OK, so I’ve been avoiding this for too long. It just seemed too obvious, I guess. But if you want to embrace life, really embrace it, you should pause every now and again and acknowledge true genius when you see it. Even if it is blatantly obvious.

This is the greatest television commercial I have ever seen.

That is the commercial for the Farmer’s Only dating site, and it’s so brilliant -- so utterly dazzling -- that, like a great novel, I’m constantly finding something new and unexpectedly luminous in it. What I think makes the Farmer’s Only commercial even better than legends of the past like the Snuggie or The Hawaii Chair is that it hits an extraordinary high point, then somehow hits another higher point, then hits yet another even higher point and then finally, when you believe that the volume is all the way to 10 and there’s no place left to go, goes one higher. Our story begins with three utterly unappealing people who apparently are supposed to be farmers though, realistically, they seem to have escaped from the 1978 set of Hee Haw. One wears suspenders and looks about 55. I shall call him Horatio. A second wears a green cap, boot, has a potbelly going over his jeans and stands near a dog. He shall be , for our purposes, Cinna. A third, the smart one apparently, wears a red cap and seems wistful in a Gomer Pyle sort of way. Let us call him Gomer.

It’s a bold move starting a commercial seemingly aimed at farmers by casting three actors who look like the awful and insulting cliche image of farmers that might be dreamed up by somebody who has never been outside of Los Angeles. But the genius has only begun.

The “farmers” are, of course, standing in front of a barn. Our tale begins with Horatio, who is telling a story.

Horatio: So I’m reelin’ her in, and that fish was that big.

Horatio holds out his hands so they are approximately 22 inches apart.

Cinna: No, it was only that big.

Cinna holds out his hands a mere 12 or so inches apart. The camera pans to the resting dog.

Gomer (as he looks at his cell phone): I gotta find myself a nice country girl already.

Horatio leans over too look at this magical device of Gomer’s. Cinna points at it suspiciously.

Cinna: On that thing?

Gomer: Yep. Farmersonly.com.

The camera cuts to a shot of Gomer holding the phone. On it is a young woman in shorts who is looking at us but also, apparently, fishing. Anyway she his holding some sort of fishing rod.

Horatio: Wow, she sure is pretty.

Cinna: And she likes to fish too!

Camera cuts to dog, who also seems to want to see the girl but cannot get anyone’s attention.

Gomer: Boys, I’ve found myself a date. Gotta go.

Gomer exits.

At this point -- we are now halfway into the commercial -- and we have already achieved a pretty high level of excellence. Let’s say you are the target of Farmers Only. Let’s say you are a country woman who doesn’t particularly care for the city, who likes the simple American life and would like to meet a nice guy with similar interests and pastimes and passions. There are many millions of people like this, lonely people who, through no fault of their own, keep running into dead ends when it comes to meeting people. Here’s a dating site that might fit their lives, a dating site with no pretensions -- it’s CALLED Farmers Only, for crying out loud. This really could be the place.

OK: Could there be a bigger nightmare on earth than putting your profile on the dating site and having THESE THREE GUYS poring over it?

But, the commercial has barely warmed up. Gomer has exited. And we are left with Horatio and Cinna in a familiar scene, back in front of the barn.

Horatio: I’m tellin’ ya, that fish was this big.

Again, he puts his hands apart 22 inches. The camera cuts to Cinna, who seems changed somehow.

Cinna (holding a new contraption called a computer): “What’s the name of that dating site again?”

Yes, you know women everywhere are thrilled THIS GUY figured out how to use a computer. But now the commercial explodes. There’s the rosebud scene in Citizen Kane. There’s the final scene in Sixth Sense. There’s the final angel’s appearance in “A Christmas Carol,” and the scene where Boo Radley comes to the rescue in “To Kill A Mockingbird.” There’s that extraordinary moment in the Bible when Moses asks in a roundabout way for the name of God, and from the burning bush God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”

Cinna asks “What’s the name of that dating site again?” And ... well ... three astonishing words.

The ... dog ... speaks.

Dog: Farmersonly.com.

I have come to realize that I have spent much of life in search of an answer. But I never knew the question. Now, as I close in on my 47th birthday, I finally know what I seek. The question is: “Why does that dog speak on the Farmer’s Only commercial?” Why? What combination of genius and madness and inspiration and drunkedness compelled the makers to have the dog speak? What was that pitch meeting like? What were they going for? How did they find a speaking dog?

I am no closer to an answer now than perhaps I will ever be. And if the commercial ended here, it would be magnificent, utterly magnificent, but no, it pushes forward because as Horatio and Cinna look down at the dog and then at each other in amazement -- apparently their dog had never had something interesting enough to say before -- a lovely little song begins.

You don’t have to be lonely. At Farmers Only dot com. OK, wait a minute, that song is, what, 11 words long (assuming Farmers Only dot com is four words). That’s not many words. So how could they have so totally whiffed on one of the eleven words. Shouldn’t it be: “You don’t have to be lonely WITH Farmer’s Only dot com?” Wouldn’t that be the point -- that with Farmer’s Only out there you don’t have to be lonely? But that’s not what it says. It says, “At.” Why would somebody be lonely AT Farmer’s Only? Is this a worrisome possibility? And if it is, should they really be advertising it in the commercial?

And so, finally, with that song, we think we’re at the peak of Olympus. The country folk have conquered both their fear or loneliness and technology. The dog has spoken. The song has been sung. We are sure that it’s over. But, no, not here -- there is one more push. There is the piece de resistance.

And that is: The slogan that appears as the commercial ends.

“CITY FOLKS JUST DON’T GET IT!”

It’s almost the perfect commercial. There’s only one way I could even imagine it being better. And that is is if the final words had been “Les citadins ne comprennent tout simplement pas.”

That’s my best effort (with brilliant reader Mr. Furious’ help) of “City folks just don’t get it” in French.

Today, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge will win the National League and American League Most Valuable Player awards. This isn’t a spoiler. The outcome is certain.

What’s also certain is this: Baseball’s biggest annual award—probably the biggest annual professional award in all of sports—will not be revealed in a Hollywood ballroom or a Las Vegas theater.

No. It will be revealed in the MLB Network studio in Secaucus, N.J.

The award will not be handed out by Tom Hanks, or Jon Hamm, or Jennifer Lawrence, or some gigantic movie or television star in front of a gallery of celebrities. There will be no envelope, no music, no hype, no tributes, no over-the-top awards extravaganza.

Nope. The MVP will be divulged on a Thursday evening in front of a handful of producers and camera people and a television audience likely no larger than a midweek afternoon game at Dodger Stadium. The winner will probably be at home, in their living room, with their spouse or a pet or both.

This is baseball’s legendary, baffling, groundbreaking, controversial, marvelous, frustrating, and just plain weird Most Valuable Player Award.

And this is how we got here.

We start with the word. Valuable.

No single word—with the possible exception of “Bonds”—has been at the center of more baseball arguments through the years than “valuable.” Skirmishes have broken out on the sliver of land between “valuable” and “important.” Full-scale wars have been fought on the postage-sized territory between “most valuable player” and “best player.”

Yes, baseball fans will go all Charles Merriam AND Noah Webster on you when the fight turns to what “valuable” really means.

Of course, it’s just a word… and like most baseball words, it has a pretty easy-to-follow origin story. Pitchers are called pitchers because, in the early days, by rule, they had to pitch the ball underhand. Clubhouses are called clubhouses because, in the early days, baseball teams were social clubs and the players/members spent their time before and after games in an actual clubhouse.

When people in those same early days talked about baseball players being “valuable,” they were referring to specifically how much money it would cost to get them to play for the team. The “most valuable” player was the one who cost the most. The original Most Valuable Player—at least the first public MVP—was a defensive whiz named George Wright, who was paid $1,400 to play for the first openly professional baseball team, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings.

It was quite common, in the years before 1911, for sports writers and baseball fans to muse about which player was, indeed, the most valuable, and thus worth the most money. But there was no shape to it, no form. There were countless trophies, loving cups, buttons, watches, pins, pens, plaques, certificates and such awarded to baseball players in those years, but they were almost universally tied to one specific aspect of the game—fielding or batting average or pitching prowess or stolen bases or something like that.

The idea of giving out an award to the most valuable player must have seemed an utterly bizarre idea to those early baseball fans. After all, the Most Valuable Player, by definition, already got the Most Valuable Prize.

You know. Money.

So, what changed?

Well, it all stars with a remarkable character named Hugh Chalmers.

Hugh Chalmers was a natural-born salesman. When he was 14 years old, while working as an office gopher for the National Cash Register company, he sold his first cash register. The feeling intoxicated him.

So he just kept on selling cash registers. He was relentless. He sold with an enthusiasm and energy that simply overwhelmed people. “Salesmanship,” he used to say, “is nothing more nor less than making the other fellow feel as you do about what you have to sell.”

Customers would have sworn that Hugh Chalmers’ great passion in life was cash registers, that he spent every waking hour thinking about them. Chalmers’ wanted them to feel that way. But his passion was not cash registers at all. It was the sale.

“It doesn’t make any difference whether we are trying to sell a house and lot or a paper of pins,” he said.

At 35, he decided it was time to run his own company. He chose the car business. He had no more personal attachment to automobiles than he did cash registers—he had actually never driven a car in his life—but he sensed that America was about to go car crazy. He sensed this in 1908, the very year that Henry Ford began mass producing the Motel T. So, you know, pretty good prediction.

Chalmers started the Chalmers-Detroit Motor Company and built it around two principles: (1) Salesmanship, of course. (2) Advertising… which he defined as “salesmanship plus publicity.” He was a zealot for both.

“All the best inventions in the world would have fallen flat had it not been for advertising and salesmanship,” he said. “Therefore, I think it will not be stating the case too strongly to say that advertising and salesmanship have done more to push the world ahead than anything else.”

Chalmers advertised his cars as both the best in quality while still being affordable.

And a personal favorite …

He advertised in newspapers, in magazines, on billboards, in the previews before moving pictures, obviously, but he wanted to find new frontiers to reach potential car buyers. It was only a matter of time before he got to baseball. Chalmers was an incurable fan, particularly of the Detroit Tigers, who in 1909 shocked everybody and won the American League pennant. He was particularly a fan of the team’s manager, Hughie Jennings, and the team’s ferocious young star, 22-year-old outfielder Ty Cobb.

After the Tigers lost to Pittsburgh in the World Series, Chalmers approached the presidents of the American and National League and made an unprecedented offer: He wanted to give an automobile to the winner of the major league batting title.

And… he was not giving away just any car: He wanted to give away his jewel, a Chalmers Model 30 Roadster with 30 horsepower, the car he understatedly called “The envy of the world!”

It was a stunning proposition. The Roadster had a sticker price of $2,000… which was roughly what the St. Louis Browns were paying for their entire roster. But Chalmers knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that the story would be irresistible to players and fans alike.

“The offer of an automobile is awakening a lot more enthusiasm among both players and fans than any trophy which could be offered,” Cobb said. “I would much rather win an automobile than any other prize.”

“A motor car for the leading batsman,” said Honus Wagner, widely viewed as Cobb’s greatest competition for the Roadster, “has the usual medals and loving cup beaten by a mile!”

“As usual,” Cobb’s teammate Wahoo Sam Crawford said, “Chalmers is in the lead with a great offer of something worth striving for. I own a Chalmers car already, and so I know just how good a prize is in store for the season’s leading hitter.”

Now, it should be said that this was not an MVP award. We are only at the start of our story. Chalmers was following the well-worn path of giving a prize—albeit a much higher-level prize—to the “leading batsman.”

