutely loathed him and thought him absurdly overrated when he was on Miami, and I love him and think he’s criminally underrated now that he’s on Cleveland.

But it’s Mitchell and Harden who make this team go, and they’re so different. Mitchell is a modest whirlwind who can disappear for entire quarters at a time, and then suddenly he takes over the game by being everything, everywhere, all at once. In the first half of Game 4 against the Pistons, you wondered at halftime if he missed the team bus. He then scored 39 points in the second half, tying a playoff record.

But it’s Harden who has my full attention now. He has to be the weirdest great player in NBA history — I mean weird on the court. The Beard is 11th all-time in scoring, 12th all-time in assists, 22nd all-time in steals, and fourth all-time in free throws made. He has led the league in scoring twice. He has shot more three-pointers than anyone in NBA history except Steph Curry.

And nobody has any idea what to make of him.

Watching him closely, as only a devoted fan can, has not cleared up anything at all. All I can say is that James Harden is always doing something dramatic that will either win or lose the game. He’s dribbling into double teams and falling down after getting stripped of the ball, or he’s blowing by a defender (how can he still have such a quick first step at 36?) and hitting a gorgeous floater over nine outstretched arms (while getting fouled, of course). He’s shooting some off-balance three airball as the shot clock expires because he dribbled it out, or he’s dropping a Magic Johnson pass to Mobley in the paint when even Mobley didn’t know he was open. He’s complaining to an official while the guy he’s covering breezes down an empty lane for a dunk, or he’s making the dagger three that knocks a team out.

I’ve never really rooted for anyone quite like him in any sport. And yes, I know, I’m late to the party, I know that Oklahoma City fans and Houston fans and Philadelphia fans and Brooklyn fans and Clippers fans are all saying the same thing: “This is not new. This is the James Harden Experience.” And I’ve been well aware of that from the outside looking in.

But it’s different when you’re the fan looking out. Tonight, the Cavaliers try to take out the Pistons, and there’s no doubt that James Harden will be front and center, and I imagine he will win or lose the game because that’s just what he does. I just don’t have any real sense of which way it will go.

BIG FAN comes out in just four days, and Mike and I are doing a bajillion interviews that will be coming out over the next couple of weeks (the first, our interview with Awful Announcing, just came out) — apparently, we’re going to be on Morning Joe Monday, which is bananas. We’re also going to be on Seth Meyers on June 10, which is even wilder.

Anyway, it’s clear from the early interviews that people want to know: How the heck did you guys get Tom Hanks to write the foreword to BIG FAN?

Here’s that story:

If you’re a long-time reader, you already know that two and a half years ago, I was in Los Angeles for some reason or another, and I got a call from Margo. The call, in my memory, went like so:

Margo: You just got a letter, and I’m opening it.

Me: I believe that’s a federal offense.

Margo: I don’t care. I’m opening it.

Me: Who is it from?

Margo: I’m opening it RIGHT NOW.

She opened it, and inside was a scroll — a literal four-foot scroll — of typewritten joy. It was the most wonderful and elaborate fan letter I have ever received. And, yes, it was from Tom Hanks.

I was reminded of this now-framed scroll at the end of Wednesday’s glorious Stephen Colbert interview with Tom (I think I can call him Tom?), when he gave Colbert a box of connected dot matrix paper and a typewriter.

This letter came completely out of nowhere. I had not met Tom Hanks. I still have not met Tom Hanks. But it was such a beautiful letter — he talked about his love of baseball, his history as a fan, his appreciation of my work. I often think of the Albert Brooks line in “Broadcast News” when William Hurt asked him what you do when your life surpasses your dreams.

“Keep it to yourself,” Brooks said.

Funny! But wrong! Well, anyway, I think it’s wrong. When your life surpasses your dreams, you owe it to yourself and also the world to celebrate it, because it’s such a rare thing … and maybe, hopefully, it reminds us all that it can happen, impossibly good things can happen, and sometimes when you least expect it.

Anyway, I was in the clouds for days and then wrote back to Tom on my own typewriter, and he wrote back to me, and I wrote back to him, and he wrote back to me, and I wrote back to him, and so on, until it became clear that I had officially become pen pals with Tom Hanks. Let me repeat again: I’ve never met him. I don’t have any of his contact information other than the P.O. Box address for his Playtone production company. This will come up again in a moment.

Just before Mike and I started writing BIG FAN, I sent Tom a letter telling him about the book. Well, as I recall, that was sort of an aside in a letter that was more about some baseball questions he had asked and manual typewriters.

That’s when he sent me a letter about his fandom — about how he fell in love with hockey, how he fell in love with Aston Villa, how his sports fandom had defined his life and, yes, the life of his family. It was (and is) an utterly remarkable letter. I sent a copy of it to Mike for two reasons. One, I thought it could serve as a compass for how we wrote the book. And two, I wanted him to know that I got another letter from TOM HANKS! Mike has actually met Tom on a couple of occasions because Mike’s a big Hollywood legend and all that. But he has never gotten a letter from him!

Anyway, in a couple of the letters, Tom invited me to come to Los Angeles and go to a baseball game with him. Well, this was a wonderful offer, obviously, but it was particularly compelling for a very specific reason: When Mike and I decided to write the book, one of the first things we decided was that we should give each other a dream chapter as a gift. That is to say: We should each get to do something we’d always wanted to do as fans, something dear to our hearts, and write about it.

Mike immediately knew what his dream would be: He’s a lifelong Liverpool fan but had never been to Anfield. So we set it up for us to go to Liverpool for a match against Manchester United, which we went on a miserably cold and icy day, and it was every bit as glorious as you would hope: It’s one of my favorite chapters in the book.

I had a harder time coming up with a dream chapter because, as mentioned, my life has in so many ways already surpassed my dreams. I’ve covered most of the biggest sporting events on six continents in my absurdly lucky career. But then it hit me: What if I could go to a baseball game with my favorite all-time actor, Tom Hanks? I mean, it was an open invitation! This would be incredible!

So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I wrote to Tom with the idea.

And then, like a 19th-century debutante, I waited for him to write back by post.

Me: Any word?

Butler: Not yet, m’lord, but I’m sure he will respond.

Me: You really think so?

Butler: I feel sure of it. This is the man who played both Forrest Gump and Jimmy Dugan.

Me: Yes. Those are very different men, indeed.

Tom did respond. He invited me to join him in his box on Opening Day. It was amazing. It was also, as mentioned, sent by mail, so I received the letter two weeks after Opening Day. In so many ways, that was perfect. I ended up choosing a different dream — I went to see the best card magician in the world, Dani DaOrtiz, perform the greatest card trick in the world, Any Card, Any Number. It was brilliant.

A couple of weeks after that, Mike called and said, “Do you think Tom would let us use the letter he sent you as our foreword? A fan letter to open BIG FAN?” It was an amazing idea, not simply because it was a letter from Tom Hanks — though, of course, that doesn’t hurt — but because it was such a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a fan.

I somehow got word to Tom — this time through a mutual friend; I didn’t really trust the timeliness of mail — and he said yes immediately, which is amazing. And now his letter is there for everybody to enjoy. What a world! What a life!

I imagine you saw the New York Times’ thirty greatest living American songwriters — and maybe you have seen some of the furious reaction to the list. As the author of The Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball — and someone who can’t really go many places without someone yelling at me for leaving Jim Palmer or the Rick Monday flag rescue or something off my lists — the reaction felt familiar to me. But, I mean, that’s why you do these lists, right? You do them to celebrate greatness. And you do them to get people to engage, to respond, to consider what greatness means.

Hey, I didn’t love the Times’ list either.

But the best thing I’ve seen on the list was written by my friend Brian, who has a wonderful new newsletter called The Greatest Show, Man, where he celebrates the absolute wonder of music, particularly in East Nashville, where he lives.

Brian loves music more than anyone I know. He has spent his entire career in music, working for labels and managing acts and so on, but his love of music goes so much deeper than that. He goes to a show (at least one) pretty much every night. He is constantly pushing to find new music, something that is hard to do for 60-somethings. Anyway, he writes about the good things about the list, and he writes about his dear friend Lucinda Williams, and if you love music or want to find your love of music, I think you’ll get a huge kick out of his free newsletter.

One of the things about sports that blows my mind in the most wonderful way is that, every now and again, a person will come along who is just better than everyone else. I think, for example, about Jannik Sinner. I recently saw an interview with comedian Michael Costa, a former professional tennis player who topped out at No. 864 in the world. What he said to the host, essentially, was: “I’m a better tennis player than anyone you know.” He didn’t say it in a bragging way at all, just matter-of-fact.