Chalmers was thrilled by the rollout. The story was in all the papers. Sportswriters gushed that the 1910 race for the batting championship would be unlike any before. He had felt sure that the publicity the Chalmers Company would receive would be worth many multiples of the car price. He was right.

He just had no idea what a pain in the neck he had created for himself.

One thing baseball fans do not appreciate enough, I think, is just how thoroughly gambling and baseball intersected in the early days of baseball. Everybody knows about the Black Sox, the Chicago club of Shoeless Joe and Eddie Cicotte and Chick Gandil and the rest who consorted with gamblers and threw the 1919 World Series. Many seem to think that was a one-of-a-kind anomaly.

It was not. The story of fixed baseball games goes back to at least 1865, which is four years before the Cincinnati Red Stockings even became baseball’s first openly professional team. There’s no telling how many baseball games were thrown through the years, but just in the years leading up to the Black Sox:

• Connie Mack suspected that his Athletics threw the 1914 World Series; they were heavy favorites and got swept in four straight by the Miracle Braves.

• The New York Giants’ Heinie Zimmerman—who would later be given a lifetime ban for fixing games—was strongly suspected of helping throw the 1917 World Series, ironically against the Chicago White Sox.

• Many believe that the Chicago Cubs threw the 1918 World Series to the Boston Red Sox. In fact, Eddie Cicotte—perhaps the key figure in the Black Sox scandal—said in court that it was an open secret that the Cubs players were offered $10,000 by gamblers to fix the Series.

• Ty Cobb, among others, threw a game in 1919 and several players bet on it, including possibly Cobb.

Hugh Chalmers undoubtedly didn’t think even consider that gamblers might get their hooks into his wholesome car giveaway. But by turning the 1910 major league batting race into a national spectacle, he was unwittingly guaranteeing it.

As the season headed into its big finish, Cobb and Nap Lajoie were locked in a batting race that was, quite literally, too close to call. In those days, statistics were kept haphazardly. The league offices did not release the official numbers until weeks after the season was over. As such, every paper in the country seemed to have different batting averages for the players. Almost all of them had Cobb ahead going into the final day, but by how much? Nobody knew!

But everybody cared! The story was mesmerizing. The characters were eternal. Lajoie was a living legend who had, almost singlehandedly, created the American League with his star power. Cobb was a brash young slasher who was already being touted as the best of them all. On the last day, Lajoie’s Cleveland team—named the Naps in his honor— played a doubleheader against the sad-sack St. Louis Browns. Reporters had no idea how many hits Lajoie would need to overtake Cobb. They surmised that he would need a lot.

And… Lajoie got a lot of hits. In all, he was credited with going 8 for 8. It might have been one of the greatest performances in baseball history—think of it! He went 8 for 8 on the final day to win the car!—except for a handful of inconvenient facts:

• One of the eight hits was, by contemporary accounts, a routine fly ball that an outfielder comically misjudged.

• The other seven hits were all bunt singles—by a 35-year-old man who was never that fast, even in his youth. These singles were made possible by a rookie third baseman who was ordered to man his position in leftfield.

• Lajoie also had a bunt that was ruled a sacrifice. The St. Louis Browns’ coaches attempted to bribe the official scorer to rule that a hit, too.

The Browns had not only thrown the batting title to Nap Lajoie… they had done so in the least convincing manner imaginable. Nobody was fooled.

“In ‘Fixed’ Game Browns Loaf and Let Larry Win,” was the headline in The St. Louis Star and Times.

“ST. LOUIS LAID DOWN TO LET LAJOIE WIN,” roared the Richmond Times-Dispatch headline.

“Race tracks were closed for less than this,” sports editor H.W. Lanigan wrote.

“Never before in the history of baseball,” The Washington Post wrote, “has the integrity of the game been questioned as it was by the 8,000 fans this afternoon.”

Why did the Browns throw the batting title to Lajoie? For many years, the given reason was that they just hated Cobb that much. Cobb was, indeed, disliked by a lot of players, but it isn’t actually clear that the Browns had any specific beef with him. Anyway, even if they did hate him… they certainly didn’t give Lajoie eight hits and try to bribe the official scorer and make a mockery of the game (fans booed relentlessly) out of sheer spite for Cobb.

No, this is surely a gambling story, and it’s one of the most shameful days in baseball history.

It only got worse. The American League president in 1910 was also the league founder: Ban Johnson. His singular purpose in life was to protect and grow his American League. When he saw what happened, he instantly knew that there was an existential danger at play. He had to do something, or the entire validity of the batting race and his league would be in question.

He promptly made two announcements:

1. He would thoroughly investigate what happened in St. Louis.

2. There would be no more individual awards given out while he was president of the American League. He said: “The merest suspicion of crookedness work irreparable injury to the game, and from now on, no more individual contests for prizes will be allowed.”

Our focus is on the MVP award, but just to tie a bow on the Lajoie saga: Ban Johnson obviously did not do a thorough investigation. What he did do was announce that all of Lajoie’s hits were kosher while he quietly banished the Browns’ officials who tried to bribe the scorer. Then, in an audacious bit of bookkeeping, he found two extra hits in Ty Cobb’s season. Those two phantom hits gave Cobb the batting title.

It was two hits only because Cobb didn’t need three.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is that Hugh Chalmers didn’t just quit on baseball right then and there. His simple and elegant idea of giving a car to the batting champion had turned sour, not only because of the corruption in the American League race—Chalmers ended up giving both Cobb and Lajoie cars—but also because he had to endure endless gripes from fans of Sherwood Magee, who had beaten out heavily favored Honus Wagner for the National League batting crown. True, Magee’s .331 average trailed Cobb and Lajoie by more than 50 points, but a title is a title, and Magee bitterly wondered why HE wasn’t getting a car, too.

There’s your reward for trying to work with baseball, Hugh Chalmers.

But Chalmers loved the game… and he loved the publicity. He still wanted to give away a car (now he was thinking of giving away two cars) to the best players. Ban Johnson and Detroit Tigers owner Frank Lavin, who had become a Johnson acolyte, were adamant that there be no more individual awards for players who led the league in an individual statistic. Chalmers needed a whole new approach.

Nine days before the 1911 season began, Chalmers announced that he would give away a Chalmers Model 35 Roadster—bigger and better than ever!—to a player in each league. But… this would be different.

“Heretofore,” he said in a statement, “trophies for baseball prowess have been given for superiority in some one department. There have been prizes for champion base stealers, for champion fielders, but chiefly for champion batsmen. The Chalmers trophies will be awarded for general ability.”

General ability? What did that even mean? Chalmers explained he would give a car to the player who “should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered.”

Value of services rendered.

Hugh Chalmers had just created the Most Valuable Player Award.

Yes, I know, he also said, “most important and useful player”—he obviously thought all of that was pretty well synonymous—but the point is there had never been an award quite like this in American sports… or perhaps in sports anywhere in the world. This was not an award for statistical excellence. This was not an award that could be thrown by corrupt players. This was an award for the player judged to be the most valuable.

And who would do the judging? Well, it couldn’t be the players themselves. The owners could do the judging, but that would bring all sorts of troubling side issues. No, there was really only one group that could do it.

The voters had to be the baseball writers.

In that spirit, Chalmers hired his friend, a longtime baseball chronicler named Ren Mulford Jr., to put together a committee of his fellow sportswriters. Mulford, who had been around baseball since the Cincinnati Red Stockings started paying players, appointed 11 sportswriters, one from each of the big-league cities at the time.

1. John B. Foster, New York Telegram (Giants and Highlanders)

2. I.A. Sandborn, Chicago Tribune (Cubs and White Sox)

3. Tim Murnane, Boston Globe (Braves and Red Sox)

4. J.C. Isaminger, Philadelphia North American (Athletics and Phillies)

5. M.F. Parker, St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Browns and Cardinals)

6. Abe Yager, Brooklyn Eagle (Dodgers)

7. Jack Ryder, Cincinnati Enquirer (Reds)

8. H.P. Edwards, Cleveland Plain Dealer (Naps)

9. J.S. Smith, Detroit Journal (Tigers)

10. C. B. Power, Pittsburgh Gazette-Times (Pirates)

11. J.S. Jackson, Washington Post (Senators)

Chalmers, Mulford and Ban Johnson then came up with the ingenious MVP voting system that’s still in use today. Each sportswriter would rank, in order, the eight most valuable players in each league. When all the ballots were in, the winner of the car in each league would be the player with the most points—eight points for every first-place vote, seven points for every second-place vote, and so on down the line.

The 1911 battle for the Chalmers Trophy was baffling to people at first.

“Considerable misapprehension exists regarding the purpose and method of award of the Chalmers Trophies, which are given to the so-called ‘best players’ in each of the major leagues this fall,” a sportswriter wrote. “The new Chalmers Trophies are of an entirely different nature, the only resemblance being that they are motor cars. A high batting average will not entitle a player to the prize. In fact, it is wholly within the possibilities that the winner may have a low batting average with the bat.

“It was decided, instead, to offer a prize for the player who proved himself of most value in all departments of the game.”

On October 15, Chalmers showed up on a stormy day when the Cubs and White Sox were supposed to play Game 2 of the Chicago City Championship Series and awarded a Chalmers Trophy car to Cubs outfielder Frank “Wildfire” Schulte, who had led the league in home runs and RBIs. Schulte was a surprise pick; most people thought the award would go to Christy Mathewson.

This cartoon ran in the Chicago Tribune.

A couple days later, Chalmers showed up at World Series Game 3 to award the American League car to Ty Cobb, who won the Chalmers Trophy unanimously after hitting .419. Cobb was so dominant in 1911 that The Sporting News actually ran a glowing editorial saying that he should remove his name from consideration because nobody in baseball was in his league.

“This trophy,” Mulford said to Cobb, “is the greatest possible individual award that can be paid any ballplayer.”

Ty Cobb led the American League in hitting each of the next three seasons… but he never again won a Chalmers Award. This was a point of contention at the time—one St. Louis sportswriter called the award “an annual joke”—but with the benefit of hindsight and advanced statistics, we can say that the American League committee made defensible, even prescient choices every year. Tris Speaker led the league in home runs and on-base percentage in 1912, Walter Johnson had his legendary 1.14-ERA season in 1913, and Eddie Collins was terrific in 1914. All three, looking back, had more Wins Above Replacement than Cobb in their respective winning years.

The National League choices were a bit more baffling—Larry Doyle somehow won the 1912 award over Honus Wagner, Brooklyn’s Jake Daubert won the award over Gavvy Cravath in 1913, and Boston’s Johnny Evers over Pete Alexander in 1914 was ridiculous… but, hey, as we will see, controversial choices are another big part of the MVP’s hold on the attention of baseball fans.

Actually, let’s pause for just a minute on Gavvy Cravath. Daubert led the league with a .350 average in 1912 to win the award. Cravath hit nine points lower, but he led the league in home runs and RBIs.

A few years later, Cravath—in a piece ghost-written by F.C. Lane—went into great detail about how he was jobbed in 1913 because sportswriters didn’t have any idea what really drove offense.

“There is a certain charm about the phrase ‘.300 hitter’ which seems to appeal to the crowd,” he wrote. “If a man is a .300 hitter he is a star. I am not a statistician myself. I claim no ability to advise a system of batting averages which would be perfect or anywhere near it. But I do think that batting averages should do more than record the mere frequency of hits. They should do something to record the quality of hits.”