And he’s 100 percent right. Unless you happen to be friends with, say, Pete Sampras or Rafa Nadal, Michael Costa is better than anyone you know. The tennis pro I hit with every week, Bobby, is a fantastic player (and a high-level ironman competitor) capable of hitting the line on any and every lob he hits, capable of blasting a forehand or backhand so deep on each shot that all I can do is (sometimes) chip the ball back.

Michael Costa is WAY better than Bobby. Like he’s in another world.

And he topped out at EIGHT HUNDRED SIXTY FOUR in the world.

That’s how good these top tennis players are — then, when you get into the top 500, the top 250, the top 100, the top 50, I mean, these players are so good that the mind can barely even comprehend it, and then when you get into the Top 25 or the Top 10, it doesn’t even make sense.

Then you see that Jannik Sinnner has won 31 consecutive Masters 1000 matches? He’s won five straight Masters 1000 tournaments (a record) and seems well on his way to winning in Rome. He has lost TWO SETS during the streak, both in tiebreakers, both early in the tournament when he was still getting his bearings.

It’s lunacy. Yes, it’s true that Carlos Alcaraz, the only player in Sinner’s universe, has been hurt, but Sinner did beat Alcaraz in April in Monte Carlo, and anyway, you have to play the players in front of you. Zverev is the No. 3 player in the world — Sinner beat him 6-0, 6-1 in Paris on hard courts, beat him 6-2, 6-4 on hard courts at Indian Wells, beat him 6-3, 7-6 on hard courts in Miami, beat him 6-1, 6-4 on clay in Monte Carlo, and beat him 6-1, 6-2 on clay in Madrid.

And it defies explanation how one player can be so much better than everyone else.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about with Paul Skenes.

On Tuesday, Paul Skenes faced the Colorado Rockies. He struck out the first six batters he faced, had a no-hitter going into the seventh, and ended up throwing eight shutout innings. In other words, it was just another Tuesday for Paul Skenes. His season ERA is now 1.98, which is both remarkable (you might remember he gave up five runs in two-thirds of an inning on Opening Day, thanks in some part to some creative defense from Oneil Cruz) and utterly mundane (his career ERA is 1.97).

This was the grand hope for Skenes when he was the first pick in the 2023 draft after, perhaps, the greatest college pitching season ever. But such grand hopes are rarely realized. Skenes was the eighth college pitcher to be taken No. 1 overall this century. Here’s that list:

• 2002: Pittsburgh took Bryan Bullington No. 1 overall out of Ball State

Expectations were actually not that high for Bullington — the Pirates drafted him because they could afford to sign him. Pittsburgh GM Dave Littlefield basically said that nobody really stood out in the draft, and so they took a college pitcher they could sign, and they hoped he was close to the big leagues. They passed on, among others, Zack Greinke, Cole Hamels, and Matt Cain. Bullington dealt with injuries and inconsistency and made 10 big-league starts.

• 2006: Kansas City took Luke Hochevar No. 1 overall … sort of out of Tennessee

In 2005, Hochevar was the 40th pick overall by the Dodgers — technically a first-round pick because of all the compensatory picks — and he didn’t sign. His agent Scott Boras instead had him play some independent ball, and it’s still a complete mystery why the Royals fell in love with him. The Royals were in limbo at the time; they didn’t technically have a general manager (Dayton Moore had been hired but had not started) and somehow, at the midnight hour, they decided to take Hochevar over, get this, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Tim Lincecum and Andrew Miller. It didn’t work out, though Hochevar did throw 10⅔ scoreless innings in the Royals run to the 2015 World Series title.

• 2007: Tampa Bay took David Price No. 1 overall out of Vanderbilt

Price was the first mega-hyped college pitcher of the 21st century, I think, and he was called up the very next year and pitched very well in the playoffs. Price was terrific from 2010-12, making the All-Star team all three years, winning a Cy Young Award and also finishing second in the Cy Young voting. In 2015, while pitching for both Detroit and Toronto, he won his second ERA title and again finished second in the Cy Young voting. He was a huge part of Boston’s run to the World Series title in 2018. It was a fantastic career.

• 2009: Washington took Stephen Strasburg No. 1 overall out of San Diego State

Strasburg might have been the most hyped pitcher of all time — his debut was something of a national celebration. Injuries plagued him and his career, but he carried the 2019 Nationals to the World Series title, and while his career feels more like a “what could have been” than anything else, when he was healthy, he was truly something else.

• 2011: Pittsburgh took Gerrit Cole No. 1 overall out of UCLA

The Cole hype was not quite on the level of Strasburg or even Price, I don’t think, but everybody knew he had a chance to be a special pitcher. And he has been that. If he can come back after Tommy John surgery and be even a passable version of his former self, Cole has a real shot at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He has finished top five in the Cy Young voting six times.

• 2013: Houston took Mark Appel No. 1 overall out of Stanford

Weird one. Pittsburgh took Appel with the eighth overall pick and turned down a nearly $4 million offer. What’s weird about it is that, apparently, his agent Scott Boras was not the driving force behind the decision. Appel wanted to play for his hometown Houston Astros and was confident enough in his own abilities (and the power of a Stanford degree) to go back to school. Then, the next year, Houston took Appel No. 1 overall. There were some scouts who were skeptical of Appel’s stuff, and sure enough, he struggled to miss bats in the minors. Then he hurt his shoulder and stepped away from the game. He tried to return four years later and briefly reached the big leagues in 2022.

• 2018: Detroit took Casey Mize No. 1 overall out of Auburn

What really impressed scouts about Mize coming out of college was his command; he had good stuff, certainly, but it was the way he commanded his pitches — “He’s like a 10-year veteran,” one scout said — that seemed to separate him. Because of that, there wasn’t a lot of hype about him; he didn’t look like a future ace so much as he looked like a solid middle-of-the-rotation pitcher who might make a couple of All-Star teams. Then came the injuries. He’s back now, and he’s pitching pretty well despite a meh fastball. His splitter and slider are top-notch.

• 2023: Pittsburgh took Paul Skenes No. 1 overall out of LSU

The reason I went through all eight pitchers taken No. 1 overall this century is to make the point — there’s SO much talent out there. The worst big league pitcher, if he’s from your hometown, will be elected to various hometown Halls of Fame and might even have a statue built in his honor. The best baseball player to come out of my high school is almost certainly Luke Little, who has made 40 big league appearances for the Chicago Cubs, and you probably haven’t even heard of him.

And so when you’re talking about the No. 1 overall pick in the draft, my gosh, the heights.

And then you see how some of them didn’t pan out, yes, but others like Cole and Price and Strasburg have been amazing, superstars, Cy Young winners, World Series heroes.

And then along comes Paul Skenes, and he’s simply better than any of them, better than anybody, the best pitcher in baseball (certainly now that Tarik Skubal is hurt), one of the most dominant pitchers we’ve ever seen. He doesn’t give up hits — he’s had no-hitters going late into each of his last two starts and is allowing an unthinkable 4.5 hits per nine — but he also doesn’t walk anybody. His 0.906 career WHIP is simply laughable. Sure, he’s only thrown 370 career innings, but nobody is even close. Addie Joss is second among starters with a 0.968 WHIP, but Addie Joss played in the aughts, when baseballs weighed as much as Buicks.*

*Joss pitched 2,327 innings … and allowed 19 home runs in his entire career.

How is Skenes so good? Yes, he throws a high-90s fastball, but other guys do that too. Yes, he has a disappearing change-up, but others have great change-ups. Yes, his sweeper moves like a wiffle ball, but it seems like everyone can throw that pitch in baseball today.

No, there’s something else about Skenes — just like there’s something else about Sinner — that comes down to focus and will and utter command of his talents. Skenes has walked seven batters all year and none in a month. That doesn’t just tell you about his control, it tells you about his confidence. He doesn’t give in. He doesn’t back down. He knows EXACTLY what he’s doing at all times.

Look at the first six strikeouts of Tuesday’s game:

First: On a 2-2 count, he threw an 89-mph changeup just off the plate to Edouard Julien, who dutifully chased it for strike three.

Second: He threw a 96-mph fastball up in the zone to Mickey Moniak, just low enough to be tempting to a slugger like Moniak, just high enough to be out of reach.

Third: On a 1-2 count, he threw a 97-mph fastball to Hunter Goodman that was not hittable, but because he was ahead in the count, he knew Goodman would try. Goodman did try.

Fourth: On an 0-2 count to T.J. Rumfeld, Skenes decided to paint the outside corner with a 96-mph fastball. Rumfeld watched it go by and walked dejectedly back to the dugout.

Fifth: With the count 2-2 to Tyler Freeman, Skenes threw a new look — a sweeper that seemed, for an instant, to be in the zone but very quickly spun away. Freeman realized he’d been fooled way too late, and he couldn’t hold up his swing.