He was demanding slugging percentage all the way back in the Deadball Era!

And he was right! Cravath led the league in slugging in 1913.

“Someone will say I am complaining because I didn’t get the automobile,” Cravath wrote. “True, I think I earned it. But that isn’t the main thing.”

The main thing was that Hugh Chalmers was getting people to think about baseball in a new way.

“What Lipton is to yachting, what Vanderbilt is to auto racing, Hugh Chalmers is to baseball!” Ren Mulford told the crowd at the last awarding of cars in 1914.

What Mulford did not say—what he probably did not even know—was that Chalmers’ business was in decline. A War to End All Wars was beginning, and the economy was sagging. Chalmers’ “two kinds of car buyers,” had turned into one kind of car buyer, the kind that wanted a car for as little money as possible, and Henry Ford’s Model T dominated that market. Chalmers would spend the next years futilely trying to keep his company solvent.

And so, in 1915, he ended the Chalmers Trophy.

“The proposition of having a baseball hall of fame, as proposed by me, was to run for five years,” Chalmers explained. “With the presentation this year of the Chalmers Trophy to Eddie Collins and Johnny Evers, the work of the commission has come to an end. It seems unlikely now, and undesirable also, that we should continue these awards.”

It’s funny how he called his awards a “baseball hall of fame.”

The Chalmers Company went bankrupt in 1922. Hugh Chalmers died 10 years later—on a motor trip, no less—and Thomas F. McManus, a genius of automobile advertising, said, “Hugh Chambers did more than any other man to market the motor car.”

One year after the final Chalmers Trophy, Ring Lardner—baseball’s Mark Twain—added one final piece to the legacy. He wrote:

What makes this historic is… Lardner is, almost certainly, the first person who ever referred to the most valuable player as “MVP.” The Oxford English Dictionary only dates the “MVP” abbreviation to the 1940s. Lardner wrote his obituary for the Chalmers award in 1915.

From 1916 through 1921, there was no official most valuable player award. Sportswriters would muse every now and then about who might win it if the award actually existed, but nobody thought it would ever come back.

Then it reemerged in the most unlikely way.

Ban Johnson, the man who had banned individual awards, brought it back.

Johnson was still the president of the American League after surviving a bloody battle with commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He grew to like the Chalmers Trophy. So, in 1922, he announced that the American League would start giving out an award of $1,000, along with a commemorative button, to the player who exemplified the highest achievement in performance and conduct on the field.

This time, the word “valuable” was not used, but Johnson basically had the same idea. He even used the same process; sportswriters would vote for the winning player using the same voting math that produced the Chalmers recipient. The new award did not have a name—it’s usually called the League Award now—but it did have clear criteria.

“All-around ability, faithfulness and freedom from accident, sickness, etc., will be considered in making the award,” Johnson announced.

“Faithfulness and freedom from accident, sickness, etc.” might seem like a strange thing to include—especially the “etc.” part—but there was probably a specific reason for it. The league’s greatest player, Babe Ruth, was (as usual) in the midst of a feud. Ruth had arranged to go barnstorming after the 1921 World Series. Landis forbade it, and warned Ruth that there would be a heavy penalty to pay if he ignored the commissioner’s bidding.

Obviously, Ruth went barnstorming anyway. Landis suspended him for the first six weeks of the season. Johnson despised Landis with the heat of a thousand suns, but he knew that he couldn’t get away with embarrassing the commissioner and giving Ruth the first League Award. So, with a few simple words—freedom from accident, sickness, etc.—he eliminated Ruth from consideration. The “etc.” does all the work.

As it turns out, Ruth probably wouldn’t have won the first League Award even if he had played all season. George Sisler hit .420 with 246 hits in 1922. He won in a runaway. Ruth did not get a single vote.

Ruth did win the League Award in 1923, and he won it unanimously.

That year, 1923, Ban Johnson grew obsessed with the idea of building an “American League Monument” in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the league he had created. This bizarre idea went so much further than you might expect. It won Senate approval and was debated in the House. A site in Potomac Park was selected. An architect created a blueprint. Johnson confidently announced that the names of every League Award winner would be etched into the monument, keeping the memories of those players alive forever.

When Babe Ruth won the League Award, he talked excitedly about having his name enshrined on a monument in Washington. “Hell,” he said, “if there aren’t any rules against it, I wonder if I can get my name up there twice.”

Ban Johnson ended that nonsense right away, by proclaiming that players were only eligible to win the League Award once.

The American League Monument quietly died in committee.

In 1924, the National League announced that they, too, would give out a $1,000 prize, plus a diploma to their most valuable player. The first National League winner was pitcher Dazzy Vance. Rogers Hornsby won it in 1925.

Meanwhile, because of the Babe Ruth Rule—one award per customer, no exceptions—the winners started to get a little bit weird. In 1925, Washington’s light-hitting shortstop, Roger Peckinpaugh, won in the American League. In 1926, George Burns won the AL award, and Bob O’Farrell won in the NL. In 1928, the American League gave the award to Mickey Cochrane, a great player, but one who didn’t have all that great a year. And so on.

And then, just like that, the leagues dropped the MVP award.

There’s a very good chance you’ve never heard of an old baseball man named Ernest Barnard. He was a sportswriter for a while, and then he joined the Cleveland Indians as the traveling secretary. He moved his way up to vice president (basically the team’s general manager) and in 1920, Cleveland won its first World Series. He obviously deserves his share of credit for that, though it does seem like the two key acquisitions—pitcher Stan Coveleski and centerfielder Tris Speaker—were the work of his predecessor, Bob McRoy.

Barnard was a respected guy all around baseball, and in 1927, a few months after Kenesaw Mountain Landis finally was able to take out his longtime nemesis, Ban Johnson, Barnard was named American League president.

To be honest, his four-year tenure as president—he died in 1931—is mostly forgettable. But he did achieve one long-lasting thing: In May of 1929, he announced that the American League would be dropping its most valuable player award.

He gave two reasons.

1. The voting was sometimes “unfair.”

2. He said the award caused strained relations between the players.

Both of these reasons were feints. Yes, of course, the voting could be uneven. And yes, there might have been some “jealousies and internal dissension,” as one unnamed baseball executive (probably Barnard) told a reporter. But neither of those reasons were at the heart of the decision.

No, at the heart of the decision was something both obvious and kind of hilarious: Players were using the award as evidence that they deserved more money. And the owners obviously couldn’t have that.

The most recent and blatant example was Mickey Cochrane. The Athletics’ catcher—and the player Mickey Mantle was named after—hit .293 with 10 home runs in 1928 and was named the most valuable player over probably, I don’t know, 20 more qualified candidates. Well, that’s what you get when you put a one-award limit on players—the voters couldn’t vote for Ruth or Gehrig, who were far and away the two best players in the league that year. Then, for whatever reason, the voters also chose Cochrane over eligible players who had better years, such as Goose Goslin and Heinie Manush and Lefty Grove and any number of others.

Anyway, Cochrane won the award. And in January, the Athletics sent him his contract. As United Press’ George Kirksey wrote: “The peeved Philadelphia Athletics catcher, who was awarded the American League’s most valuable player prize last season, was so surprised when he read the salary offered him, he exclaimed: ‘Why, there’s been a mistake! This can’t be my contract!’”

The holdout was not too long—Cochrane signed at the end of February—but it was bitter, and it was a headache that the owners didn’t want. As it turns out, it was also a headache that many sportswriters, even some of those who had actually voted for the award, didn’t want, either.

“The ball player so honored used the trophy as a lever to prize the managers loose for more cash,” Atlanta sports writer Morgan Blake wrote in his gloriously named column, “Sportanic Eruptions.” “He became a holdout the moment he obtained the prize.”

“Every player who has been named the most valuable player has gone right back to his boss the next year and demanded a raise in salary,” The Associated Press’ George Chadwick wrote. “And his principal argument has been to the owner, ‘I am the most valuable player in my league and in your club, and I want haversacks of dough. No use in you arguing that I am not the most valuable player, because I have the votes to show for it.”

It’s telling to see how enthusiastically sportswriters back then supported the owners in every single contract negotiation.

The National League most valuable player award lasted one more year—in 1929, they gave the award to Rogers Hornsby for a second time (wisely ending the whole one-player, one MVP rule) and then they, too, ended it. The National League also released a statement saying that the award was a widespread plague on the game. “It caused friction between players and manager, between managers and owners, and between players and owners,” Chadwick wrote. “There seemed to be no limit to the petty annoyances that it occasioned.”

But, you know: It came down to money. It always does, right?

And so the most valuable player award was dead. As one baseball executive told a reporter: “It shall never be revived.”

One of the wonderful parts of following a story like the history of the MVP award is all the wonderful people you meet along the way. Meet Alan J. Gould. What a guy. He grew up in Elmira, N.Y.—the place where the bank examiner in “It’s a Wonderful Life” lived—and at 16 he began writing part-time for his hometown Elmira Star-Gazette. After bouncing around for a few years, he was hired by the Associated Press to be a sportswriter.

Years ago, I wrote about Gould, and I called him the Forrest Gump of journalists because he seemed to show up everywhere. He was ringside for the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight. He was in Augusta when Gene Sarazen hit his famous double eagle in the second-ever Masters. He was in Berlin when Jesse Owens won gold medals under the outstretched arms of Nazi Germany. Heck, in 1948, when he was editor of the Associated Press, he was the one guy who kept his head on election night and announced to a shocked nation that, by gosh, Harry Truman was actually winning.

But whatever fame Alan J. Gould gained was because of one innovation: In 1935, while sports editor of the Associated Press, he began including his own Top 10 list of the best college football teams in the country. People were outraged. Well, very specifically, people in Minnesota were outraged. In his year-end ranking, Gould named Minnesota, Princeton and Southern Methodist as tri-national champions. For Golden Gophers fans, who had seen their team outscore opponents 194-36 in their 8-0 season, sharing the national title was infuriating, and they hung Gould’s likeness in effigy. “It created a storm,” Gould said modestly.

This made Gould… absolutely delighted. What, after all, were sports about if not to, in his own words, “keep the pot boiling.” He doubled down after the 1935 season, somehow found 44 sportswriters from around the country, and created the first-ever Associated Press college football poll.

“This,” he said proudly, “was just another exercise in hoopla.”

What does this have to do with the MVP? Well, seven years earlier, in 1929, Gould saw the void left behind by the American League’s abandonment of the MVP award. And so he put together a panel of sportswriters and gave out the Associated Press MVP award. The eight voters—one of whom was future commissioner of baseball Ford Frick—chose Cleveland’s Lew Fonseca, who had led the league with a .369 batting average.

And you know what happened? The newspapers covered it like crazy. It didn’t matter to them that this award was “unofficial.” It didn’t matter to them that this award came with no cash prize, no trophy, I don’t even think there was a certificate.

It should be said, the Associated Press was not the only organization to give out an MVP award that year. The Sporting News did, too… they gave the award to Al Simmons instead of Fonseca. But, honestly, even though The Sporting News was already being called “the Bible of Baseball,” few really bought into their award. No, Fonseca was the MVP because Alan J. Gould and the Associated Press said so.

In 1930, Gould tried it again, this time for both leagues. In the AL, the sportswriters chose Washington’s Joe Cronin. And in the NL, they selected the Cubs’ Hack Wilson, who that year had set the never-to-be-broken record of 191 RBIs. The Hack Wilson choice was given extra authenticity when Cubs president William J. Veeck—father of the more famous Bill Veeck—said the team would give Wilson the $1,000 prize that the league had stopped offering.