Sixth: On a 1-2 count, Skenes went back to his old standby against Troy Johnston — a fastball just a touch too high to hit. Johnston swung under it, of course.

I love Salieri’s monologue about Mozart in the movie “Amadeus,” when he recalls the first time he understood Mozart’s genius:

On the page it looked … nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse, bassoons and basset horns … like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly — high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight. This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard.

More and more, I feel that way about Paul Skenes’ pitching. Of course, we’ve seen great pitchers before, greater pitchers, I mean, as amazing as Skenes is, come on, we’ve watched Skubal the last couple of years, we saw Kershaw in 2014, we saw Pedro in 1999 and 2000, and we saw Maddux in the mid-1990s, and we saw Gooden in 1985, and on and on. But there’s something about how he commands a game, how he conducts it, how he makes hitters bow to his will that feels, well, yeah, a bit like genius.

I’ll be at the Arboretum Barnes & Noble in Charlotte this Sunday at 2 p.m.!

I am a sucker for a good prompt. Monday, I popped in on social media and saw this from the most wonderful Linda Holmes:

Slightly increase a band

Men With One Small Hat

Nine words, and I spent the rest of the night trying to come up with ways to slightly increase a band. The best I could come up with was The B-36s, which will speak to all the New Wave Aviation Enthusiasts out there, but probably nobody else. And so I kept thinking and thinking, and mentioned to our younger daughter Katie, who almost immediately said, “Ariana Venti,” which had the double effect of making me proud and also furious that she beat me at this dumb game.

A few others that I saw that I loved:

• Riz: Linkin Memorial

• Snookertst: Red Hot Ghost Peppers

• Robert: The Rolling Boulders

• mfmindc: Frozenplay

• Celeste Ng: 10,001 Maniacs

• Jack: Electric Heavy Orchestra

• Doc: Green Week

• Riley: Paramost

I started thinking then — can’t we do this in sports? Can’t we slightly increase a few sports figures?

Well, we can try — let me try to put together 50 of them in rapid fire. Like 100 floors of fright, these will not all be winners:

1. Johnny Sofa

2. Willie Springs

3. Medium-Sized Reese

4. Joe California

5. Swan Gossage

6. Four Finger Brown

7. Duffel Paige

8. One Neck Williams

9. Aaron Justice

10. Mookie Parlays

11. Patrick Mamansions

12. Steph Vindaloo

13. Jordan Runner

14. Pete Murder-Armstrong

15. Cy Grown

16. Myles Attic

17. James Chef

18. Bo Veto

19. James Cement

20. Tris Amplifier

21. Maya Most

22. Maxi Miñoso

23. Tim Pours

24. Sprout Selig

25. Ken Griffey Sr.

26. Cold Papa Bell

27. Flamey Anderson

28. Prince Snider

29. Senior Seau

30. Generalissimo Faulk

31. Floyd Big (also Larry Big)

32. Warren Planet

33. Howie Longer

34. Whitey Lincoln

35. Michael Oman

36. Grant Butte

37. Bill Oversoul

38. Jo Jo Jo White

39. Trevor Novella

40. Dylan Desist

41. Joe Sawbuck

42. Chris Liquidation

43. Mike Salmon

44. Brandon Swamp

45. Roast Allen

46. Joe Warren

47. Ambush Woods

48. Nellie Skulk

49. Glenn Atrium

50. Mike Imperious

I suspect 47 of these made you groan and perhaps consider canceling your subscription (and some will undoubtedly make you go “Who?”). That’s fair. But hopefully you got a chuckle out of two or three. Of course, the comments are open for your choices.

BIG FAN releases in ONE WEEK! Woo hoo! You can preorder here.

And so it begins — we’re now one week away from the release of BIG FAN, so MIke and I will be spending this week appearing on half a bajillion podcasts, radio shows, and so on to tell people all about it. In fact, we’ll be recording a special BIG FAN PosCast this afternoon, and we’ll be taking your questions — all you have to do is throw your question into the comments, and we’ll try to get to it.

Then next week, we hit the road! Here’s that schedule again in case you’d like to get tickets.

Sunday, May 17: I’ll be at the Arboretum Barnes and Noble here in Charlotte at 2 p.m. This was a last-minute addition to the tour; I wanted to do something for my friends before I left town, and Dutton was kind enough to let me do a special event two days before the pub date. They don’t usually do that. It should be pretty loose and casual; I would love to see you there. Tickets.