With that, the sportswriters realized something they might have known all along: They didn’t need the leagues’ approval or status or even their permission to give out the MVP award. They didn’t even need Alan J. Gould’s Associated Press. Nope, they could just give it out themselves… and people would care.

The president of the New York Chapter of the BBWAA was a guy named William J. Slocum—back in 1924, he created the New York BBWAA dinner (in honor of Kenesaw Mountain Landis), and this year that event celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Anyway, in December of 1930, Slocum announced that the BBWAA would start giving out the Most Valuable Player award themselves. Nobody paid too much attention when he first announced the plan. But, in October, when the group named Lefty Grove the American League MVP and Frankie Frisch the National League MVP, it was big news across America. The BBWAA even created silver trophies, 25.5 inches tall, to give to the winners at the New York dinner.

And the MVP trophy as we know it was born.

From 1931 to 1951, the MVP award—every single year—went to a player on a winning team. It didn’t always go to a player on the best team… but it usually did. From 1939 to 1952, at least one of the MVPs every year was from a pennant winner. Usually, both of them were from pennant winners.

The very idea of giving the MVP award to a player on a losing team was ludicrous.

Something happened in 1952, then, that was kind of hard to explain. The Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant, and they had a fantastic MVP candidate, rookie Joe Black, who had gone 15-4 with a 2.15 ERA. He had pitched brilliantly in every role, and had been, in pretty much everyone’s estimation, the key to the Dodgers overcoming their rival Giants.

Then, in Philadelphia, the Phillies had played winning baseball, thanks largely to their ace, Robin Roberts, who had gone 28-7 while throwing 30 complete games.

Everybody assumed the MVP would come down to those two.

Instead, the award went to Cubs outfielder Hank Sauer.

The shock was palpable across the baseball world. Sauer had, indeed, led the league in home runs and RBIs. But he had slumped badly in the final month of the season. And, more to the point, the Cubs were not a winning team. They had gone 77-77-1 and had never been a factor in the pennant race.

It’s fair to say that a lot of people lost their minds in fury.

“The proper way to select the MVP would be to put all eight managers in a room and tell them they could have any athlete in the league,” Dick Kelly wrote. “How many do you suppose would take Hank Sauer over 25 or more others? The answer is none.”

“Perhaps the whole system should be changed to preclude some nonsense such as this,” Lawton Carver wrote. “A solution to all this may be to let the fans select by ballot the most valuable player.… Maybe a majority of fans do not know quite as much baseball as the writers. However, they couldn’t do any worse than the experts did this year.”

“What happened to the lame is debatable,” Oscar Fraley wrote, “but there can be no doubt today that the halt and the blind voted baseball’s most valuable player awards this year.”

The reaction against Sauer’s selection was so over-the-top that the nation’s leading sportswriter, Red Smith, felt like he had to say something.

The voting format has barely changed at all since Hugh Chalmers started this whole thing back in 1911. He chose sportswriters as voters; the sportswriters still vote. He had voters rank the players and then came up with a point system based on that ranking. The point system today is almost exactly the same.

And the instructions that go to voters haven’t changed much, either. Chalmers wanted voters to select the player who “should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered.”

Then, Ban Johnson took over, and he wanted the MVP to go to the player who demonstrated the highest achievement in performance and conduct on the field based on “all-around ability, faithfulness and freedom from accident, sickness, etc.”

When the BBWAA started giving out the MVP in 1931, they gave three guidelines—votes should be based on:

1. Actual value of player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense.

2. Number of games played.

3. General character, disposition, loyalty and effort.

Voters in 2024 were given these EXACT same guidelines. In other words, the language has been pretty much the same for more than 100 years.

But the voting hasn’t been the same. And yet, there have been many shifts in “what does valuable mean?” The 1952 vote for Hank Sauer was one of those that altered the trajectory of the MVP vote. After 1952, voters felt free to vote for players who were not necessarily on championship teams. The idea that a great player alone couldn’t make a team win was beginning to take hold, at least in the voting.

There are five other MVP votes that, I think, altered the trajectory of the vote.

Joe Medwick over Gabby Hartnett, 1937

Until 1937, the MVP math was simple. Each voter ranked 10 players. Then the voting was tallied using the same point system Hugh Chalmers had devised in 1911.

• 1st-place vote: 10 points

• 2nd-place vote: 9 points

• 3rd-place vote: 8 points

• 4th-place vote: 7 points

• 5th-place vote: 6 points

• 6th-place vote: 5 points

• 7th-place vote: 4 points

• 8th-place vote: 3 points

• 9th-place vote: 2 points

• 10th-place vote: 1 point

There was a sweet numerical purity to that particular system, and everybody seemed to like it. That is, until 1937. The National League MVP race was wide open in ’37. Looking back, it doesn’t make a lot of sense WHY it was so wide open. St. Louis’ Joe Medwick won the Triple Crown (even though nobody called it that back then. ). Medwick hit .374 with a league-leading 56 doubles, 31 homers, 154 RBIs and 111 runs.

But, at the time, as you know, winning was everything, and the Cardinals were pretty much a non-factor in the pennant race. As such, there was strong MVP support for Giants stars Carl Hubbell, Dick Bartell and Mel Ott (the Giants had won the pennant), Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett (the Cubs had finished a close second), and even Boston’s 20-game winners Jim Turner and Lou Fette (the Bees had not been contenders, but they did surprise by finishing over .500 two years after losing 115 games).

The voting was quirky. Hartnett got one more first-place vote than Medwick (3-to-2) and they got the same number of second-place votes. But because Medwick got four third-place votes to Hartnett’s one, he took the MVP award by a score of 70-68.

That was an unsatisfactory result for the writers. In a vote that close, they believed the MVP shouldn’t go to the guy who got the most third-place votes. It should go to the guy who got the most first-place votes. And so in 1938, they changed the calculus—they made it so that a first-place vote was worth 14 points… and all the rest of the numbers would stay the same.

With this system in place, Hartnett would have won the 1937 MVP vote by three points.

Everybody seemed pleased with the new counting system. It mostly didn’t change the result, but every now and again it did. In 1944, for instance, Bill Nicholson was named on two more ballots than Marty Marion and, under the old system, would have won comfortably. But Marion got three more first-place votes and so he took the MVP award by a single point. Again, though, that was 1944, there were a few other things happening in the world at the time, and nobody particularly cared about the MVP voting system.

Three years later, though, they sure did.

Joe DiMaggio over Ted Williams, 1947

Before we get to the most controversial MVP vote in baseball history, let’s look at the statistics…

• Joe DiMaggio: .315/.391/.522, 31 2B, 10 3B, 25 HR, 95 RBIs, 97 R, 4.8 WAR

• Ted Williams: .343/.499/.634, 40 2B, 9 3B, 43 HR, 159 RBIs, 150 R, 9.9 WAR

Now, you can say—and you’d be right—that WAR wasn’t even invented in 1947. But let’s not kid anybody: Everybody knew Ted Williams’ numbers that year dwarfed DiMaggio’s. He won the Triple Crown again… and by now sportswriters were calling it the Triple Crown. Nobody was under any illusion that DiMaggio’s quantifiable value was anything close to that of Williams.

There was, of course, the enduring argument that Joltin’ Joe was an exponentially better defender and baserunner than Teddy Ballgame, and most years he was. But in ’47, DiMaggio—after having a bone spur removed from his left heel—was a shell of his former self. As the writers well knew, there were times he could barely walk… much less chase down fly balls in Yankee Stadium’s massive centerfield.

But, oh, the writers—particularly the New York writers—loved DiMaggio. They didn’t just love him personally (though some were, indeed, friends with him). It was about something bigger than that. They loved DiMaggio for the way he represented Hemingway’s courage, you know, grace under pressure. He gave the sportswriters a chance to be Hemingways themselves. They knew full well that DiMaggio was in pure agony throughout the 1947 season, and yet he played on without complaint, and he played well, and he led the Yankees to their first pennant since before D-Day. That story was irresistible, numbers be damned.

And DiMaggio won the MVP by one point.

“There hasn’t been this much indignation since George III put a tax on the tea that resulted in the celebrated Boston Tea Party,” Boston sportswriter John Drohan wrote in The Sporting News.

The vote totals from 1947 are truly wild. The first-place votes were divided among SIX different players.

• Joe DiMaggio: 8 first-place votes

• Joe Page, Yankees multi-use reliever who pitched in 56 games and went 14-4 with a 2.48 ERA: 7 first-place votes

• George McQuinn, the Yankees’ 37-year=old first baseman who hit .304 with light power: 3 first-place votes

• Ted Williams: 3 first-place votes

• Eddie Joost, Philadelphia’s light-hitting shortstop who hit .206 with a league-leading 110 strikeouts: 2 first-place votes

• Yeah that Eddie Joost thing is not a misprint

• Lou Boudreau, Cleveland’s player-manager who hit .307 and led the league with 45 doubles: 1 first-place vote

We’ll get back to Joost. But first let me give you a few more facts about the 1947 voting. Thirty-four players received at least one vote, and that list included Washington’s part-time third baseman Mark Christman, who hit .222/.287/.281; Detroit’s 33-year-old slugger Roy Cullenbine, who hit .224 and was released after the season; and Athletics rookie pitcher Bill McCahan, who pitched 165 moderately effective innings.

The only player to be named on all 24 ballots was Lou Boudreau… and, yes, that does mean that one voter left Ted Williams off his ballot. The search for the person who left off Williams has been going for more than 75 years now… in part because Ted Williams put out an accusation in his book, My Turn at Bat.

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t Mel Webb who left Ted Williams off his ballot. For one thing, Boston’s Harold Kaese—no fan of Ted Williams—said that the voter who left off Williams was from the Midwest and that the three first-place votes Williams got were “probably the Boston representatives.” For another, Webb wrote a glowing story about Williams’ remarkable season just a couple weeks after the vote. We still don’t know who left off Williams.

Anyway, the big problem wasn’t the guy who left Williams off his ballot. The big problem was that two voters gave their first-place votes to Eddie Joost, and three first-place votes went to George McQuinn. “In all sense of fairness and justice, how could they pass up Ted Williams?” Red Sox GM Joe Cronin asked about those writers. One sportswriter wondered if the writers who chose Joost were playing a practical joke.

The final jolt from 1947 is that if the vote had been counted under the original 10-9-8 point system, Williams would have won easily.

Anyway, the MVP came of age that year. There had been controversial votes before—a couple of them involved Williams—and there would controversial votes again, but this one captured the imagination of America.

Intermission: Is It Easier to Win an MVP Award in New York or Texas?

Before we get to the next pivotal vote, let’s pause for this question. DiMaggio winning the MVP over Williams (twice!) and the multiple MVP wins for Yogi Berra, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle and so on strongly suggest that it’s much easier to win an MVP award as a Yankee than, say, a Ranger. Is that actually true, though?

Well, I do think that was true at one time. I don’t think it has been true for years, though.

Here are the team-by-team rankings of MVPs, going all the way back to the Chalmers Awards:

• New York Yankees: 23

• St. Louis Cardinals: 21

• Los Angeles/Brooklyn Dodgers: 14

• San Francisco/New York Giants: 14

• Oakland/Philadelphia Athletics: 13

• Boston Red Sox: 12

• Cincinnati Reds: 12

• Detroit Tigers: 12

• Chicago Cubs: 11

• Atlanta/Milwaukee/Boston Braves: 9

• Minnesota Twins/Washington Senators: 8

• Philadelphia Phillies: 8

• Pittsburgh Pirates: 8

• California/Anaheim/Los Angeles/Whatever Angels: 7

• Baltimore Orioles/St. Louis Browns: 6

• Texas Rangers: 6

• Chicago White Sox: 5

• Milwaukee Brewers: 5

• Cleveland Indians/Guardians: 3

• Houston Astros: 2

• Seattle Mariners: 2

• Toronto Blue Jays: 2

• Colorado Rockies: 1

• Kansas City Royals: 1

• Miami Marlins: 1

• San Diego Padres: 1

• Washington Nationals/Montreal Expos: 1

• Arizona Diamondbacks: 0

• New York Mets: 0

• Tampa Bay Rays: 0

So that probably looks the way you’d expect it to look. Before getting to the Yankees and Rangers, I would say that if any team has a gripe about the MVP voting, it’s Cleveland. The Guardians/Indians have had only four MVPs in their long history, and no Clevelander has won an MVP award since Al Rosen in 1953. Cleveland has had 10 players finish second or third in the MVP voting in those years:

1. Larry Doby in 1954: Finished 2nd (Yogi Berra)

2. Al Smith in 1955: Finished 3rd (Yogi Berra)

3. Rocky Colavito in 1958: Finished 3rd (Jackie Jensen)

4. Albert Belle in 1994: Finished 3rd (Frank Thomas)

5. Albert Belle in 1995: Finished 2nd Mo Vaughn)

6. Albert Belle in 1996: Finished 3rd (Juan Gonzalez)

7. Robbie Alomar/Manny Ramirez in 1999: Finished 3rd (Iván Rodríguez)

8. Michael Brantley in 2014: Finished 3rd (Mike Trout)

9. José Ramírez in 2018: Finished 3rd (Mookie Betts)

10. José Ramírez in 2020: Finished 2nd (José Abreu)

But getting back to the Yankees and Rangers—it’s true that overall the Yankees have the most MVPs. But the Rangers have only been in existence since 1972. And since 1972, the Rangers have six MVPs. The Yankees also have six MVPs since ’72.

Rangers:

• 1972: Jeff Burroughs

• 1996: Juan González

• 1998: Juan González

• 1999: Iván Rodriguez

• 2003: Alex Rodriguez

• 2010: Josh Hamilton

Yankees:

• 1976: Thurman Munson

• 1985: Don Mattingly

• 2005: Alex Rodriguez

• 2007: Alex Rodriguez

• 2022: Aaron Judge

• 2024: Aaron Judge

You look at that, and then you think about how much more success the Yankees have had than the Rangers since 1972 and you realize something kind of shocking: There was a time, yes, when a Yankee seemed to win the MVP every year, and many of those awards were suspect. But these days it’s probably a disadvantage to be a Yankees player when it comes to the biggest awards. Derek Jeter never won an MVP. Mariano Rivera never won an MVP or a Cy Young. The Yankees have won seven World Series since 1977. They did not have an MVP in any of those years. Wild.

Rollie Fingers over Rickey Henderson, 1981

From the start, the people running these MVP contests have reminded voters repeatedly: Do not forget the pitchers. Only one of the eight Chalmers winners was a pitcher—that was Walter Johnson in 1913. Then, only two of the 13 League Award MVPs were pitchers.

The BBWAA felt so strongly that pitchers were being undervalued that they included a sentence in their instructions to voters that trumpeted: “Pitchers are eligible for the award.”

It sort of worked—almost a quarter of the MVPs handed out between 1931 and 1956 (12 out of 52) went to pitchers. Then, in ’56, the BBWAA began giving out the Cy Young Award to pitchers, and even though everybody kept insisting that pitchers should still be given full consideration for MVP, well, only four pitchers won the award over the next quarter century.

• Sandy Koufax, 1963

• Bob Gibson, 1968

• Denny McLain, 1968

• Vida Blue, 1971

Even though starting pitchers dominated the nine seasons after Blue’s victory—11 of the 18 WAR leaders were pitchers—none won an MVP award. Truth is, none came all that close. In 1978, Ron Guidry came closest when he went 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA and finished second in the MVP balloting to Jim Rice. But the margin between them was more than 60 points. If that year didn’t win a starter the MVP award, well, there really wasn’t much hope.

Then came 1981. It was the strike year, so 50-plus fewer games were played, and the stats were wonky and unimpressive to look at. The American League MVP favorite had to be Oakland’s dynamic, 22-year-old leftfielder, Rickey Henderson, who hit .319, stole 56 bases, and scored 89 runs in just 108 games. He was thrilling, and he led Billy Martin’s A’s to the playoffs.

The voters went in a completely different direction.

They selected Milwaukee Brewers closer Rollie Fingers. He was the first relief pitcher to ever win the American League MVP award. And he won it by pitching 78 innings.

“I was certainly surprised,” Fingers said.

Fingers’ season was unquestionably delightful. He was 34 years old and nearing the end. During the offseason, he had been traded twice—the second time to Milwaukee. And then he was marvelous: He allowed just nine runs all season, the league hit .198 against him, he allowed just two runs and four walks in his last 23 appearances combined.

“I didn’t think I still had a year like this in me,” he said.

Even so, his election was just plain strange. But, as it turns out, it was a sign: The BBWAA writers had mostly given up on starting pitchers as MVP candidates. But, as save totals began to skyrocket—the save was still an exciting new statistic then—the writers were about the go relief pitcher crazy.

In 1984, they gave the award to Detroit reliever Willie Hernández, who had never been a closer before. Royals reliever Dan Quisenberry finished third.

The very next year, Dwight Gooden had perhaps the best starting pitcher season of the last half-century—he went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA. He finished fourth in the MVP voting. Starters were mostly out (Roger Clemens did win the MVP in 1986). Relievers were mostly in! Dennis Eckersley won the 1992 MVP while pitching 80 innings. In that wild time, Kent Tekulve, Goose Gossage, Dan Quisenberry, Bruce Sutter, Mark Davis, Bobby Thigpen and Lee Smith all received considerable MVP consideration.

I mean, look at this fun!

1993 National League voting

• Greg Maddux (20-10, 2.36 ERA, led league in innings): 17 MVP points.

• Giants closer Rod Beck (79 innings, 48 saves): 23 MVP points

1994 American League voting

• Randy Johnson (18-2, 2.48 ERA, 294 Ks): 111 MVP points

• Cleveland closer Jose Mesa (64 innings, 46 saves): 130 MVP points

1997 American League voting

• Roger Clemens (21-7, 2.05 ERA, 292 Ks, 12.1 bWAR): 56 MVP points

• Baltimore closer Randy Myers (59 innings, 45 saves): 128 MVP points

It was like a fever dream.

In time, the fever broke. The voters stopped directly connecting saves with value. A couple starters—Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw—won MVP awards in the early 2010s. No reliever has won the MVP since Eck. No full-time starting pitcher has won the MVP since Kershaw in 2014.

But one part-time pitcher has won two MVPs. Shohei, of course. Turns out if you can pitch AND hit, the voters will still love you.

Andre Dawson over Tony Gwynn, 1987

You certainly know about Branch Rickey’s famous line to Ralph Kiner. This came after the 1952 season. Kiner was shocked to find that Rickey, then Pittsburgh’s general manager, had cut his salary. Kiner barged in to confront the Mahatma with a few basic facts, including that he had just led the National League in home runs.

Rickey, as usual, was nonplussed by the assault.

“We could have finished last without you,” he said.

Rickey has been much-celebrated for that line, and that’s always bugged me, because (A) It was a cheap shot to laugh off cheating a player out of his fair value, and (B) It’s utterly absurd and unfair. The Pirates didn’t finish in last place because of Ralph Kiner. The Pirates finished in last place in 1952 because of Branch Rickey and the dreadful team he had assembled around Ralph Kiner. And you know Rickey wasn’t returning any of his salary.

But, hey, the line is funny… and for many years it guided the MVP voting.

In the entire history of the MVP awards up to 1987—that includes the Chalmers Trophies and the League MVPs—only two players from losing teams were selected as the Most Valuable Player.

They were both Chicago Cubs.

The first—well, technically, the first two—was Ernie Banks. He won the 1958 and 1959 MVP awards for losing Cubs teams. He won both of them convincingly because he was that good and that beloved. Nobody had ever seen a shortstop hit the way Ernie Banks hit.

The second was Andre Dawson in 1987.

It was a huge deal when Dawson won the award. Well, it was a beautiful story. The Hawk was one of the best and most dynamic players in baseball, but he was generally underappreciated because he had spent his career in Canada. He was also somewhat worn down because he had spent his career on the brutal artificial turf at Montreal’s Stade Olympique. His knees, in particular, were an issue when he became a free agent at the end of the 1986 season—or anyway, that was the excuse colluding owners used for not making him offers.

He publicly campaigned for a chance to sign with the Cubs. And the Cubs—because, you know, collusion—refused to sign him and claimed that they would rather have 30-year-old pinch-hitter Brian Dayett in the outfield. Then Dawson and his agent, Dick Moss, made the Cubs an offer they couldn’t refuse: a blank contract. The Cubs were told they could fill in any amount they wanted for one year, and Dawson would play under those terms.

Even a colluding owner couldn’t turn down a deal like that, and the Cubs wrote in $500,000—less than half of what Dawson had been paid as a perennial All-Star—and Dawson signed the deal and then had a spectacular statistical season. He led the league in home runs (49), RBIs (137) and total bases (353). He became the first player to ever win the MVP award with his team finishing in last place.

At the time—and, yes, even now—there are those who will argue that the award should have gone to second-place finisher Ozzie Smith, who had his best offensive season (hit .300 for the only time and scored 100 runs) to go along with his typically legendary defense. It’s a fair argument now. It was also a fair argument then, when the MVPs almost always went to a player on a first-place team. The Cardinals beat out the Cubs by 19 games that year and ended up winning the pennant.

But, you know what? Looking back, the 1987 MVP should have gone to ANOTHER player from a DIFFERENT last-place team.

In 1987, Tony Gwynn had a truly historic season. To start with, he hit .370. No National Leaguer had hit .370 in a season in almost 40 years, going all the way back to Stan Musial in 1948.

On top of that, Gwynn stole 56 bases. The last National Leaguer to combine a .370 average with 56 stolen bases? Yeah, that would be John McGraw in 1899. And it was kind of a different game in 1899.

On top of THAT, Gwynn won the Gold Glove. You can’t necessarily count on Gold Glove voting to offer a clear-eyed view of a player’s defense, but the defensive stats show that Gwynn was a standout defensive rightfielder in 1987.

A .370 average? Fifty steals? A Gold Glove? Only one player has ever done all three of those things in the same year. That one player was Tony Gwynn in 1987.

Gwynn finished eighth in the MVP voting.

Looking back, Baseball-Reference WAR and FanGraphs WAR both have Gwynn as the best player in the league and MUCH more valuable than Dawson. But… the Padres lost 95 games that year, and Gwynn didn’t have the compelling narrative that Dawson had, and that was that. Gwynn never won an MVP award, and only once finished in the top five. A huge part of that is that he rarely played on a team that contended.

After the Dawson vote, sportswriters did uncouple the MVP award from team success somewhat. In 1989, Robin Yount won the award playing for an up-and-down, 81-81 Brewers team. In 1991, Cal Ripken Jr. won the MVP even though his Orioles lost 95 games. In 2003, Alex Rodriguez won the MVP for a hugely disappointing, 91-loss Rangers team.

And today? Well, three of the last five American League MVPs played on losing Angels teams—Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani twice.

An MVP Parade!