Monday, May 18: Mike and I will be at The Strand Bookstore along with Seth Meyers. Alas, this event is sold out, but you can join the waitlist here.

Tuesday, May 19: Mike and I will be in Boston, at the Brattle Theater. We’ll be joined by the great Howard Bryant. Only a few tickets left.

Wednesday, May 20: Mike and I will be in St. Louis, at the St. Louis County Library. This promises to be awesome — the incredible Gerald Early will be moderating. St. Louis has sold the most tickets for any city on the tour so far, but it’s a big space so there are still some available.

Thursday, May 21: Mike and I will be in Kansas City at the beautiful Unity Temple on the Plaza, and I just had to share with you the email that Rainy Day Books sent out about it:

I’m a total afterthought in my own town! As it should be! Our great pal Jason Kander will join, and there might be other guest stars. Tickets here, this will be a great time, and I suspect we’ll spend a good part of the night talking about this — I spend a lot of time later in today’s essay talking about it:

Friday, May 22: Mike and I will be in Los Angeles, at the Hermosa Beach Community Center, for one of the best bookstores on earth, Pages. We’ll be joined by Justin Halpern, writer, Padres fan, co-executive producer of the incredible “Abbott Elementary,” and all-around great guy.

It’s all going to be a blast. BIG FAN is a blast. We go to the World Darts Championship in London! I play pickleball! Mike divulges his full obsession with baseball cards! I learn how to swear properly at a Canadiens game! Mike goes to Wrestlemania! I go to a chess tournament! Mike goes to see if Victor Wembenyama is real. We talk with Jim Nantz about his obsession with the Masters! We talk with Megan Amram about her impossible crossword puzzle talents! We see Shohei smash home runs to the moon, we see Carlos Alcaraz jump through dimensions to get a drop shot, we argue whether Michigan football is a force for good or evil. It’s just a good time.

You can preorder the book here.

And remember, leave your questions for the PosCast in the comments; they’re open to everybody today.

The JoeBlogs Store is Back!

With our younger daughter, Katie, so busy finishing up at Wake Forest — she’s going to be a senior next year, it feels impossible — our older daughter Elizabeth, is taking over the JoeBlogs Store, and she has added some fun stuff for summer, including some cool JoeBlogs T-shirts and, just for Father’s Day, a Grilli Grilling Apron which includes the fact that father and son Steve and Jason Grilli saved 82 games between them.

The Joy Series: Inside the Park Homers

The way ballparks are configured today, there is probably no such thing as a pure inside-the-park home run. Providence has to step in. A lucky bounce. An outfielder misplay (but one not so flagrant that it is ruled an error). A blinding burst of sunshine. Ballparks in 2026 are too confined and too symmetrical — and fielders are too fast and skilled — to give us inside-the-park home runs where the fielder does everything exactly right.

The closest thing to a pure inside-the-parker is what Bobby Witt Jr. did on Saturday. The Tigers’ right fielder, Kerry Carpenter, made just one little mistake — he let the ball get by him in the right field corner. For someone else, that mistake might have cost a triple. For Giancarlo Stanton, it might have cost the Tigers a double, maybe.

For Bobby Witt Jr., it was not only an inside-the-park home run — there wasn’t even a play at the plate. I like to give inside-the-parkers what I call a “chaos rating,” which tells you, on a scale of 1 to 10, just how much chaos was necessary for the batter to make it all the way around the bases. In Bobby Witt’s case, there was VERY little chaos needed. I’d give that a chaos rating of 2.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are the “inside the park home runs” from 2025 — I put these in quotes because some are not actual inside the park home runs but error-plagued comedy skits — and their chaos ratings.

• April 5 (inside-the-park homer): Atlanta’s Matt Olson hit a long fly ball to left field — Reds left fielder Tyler Callihan appeared to have it in his sights, and at first, he appeared to catch it. He did not catch it and, in fact, stumbled and smashed into the wall in the left-field corner. He broke his forearm. Olson made it all the way around the bases while Callihan stared at the sky and dealt with the pain. Chaos Rating: 8.

• April 27 (ruled a single): San Francisco’s Heliot Ramos dribbled a ball to the left side, Texas pitcher Luke Jackson raced over, picked it up, threw off-balance and the throw went down the right field line. Ramos ran to second and then gingerly began to run to third. Texas’ Jake Burger picked it up and fired to third, but missed his target by about 10 feet. Ramos headed home, and the Rangers couldn’t pick up the ball in time to even throw home. Chaos Rating: 10 — even though it’s not actually an inside-the-park homer.