Before we get to our fifth and final award-altering MVP vote—Miguel Cabrera over Mike Trout in 2012—well, 13 years ago (ironically or fittingly right before the Miggy-Trout season), I wrote an article called “The MVP Formula.” I totally forgot about this article, which leads off with a passionate section about how Babe Ruth was the greatest player of all time, news that certainly would have surprised the author of The Baseball 100 less than 10 years later. Ah, we do change with the years, don’t we?

But, here’s the main thing: In that article, I wrote about every one of the 44 MVP races where the winner had an OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) at least 10% below the OPS leader. Since I did the research back then, and we’ve already come this far, I’ll show you all 44 of those races again with a quick “Why did he win?” sentence.

1931: Frankie Frisch over Chuck Klein

Difference in OPS: 22.2%

Why: Frisch was celebrated for his intangibles, and his Cardinals won the pennant. Also, Klein’s OPS was greatly aided by his ludicrous home ballpark, the Baker Bowl.

1934: Mickey Cochrane over Lou Gehrig

Difference in OPS: 28.3%

Why: This is one of the most egregious choices in the award’s history—both of Cochrane’s MVP choices are shaky at best—but Cochrane was a catcher, a leader (literally; he was the team’s manager) and his Tigers won the pennant.

1935: Gabby Hartnett over Arky Vaughan

Difference in OPS: 13.6%

Why: To the winners go the spoils; Hartnett’s Cubs won the pennant. Also, Hartnett was a catcher and, as you will see, MVP voters love catchers.

1937: Charlie Gehringer over Lou Gehrig

Difference in OPS: 12.4%

Why: Hard to explain this one, since the Yankees won the pennant by 13 games. Gehringer did lead the league in hitting. Also, Gehrig was not even the top MVP choice for the Yankees; Joe DiMaggio hit .346 with 46 homers, 167 RBIs and 151 runs. Gehrig and DiMag must have split the Yankee vote (though, somehow, Gehringer didn’t split the Tiger vote with Hank Greenberg, who drove in 184 runs that year).

1938: Ernie Lombardi over Johnny Mize

Difference in OPS: 11.7%

Comments: Lombardi was a catcher, and he won the batting title over Mize in grand style by refusing to sit on the last day. Winning didn’t play a big role in ’38 since neither player’s team won a championships. The Cubs won the pennant, and their top MVP candidate was pitcher Bill Lee (not that Bill Lee).

1940: Frank McCormick over Johnny Mize

Difference in OPS: 18.3%

Comments: Poor Johnny Mize. For the second straight year, he had the MVP taken away, this time by a slick-fielding first baseman whose Reds won the pennant.

1941: Joe DiMaggio over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 15.9%

Why: DiMaggio over Ted Williams in 1941 was egregious—this was the year Ted hit .400—but not nearly as egregious as 1947. This was, after all, the year of DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, and he was still at the height of his powers as an all-around player.

1942: Joe Gordon over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 21.5%

Why: The why is easy—the Yankees won the pennant by nine games over the Red Sox—but, as I wrote 13 years ago, something else should be said here: Gordon’s MVP in 1942 has been much-maligned, and you get it: Williams was definitely better. Heck, he won the Triple Crown. BUT, Joe Gordon had a really good season, too. I mean, it was an 8-WAR season. This isn’t a case of an undeserving player winning MVP (which has happened many times). This is a case of a deserving player winning over a perhaps more-deserving player.

1944: Marty Marion over Stan Musial

Difference in OPS: 30.7%

Why: I wrote above about how the new point system gave Marion the MVP over Chicago’s Bill Nicholson. Musial didn’t really figure in the balloting; he finished fourth. I think that’s because he won the MVP in 1943.

1947: Joe DiMaggio over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 19.4%

Why: See above.

1947: Bob Elliott over Ralph Kiner

Difference in OPS: 12.1%

Why: They called Bob Elliott, “Mr. Team.” They did not call Ralph Kiner that.

1948: Lou Boudreau over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 11.2%

Why: Boudreau was Cleveland’s player-manager and the Indians won the pennant. He was also the better defensive player. He also came up with the Boudreau shift, specifically to stifle Ted Williams.

1949: Jackie Robinson over Ralph Kiner

Difference in OPS: 11.8%

Why: Jackie Robinson was a much better all-around player, and the Dodgers won the pennant, and the Pirates were terrible. Kiner led the league in OPS three times. He got one first-place MVP vote in his entire career.

1950: Phil Rizzuto over Larry Doby

Difference in OPS: 13.1%

Why: The why, again, is easy—the Yankees won the pennant, Rizzuto had his best offensive season and was a defensive whiz and team leader. The sad part is that Doby finished EIGHTH in the MVP balloting. In my original version of this MVP rundown, I wrote about how there were nine African-American MVPs in the National League between 1949 and 1959—all of them played in the Negro leagues. The first Black MVP in the American League was Elston Howard in 1963. I don’t think this was a reflection of the voters as much as it was a reflection of how slowly American League teams moved to add Black players.

1951: Yogi Berra over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 17.4%

1954: Yogi Berra over Ted Williams

Difference in OPS: 25.5%

1955: Yogi Berra over Mickey Mantle

Difference in OPS: 21.4%

Why: The voters loved themselves some Yogi Berra. Then again, don’t we all love Yogi Berra?

1958: Jackie Jensen over Mickey Mantle

Difference in OPS: 10%

Why: I think this comes down to Mantle having won the MVP award in 1956 and 1957—it was just somebody else’s turn. Now, why was it Jensen rather than, say, Rocky Colavito or Bob Cerv or even the aging Ted Williams, who was incredible in his 121 games? My guess: It came down to Jensen having led the league in RBIs.

1959: Nellie Fox over Al Kaline

Difference in OPS: 18.2%

Why: It was the White Sox’ year—they won the pennant—and so somebody on Chicago was winning the MVP. Fox was unquestionably the team’s leader, and he played in 156 games, an achievement in a 154-game season.

1960: Dick Groat over Frank Robinson

Difference in OPS: 23.7%

Why: It was the Pirates’ year—the won the pennant—and so somebody on Pittsburgh was winning the MVP. Groat led the league in hitting, so he was that somebody. Roberto Clemente, who led the Pirates in RBIs, felt slighted.

1961: Roger Maris over Norm Cash

Difference in OPS: 13.6%

Why: The answer is easy and can be summed up in one number and one punctuation mark: 61*.

1962: Maury Wills over Frank Robinson

Difference in OPS: 31.1%

Why: The answer is easy and can be summed up in one number: 104. That’s the number of stolen bases Wills had in 1962… nobody in the National League had stolen even 50 bases since the early 1920s.

1964: Ken Boyer over Willie Mays

Difference in OPS: 13.7%

Why: The Cardinals came back from oblivion to take the pennant, and Boyer was a big reason why—he led the league with 114 RBIs. But Mays was beyond incredible in 1964; it’s one of the greatest seasons in baseball history not rewarded with an MVP.

1964: Brooks Robinson over Mickey Mantle

Difference in OPS: 12.4%

Why: The Yankees did win the pennant, but the Orioles (and White Sox) made a gallant run and Brooksie had his best offensive season to go along with his unmatched defense.

1965: Zoilo Versalles Over Carl Yastrzemski

Difference in OPS: 16.2%

Why: It was the Twins’ year—they won the pennant—and so somebody on Minnesota was winning the MVP. The other option was Tony Oliva, who led the league in batting, but the voters went almost unanimously for Versalles’ all-around play.

1966: Roberto Clemente over Dick Allen

Difference in OPS: 12.8%

Why: The Dodgers won the pennant and their obvious MVP candidate was Sandy Koufax, who actually got more first-place MVP votes than Clemente. But Koufax had already won an MVP, and Clemente had been this remarkable and much-admired player for a decade, and it was just his time.

1970: Johnny Bench over Willie McCovey

Difference in OPS: 11.7%

Why: Even though McCovey had a higher OPS (mostly because he led the league with 137 walks), nobody in 1970 would have said he had a better offensive year than Bench, who led the league in home runs and RBIs. He was also the best defensive catcher anybody had ever seen. This was a runaway.

1973: Pete Rose over Willie Stargell

Difference in OPS: 19.3%

Why: The Reds won the West, the Pirates finished below .500, Rose led the league in hitting… that’s what gave Pete the edge over Pops in a very close vote.

1974: Steve Garvey over Willie Stargell

Difference in OPS: 14.1%

Why: Two years in a row that Stargell led the league in OPS and didn’t take the MVP. This year, he didn’t even come close—the Dodgers won the pennant and Garvey, Captain America, was viewed as the impeccable leader of the Boys in Blue.

1976: Thurman Munson over Hal McRae

Difference in OPS: 11.4%

Why: Munson was a catcher and the rough-and-tumble leader of the Bronx Zoo Yankees when they reemerged after a few years in the wilderness. George Brett, who led the league in hitting, finished a distant second to Munson; McRae, as a designated hitter, didn’t even get a first-place vote.

1979: Don Baylor over Fred Lynn

Difference in OPS: 14.9%

Why: Baylor’s Angels won the American League West, while Lynn’s Red Sox finished a distant third. So that was what likely made the difference, along with Baylor’s league-leading 139 RBIs. But what’s funny is: Lynn’s Red Sox actually won more games than Baylor’s Angels.

1985: Willie McGee over Pedro Guerrero

Difference in OPS: 11.2%

Why: McGee won the batting title and Guerrero missed 25 games with injuries. Heck, Guerrero didn’t even finish second—that went to Dave Parker, who led the league with 125 RBIs. The real travesty of 1985 is that Dwight Gooden finished fourth.

1987: Andre Dawson over Jack Clark

Difference in OPS: 15.1%

Why: See above.

1995: Mo Vaughn over Edgar Martinez

Difference in OPS: 13%

Why: One fun thing for people of my generation is to try and explain why Fred McGriff was nicknamed the Crime Dog—it’s a LONG story. Same with the 1995 American League voting. You have to explain that the writers hated Albert Belle, who had 50 doubles and 50 home runs and tied Vaughn for the RBI title. You have to explain that Edgar was a designated hitter and spent his whole career being underrated. You have to explain that Randy Johnson was incredible but MVP voters had lost interest in starting pitchers. It’s a whole thing.

1995: Barry Larkin over Barry Bonds

Difference in OPS: 12.2%

Why: The Reds won the division, Larkin was the king of intangibles, and Bonds’ Giants finished with a losing record. He finished 12th in the voting.

1996: Juan Gonzalez over Mark McGwire

Difference in OPS: 15.6%

Why: Again, Albert Belle plays a role. He, not Juan Gone, led the league in RBIs. But Gonzalez was second, and the voters weren’t going to pick Belle, so the award went to Gonzalez. The crazy part is that the voters didn’t give the award to Ken Griffey Jr., who was SO much better and so much more popular. That comes down to the Rangers winning the division.

1998: Sammy Sosa over Mark McGwire

Difference in OPS: 16.2%

Why: This vote doesn’t get nearly enough criticism. Sosa dominated the voting (30 first-place votes to 2!). But McGwire was WAY better than Sosa in the Year of the Homer. I mean, it’s not even close—there are 200 points of OPS between them. BUT Sosa won the RBI battle and the Cubs snuck into the postseason as a wild card.

1999: Ivan Rodriguez over Manny Ramirez

Difference in OPS: 17.3%

Comments: Pudge beating out Pedro Martinez in 1999 is one of the wackier votes ever—Pedro got more first-place votes but was left off two ballots because he was a pitcher. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that MannyBManny drove in 165 runs in ’99, in addition to leading the league in OPS.

2000: Jeff Kent over Todd Helton

Difference in OPS: 12.2%

Why: The Giants won, Kent led the Giants in RBIs, voters had grown increasingly unimpressed by Coors Field numbers and increasingly sick of Barry Bonds. This is the result.

2001: Ichiro Suzuki over Jason Giambi

Difference in OPS: 26.3%

Why: Ichiro created a mania, he led the league in hitting, and the Mariners won 116 games.

2002: Miguel Tejada over Jim Thome

Difference in OPS: 23.2%

Why: The A’s won 103 games and Tejada played all 162 games at shortstop. Big Jim was a designated hitter serving as a first baseman for a losing team.

2006: Justin Morneau vs. Travis Hafner

Difference in OPS: 14.9%

Why: This will always be remembered as Morneau over Derek Jeter—again, it came down to RBIs—but Hafner led the league in slugging and OPS, and that should be remembered.

2007: Jimmy Rollins over Chipper Jones

Difference in OPS: 15%

Why: The Phillies won the pennant, the Braves didn’t, and J-Roll’s numerical buffet—20 doubles (38, actually), 20 triples (exactly), 20 homers (30), 20 stolen bases (41), plus a Gold Glove at shortstop—wowed the voters.

2008: Dustin Pedroia over Milton Bradley

Difference in OPS: 13%

Why: The Red Sox won, Pedroia was the leader; this one’s easy. But it’s a reminder that Milton Bradley really did lead the league in OPS one year, though he played in only 126 games.

Miguel Cabrera over Mike Trout, 2012

Now, finally, it’s time for the last frontier—or at least the latest frontier—of MVP voting… and our big finish.

Before Miggy and Trout, going all the way back to Hugh Chalmers, the debate about the MVP, and more specifically the debate about baseball value, has come down in many ways to that clash between offensive statistics and so-called intangibles. You’ll remember the very first Chalmers Trophy of 1910 was meant for the batting champion. That was the original thought: The numbers would do the choosing. The assumption in those days was that the batting champion—batting average being the most vital and important statistic of the day—HAD to be the most valuable player.

When the race for the first Chalmers Trophy blew up, the paradigm shifted. Voters were given the choice. Of course, they could have voted for the batting champion—and sometimes they did. They could have voted for the pitcher with the most wins—and sometimes they did. They could have voted for the player with the most RBIs, the most stolen bases, the most saves, the most home runs. And sometimes they did.

But sometimes, they went in other directions. Sometimes, they chose an MVP because of how they hit in the clutch. Sometimes they chose an MVP based on leadership. Sometimes, fielding came into play. Sometimes, they defaulted to the best player on the best team. Sometimes they fell in love with a story. The MVP choices were sometimes inspired and sometimes ridiculous, but that basic tension between the stats and something uncountable was always there at the forefront of the conversation. And it was interesting.

In 2012, though, the argument changed. This time, it wasn’t about statistics and intangibles.

It was about old statistics and new statistics.

Representing the old statistics was Miguel Cabrera. He won the Triple Crown in 2012 for a Tigers team that ended up winning the pennant. In other years, he would have won the MVP unanimously.

Representing the new statistics was a 20-year-old rookie, Mike Trout, who hit a few points lower than Cabrera, hit 14 fewer homers, knocked in 56 fewer runs, and played in 22 fewer games. He did all this for an Angels team that did not make the postseason.

It’s hard to say just where Trout would have finished in the MVP balloting 10 or 20 or 50 years earlier. It’s not like a 20-year-old rookie hitting .326 with 30 home runs and 49 steals would have ever gone entirely unnoticed. But I’m certain he would have received no first-place votes, and he probably would have finished no higher than fifth or sixth.

But in 2012, Wins Above Replacement had become the it statistic. WAR combines so many of those things previously called intangibles—fielding, baserunning, the ability to stay out of the double play, ballpark effects and so on—into one tidy number that is basically meant to approximate how many more wins the player will contribute to the team over some random and imaginary player who might replace him. Unlike batting average or ERA, it’s a difficult statistic to calculate. But it’s a very easy statistic to comprehend. You want the player who can get your team more wins.

And by WAR, Trout was the superior player—WAR calculated that he was worth three or so more wins than Cabrera because he was the better defender, because he was the better baserunner, because he played a more valuable defensive position, because he put up his outstanding numbers in a tougher hitting park, and so on.

WAR did not win the Battle of Trout and Cabrera. Trout did get six first-place votes, but Miggy got 22 and ran away with the award. A year later, Trout again led the league in WAR, but Miggy took the MVP award again.

Ah, but in the end, WAR seems to have won the war.

Let me show you the chart that might blow your mind (or might just confirm what you already know). I looked at an era-by-era average difference in Baseball-Reference WAR between the MVP and the WAR leader (I used bWAR for simplicity). Obviously, when the MVP and WAR leader are the same player, the difference is 0. When the voters pick Ryan Howard over Albert Pujols or Justin Morneau over Johan Santana, though, the difference is 3.3 as it was in both those cases.

First, here’s a fun fact: The largest difference between the WAR leader and the MVP is probably not the one you think. That is to say, it’s not Ted Williams over Joe DiMaggio in 1947 (4.8 difference) and it’s not Willie Mays over Ken Boyer in 1964 (4.9 difference) and it’s not Dwight Gooden over Willie McGee in 1985 (5.1 difference).

Nope, the largest difference, incredibly, happened in 1971, when Joe Torre won the National League MVP with a respectable 5.9 WAR. But, that same year, Fergie Jenkins pitched 325 innings—more than half of them in the Wrigley Field, which was a violent hitting park back then—and posted a 2.77 ERA (and a 2.38 FIP). He had 11.8 WAR that year, double Torre’s—a 5.9 WAR difference.

OK, let me show you the chart. I broke up the eras in a way that makes sense to me.

• Pre-war years (1931-41): 1.5 WAR difference

• War years (1942-46): 1.3 WAR difference

• Integration years (1947-59): 1.7 WAR difference

• Fabulous ’60s (1960-68): 1.7 WAR difference

• Division Series Era (1969-1993): 2.3 WAR difference

• Before WAR took over (1994-2013): 1.6 WAR difference

• After WAR took over (2014-present): 0.4 WAR difference

Yes, of course, WAR wasn’t even invented for most of that time… but that’s not the point. The point is that before WAR became omnipresent in baseball, the voters had their own way of determining value, and their way didn’t necessarily match up to how WAR works. Believe it or not, between 1950 and 2002, the two WAR leaders NEVER swept the MVPs. Not even once. The closest was in 1957, when Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron won the awards. Mantle led the league in WAR by a landslide; Aaron finished just 0.3 WAR behind Mays… an inconsequential difference, but a difference just the same.

Since 2014, as you can see, the WAR leader essentially IS the MVP. That minuscule difference of 0.4 actually undersells how thoroughly WAR has taken over, because the difference comes down almost entirely to pitchers who led the league in WAR, and pitchers essentially don’t win MVP awards anymore. If you look only at position players… the difference between WAR leaders and MVPs since 2014 is only 0.26… and almost all of that is because, in 2015, the American League voters chose Josh Donaldson (7.1 WAR) over Trout (9.6 WAR).

If you are not within, say, 1 win of the WAR leader, you absolutely have no chance of winning the MVP these days.

People can argue whether this is good or bad. I mean, you can make a reasonable case for either side. You can make a reasonable case that voters are simply using the most advanced metrics to guide their decisions, and that’s good. You can also make a reasonable case that voters have abdicated their own judgments and viewpoints in favor of a statistic, and that’s bad. You can argue that WAR is simply a better judge of value than the human eye. You can argue that WAR is deeply flawed and, anyway, can’t get at all of the things that matter most.

All those things can be true, too.

The irony and poetry of it all is that this crazy award that started with players chasing after a baseball statistic has evolved and matured and reshaped, and after more than 100 years… it’s back to being a crazy award with players chasing after a baseball statistic. The wheels go round and round.

A final story. On Nov. 8, 1983, Dale Murphy won his second consecutive MVP award. By doing that, he completed a most remarkable team: He was the ninth player to win the MVP award in consecutive years.

And those nine perfectly made up a baseball team:

• First base: Jimmie Foxx (1932-33, AL)

• Second base: Joe Morgan (1975-76, NL)

• Third base: Mike Schmidt (1980-81 NL)

• Shortstop: Ernie Banks (1958-59, NL)

• Outfield: Roger Maris (1960-61, AL)

• Outfield: Mickey Mantle (1956-57, AL)

• Outfield: Dale Murphy (1982-83, NL)

• Catcher: Yogi Berra (1954-55, AL)

• Pitcher: Hal Newhouser (1944-45, AL)

It was perfect, absolutely perfect, the sweetest piece of baseball trivia imaginable. A decade later Barry Bonds won back-to-back MVPs. It is not the only time Barry Bonds has drawn a mustache on a baseball Mona Lisa. But so it goes. Time moves on. Since then, Frank Thomas, Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera and, yes, Barry Bonds again have won consecutive most valuable players.

But let’s go back to that day in 1983 for a moment, and a longtime Pittsburgh sportswriter named Russ Franke. Murphy got first-place votes from 21 of the 24 sportswriters. Two of the other three put Murphy second. Only Franke had Murphy below that. Franke put Murphy fifth on his ballot, behind Andre Dawson, Mike Schmidt, Pedro Guerrero and Tony Peña.

In doing this, Franke followed a long line of rebellious sportswriters who followed their own path. In 1946, Stan Musial took 22 of the 24 first-place votes, to score the highest vote total in MVP history up to that point. One of the other two voters ranked him ninth. The voter never revealed himself.

“My only guess is that it was a practical joke,” one sportswriter mused.

In 1967, a Minneapolis sportswriter named Max Nichols voted for Cesar Tovar over Triple-Crown winner Carl Yastrzemski.

“I go by what I see,” Nichols said.

Franke’s vote was certainly not in that class, but it was odd, and the Atlanta newspaper reached out to him for an explanation. Franke said that Murph’s home ballpark aided his numbers, which is unquestionably true. Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium was known as The Launching Pad, and Murph hit significantly better there than he did on the road.

But then Franke said the reason he put Murphy fifth was because he based his ballot, “mostly on what the guys did against the Pirates, mostly on what I saw. I forget what Murphy’s batting average and home runs were against the Pirates, but I don’t think he was very productive.”

In 1983, Dale Murphy hit .357/.451/.595 with 3 homers, 12 runs and 6 RBIs in 12 games against the Pirates. When this was pointed out to Franke, according to legend, he shrugged.

“Well,” he said. “I misremembered.”

The evening sky does not darken in Los Angeles in late summer so much as it dulls into lighter and lighter shades of blue. In time, the blue goes cloudy white, then gray, then very slowly fades to black; you can almost hear a director shouting: “We’re losing our light.”

It is the end of summer in the City of Angels. You know this because the Dodgers are out of the pennant race. Traffic stops and starts on The 101, violently at times, car horns and squealed tires and middle fingers. The names on the exit signs along the side of highway are startlingly familiar for a stranger. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard. Vine Street. The Hollywood Bowl. Los Angeles is one of those few cities in the world where you can be lost and know exactly where you are at precisely the same time. And another car horn. Another tire squeal. Another middle finger.

And the voice begins to talk. The voice is talking about Charles Fuqua Manuel, Charlie for short. Yes, the voice says, Charlie comes from out of the hills of West Virginia. His father was a preacher. He was third-born in a family of 11… and not only that, he was born in the car on the way to his grandmother’s house.