• June 30 (inside-the-park homer): Boston’s Wilyer Abreu launched a long fly ball to right field that hit the railing near the 420-foot sign and took a grasshopper bounce high and to the left. Reds center fielder TJ Friedl was so shocked by the hop that he just fell down. The ball rolled away, and Abreu scored easily. Chaos Rating: 5.

• July 2 (inside-the-park homer): Tampa Bay’s Jake Magnum ripped a long fly ball to center field. Sacramento’s Denzel Clarke — the master of the magical play — raced back to the wall and leaped, but he kind of mistimed his jump — he actually seemed to overrun the ball. Clarke hit the wall and fell to the ground. The ball bounced back toward the infield. Sacramento’s left fielder Colby Thomas raced over well and threw the ball back toward the infield, but it was unclear exactly who he was throwing it to, and Magnum scored without a throw. Chaos Rating: 3.

• July 8 (inside the park homer): The biggest inside-the-park home run of the season — bottom of the ninth, the Giants trailed by two with two runners on. Patrick Bailey (who was just traded to Cleveland; it seems like a good move for the Guardians) blasted a high fly ball to deep, deep right field. It looked like a sure outside-the-park home run, but instead it smashed off the brick wall out there and took a crazy bounce and just went running and running along the warning track. Bailey is actually one of the slowest players in baseball, but after that bounce, there’s a pretty good chance that most Brilliant Readers would have scored. Chaos Rating: 7.

• July 8 (inside-the-park homer): Same day as the Bailey homer! Lawrence Butler, on the first pitch thrown by Atlanta’s 20-year-old starter Didier Fuentes, crushed a long fly ball to right field. Everyone seemed to assume it was gone, because it looked gone — but somehow it hit the very top of the fence and, for reasons that defy physics, ricocheted right, and by the time the Braves got the ball back to the infield, Butler had scored. Chaos Rating: 4.

• August 31 (inside-the-park homer): I like this one a lot because it is mostly due to the quirks of Fenway Park — Jarren Duran drilled a line drive to right-center, and when it got by the outfielders, it just rolled into that enormous alley near the 420-foot sign out there, an area Boston fans call “The Triangle.” Fenway Park’s odd shape is one of the true joys of baseball. The Pirates’ outfielders, particularly the always entertaining Oneil Cruz (we’ll hear from him again), kind of botched things up out there, allowing Duran to score easily. Chaos Rating: 5.

• September 24 (inside-the-park homer): Cincinnati’s Noelvi Marte crunched a long fly ball to center field — it looked like a home run off the bat. Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz (told you we’d hear from him again) was playing super shallow and he raced back on the ball. Then, just as he hit the warning track he — this is hard to explain completely — didn’t turn around but kind of threw his glove in the air, with the pocket of the glove facing the wall, as if he hoped to, well, I don’t know what he was hoping. He then ran face-first into the wall and fell to the ground. There was nobody else out there to get the ball, and Marte scored without a throw. Chaos Rating: 8.

So, with a Chaos Rating of only 2, I’d say Bobby Witt Jr.’s inside the parker was the purest of the last year.

In 1901, Wahoo Sam Crawford hit a league-leading 16 home runs. Twelve of them were inside-the-park home runs. That was the last year that Cincinnati played in what they called League Park II — it was the remnants of a ballpark that had essentially burned to the ground. That park originally had such a short left-field fence that balls hit over it were ruled doubles. But they soon moved everything back so that the left field fence was 387 feet from home plate, and the fence in the right field gap was close to 500 feet from home plate. The ball would roll and roll.

Nobody would ever build a park with dimensions like that now, obviously, because it would move the fans too far from the field. But it’s so intriguing, after you watch Bobby Witt Jr. blur around the bases in 14 seconds, to wonder just how many inside-the-park home runs he would hit there. It would be a lot. I think a lot about how much Buck O’Neil would have loved watching him play.

That means that I wasn’t at this game, and it breaks my heart.

No matter how hard you try — and I know because I tried pretty hard — you will not guess who is singing the National Anthem before this game:

I wrote this at the 2012 Olympics — it, like so many other pieces I’ve written, seems to have disappeared off the internet. Brilliant Reader Ben asked if there was any way to revive it. Well, we live to make our Brilliant Readers happy.

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