“Charlie’s a wonderful story,” Vin Scully tells Los Angeles as traffic stalls on The 101, and the summer sky turns to fog. “He’s the sort of story that Mark Twain might have written.”

When Vincent Edward Scully first came to Los Angeles to broadcast Dodgers baseball games in 1958, he worried because he could not find the essence of the city. The center. The heart. He was 30 years old, and he had some clear ideas about what it took to call a baseball game. He thought it was important that the hometown baseball announcer know the hometown. So, he kept looking for this PLACE. That’s was how his mind worked then. There had to be a place. Back in New York, there was always a place.

Vin Scully heard life in New York City rhythms then — well, he had grown up in New York. He went to school in New York. He had worked with Red Barber in New York. And in New York there’s always a place, doesn’t matter if it’s Brooklyn or the Bronx, Harlem or Greenwich Village, Manhattan or Queens. There’s a place you go, where people gather, where decisions are made, where the energy pulses, where everything starts.

“In New York, for me, it was Toots Shor’s,” he says. That was the restaurant, of course, there on 51st street between 5th and 6th Avenues but closer to 6th. That was where things were always going on, where Vin could feel the city’s vibrations, its power. He might see Joe DiMaggio sitting with Marilyn Monroe. He might catch Frank Sinatra talking a little boxing. He might catch a glimpse or Ernest Hemingway or see Jackie Gleason hold court or see Judy Garland sitting in a corner. More than anything, though, he might hear what was happening in his town, what mattered, and Vin Scullly needed to know these things. He felt sure they made him a better baseball announcer.

So when Scully first came to Los Angeles with the Dodgers, he looked around town for the essence. And… he couldn’t find it. Oh there were famous places, of course, more than you could count. The Brown Derby. Musso and Frank’s. Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Places like that. And there were famous people, more of them here even than in New York. But it wasn’t the same. Los Angeles wasn’t the same. Los Angeles wasn’t built around a PLACE. New York, the city, was an eight-block walk from wherever you happened to be standing, Los Angeles was a ribbon of highways. New York’s jokes were about tourists looking up at skyscrapers and hotel rooms so small that when you put in your key you broke a window; Los Angeles’ jokes were about smog and Humphrey Bogart. It seemed to Vin Scully, at least at first, that New York was an open city, emotions always right on the surface. And Los Angeles was tougher to figure.

“I really had trouble with that for a while,” he says, and he is about to say something else, but he stops because people keep coming over to say hello. Here’s a Dodgers employee who has been gone for a while (“You look beautiful, my dear.”) There’s Tommy Lasorda (“Vinny, my boy!”). There’s the young woman who works in the press dining room bringing him coffee (“You are an angel.”)

“Like I was saying, I really had trouble with that for a while,” he says when things clear. “I didn’t quite know what the city was about. It took me a while to figure it out.”

“What did you finally figure out?”

As he is about to answer, two more people wander in to offer hugs. They apologize profusely for interrupting, but they cannot help it, they cannot let an opportunity like this go by. Vin Scully! He has been a Los Angeles icon now for more than 50 years. There are not many of the great baseball voices left, not from the old days. Ernie Harwell up in Detroit — Vin’s buddy for almost 60 years — died in May. Philadelphia’s Harry Kalas died a year ago April. Jack Buck’s gone, Mel Allen’s gone, Bob Murphy, Joe Nuxhall, Herb Carneal, Jack Brickhouse, Herb Score, all gone.

Vin Scully, who broadcast his first baseball game in 1950, is still going.

When they walk off, Scully smiles and says: “What were we talking about again?”

You probably did not know this… but more than 2,000 people have actual, official, Hollywood Stars in the Los Angeles pavement. It can be a dizzying experience, walking up and down Hollywood Blvd. and Vine Street, staring at the ground, and realizing that you haven’t heard of most of these people with stars on the sidewalk.

“You know, they keep stats of everything these days,” Vin Scully is saying on the radio. “But I wonder if you knew that they actually keep track of the number of bats each pitcher breaks over a season.”

I walk along, listen to Vin Scully, look down at the stars. I write down some names. Charles Vidor was a Hungarian director who directed more than a dozen pictures, including Frank Sinatra in The Joker Is Wild. Flora Finch was from England, and she played in hundreds of silent films. Laraine Day played in many movies and served as a panelist on various TV shows like What’s My Line, but she may be best-remembered for being married to the Hall of Fame baseball manager and lovable (enough) rogue Leo Durocher. Robert Guillaume is a stage actor best known for his work on television as the character Benson Du Bois on the shows Soap and, later, Benson.

“Can you imagine them keeping a statistic like that?” Vin Scully says, and you can almost hear his eyes twinkling on the radio. “The number of broken bats! Well, I guess it does matter in today’s game. And it won’t surprise you to know that Roy Halladay is one of the best when it comes to breaking bats. But his opponent tonight, Hiroki Kuroda, is no slouch when it comes to splitting lumber…”

People wander all around me, and they, too, are looking down at the Hollywood Stars, you can see their faces brighten when they recognize a name. Some people have their photo taken by the Michael Jackson star. Parents point out Shrek’s star to their children. I write down more names. There are George Burns and Gracie Allen next to each other, as they should be…

Burns: “Say good night, Gracie.”

Allen: “Good night, Gracie.”

There’s the bandleader who gave Sinatra his big break, Tommy Dorsey, and there’s Hollywood tough man George Peppard, and there’s the Hollywood star for the Monkees.

“I guess what it tells you,” Vin Scully says on the radio, “is that we might expect to see a couple of broken bats in tonight’s game.”

And there is a son pulling his father’s hand so he can point out Vin Scully’s Hollywood Star.

Vin Scully begins his stories with apologies these days. He’s reached that plateau of fame. “I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself,” he says. “I know you’ve probably already heard this,” he says. “I’ve told this many times before,” he says. It is a mark of the man’s grace that he is the one apologizing repeatedly and not the reporter who asks him precisely the same questions people have been asking for 50 years. Scully genuinely — and generously — wants to help the writer tell a good story.

“I know you’ve probably heard about the radio,” he says, and indeed I have heard it, but I ask if he will tell it again.

“When I was a little boy in New York, we had this radio that stood on four legs,” he says. “It was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me at the time. We lived in a little fifth-floor walk-up apartment then, and the radio was just about the biggest thing in there. I remember — I couldn’t have been older than 4 or 5 — I used to crawl under that radio with my pillow. There was no baseball on the radio then, but there were football games, and I remember I used to love listening even then to the crowd.”

I wait for it. Vin, I think, knows that I’m waiting for it.

“That sound of the crowd would just engulf me,” he says, and then (I’m almost mouthing the words with him now), “it was like water out of a shower head.”

Like water out of a shower head.

No announcer in the history of sports has used crowd noise more musically than Scully. Can it be a coincidence? Sinatra used to say that his musical instrument was not his voice, it was the microphone. Scully uses crowd noise as his orchestra. When Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, Scully was there, and he called the home run, and then he took off his headset, walked to the back of the room, and let people listen to the crowd cheer.

Like water out of a shower head.

“What could I have said that would have told the story any better?” he asks. And he pauses: “You know what? I still love listening to the sound of a crowd cheering. Don’t you? Don’t you just love that sound?”

The sleeping-under-the-radio story makes it sound like Vin Scully was destined to live this sports broadcasting life, like it was inevitable, but of course it was not inevitable. Vin Scully grew up during the Depression. He was about to turn 2 when Wall Street crashed in 1929. There was no television. There was little sports on radio. Sports announcer was not exactly a JOB then. He wanted it to be a job, certainly. He does remember writing an essay in school about how he wanted to be a sports announcer, but it was fantastical stuff then in the 1930s, just as the world was about to go to war. He might as well have been saying he wanted to start an Internet social network.

Still, he never stopped thinking about it. He worked hard to lose any detectible accent. He practiced his cadences. When he graduated from Fordham, he sent out more than a hundred letters to radio stations and was not surprised when he was told there were no jobs. His break came at Fenway Park, though it hardly felt like a break at the time. The legendary announcer Red Barber was also sports director at CBS Radio, and he was desperate for someone, anyone, to be at the Boston University-Maryland game (he had moved Ernie Harwell to the Notre Dame-North Carolina game). Scully had introduced himself to Barber a few months before, and his fiery red hair had left enough of an impression that Barber called up someone he knew at Fordham and said, “Who is the red-haired kid who wants to be a sports announcer?” When Red Barber called the house, Scully wasn’t home, but his mother answered and took the message. “You got a call,” she told her son excitedly, “from Red Skelton!”

Scully went to the Boston University-Maryland game, and because of a mix-up found himself broadcasting outside on the roof of Fenway Park in the freezing cold. He did not say a word about it, on the air or off. (“I was so green, I thought that was just how they did things,” he says). Instead, he did his reports, stayed on time, and Barber was impressed enough that he intended to keep Scully on as an alternate. It was only the next day, when Barber got a call from someone at Boston University apologizing for sticking their announcer on the roof in the freezing cold, that Barber realized the kid had something special.

“I think he was impressed that I didn’t complain,” Vin Scully says.

“And here’s an exciting moment,” Vin Scully says on the radio. “Rod Barajas is coming to the plate.”

The familiarity of the street names in Beverly Hills — like those of the signs on The 101 — is a bit jarring. How can you know the name and shape of every street when you’ve never lived in a place? But there’s Santa Monica Boulevard — where the sun comes up and over in that Sheryl Crow song. There’s Wilshire Boulevard, which leads right to the Miracle Mile. There’s Rodeo Drive, of course, pronounced “Row-DAY-oh,” and there’s MacArthur Park, where someone left the cake out in the rain, and there, closer, to West Hollywood, is Melrose Avenue. It’s strange to be so familiar and so unfamiliar at the same time. I even know the zip code here.

“Rod Barajas grew up in Ontario and he went to high school in Santa Fe Springs,” Vin Scully is saying. “And so this is a dream come true for him. He came over from the Mets last week, but this will be his first at-bat at Dodger Stadium in a Dodgers uniform.”

Everything, all around, is famous, or at least FEELS famous. As you drive here, it can feel like you’re on television. It can feel like there’s music playing in the background. These are the most-filmed palm trees in the world. These streets, those buildings, the hotels, the parks, the statues, they are ingrained in the mind of anyone who has spent a lot of time watching television.

“What a special moment for Rod Barajas,” Vin Scully says.

Walter O’Malley wanted Vin Scully to do just a little cheering when they got to Los Angeles. Scully loved O’Malley. When O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles, there was a lot of pressure on him to hire local radio broadcasters, well-known Californians, voices that these new Dodgers fans could recognize. O’Malley said no. He would never even consider it. He was bringing Vin Scully with him from New York.

But… O’Malley did wonder if maybe Scully could punch up a little love for the Dodgers. That was impossible in New York. There were three teams in New York then — Yankees, Dodgers, Giants — and you wanted fans of all three teams to listen to the broadcast. But in Los Angeles, there was only the Dodgers — the first major sports team in California. And O’Malley thought it wouldn’t do any harm if Scully spent just a little more radio time cheering for the Boys in Blue.

Scully thought long and hard about this. He was not opposed to it on any ethical grounds — the Dodgers paid his salary. But he had learned his craft from Red Barber, who basically invented baseball on radio. “He was hard on me at times,” Scully says. “But he did it out of love. He really was like an older brother to me or a second father.

“And he said to me, and I’ll always remember it, he said: ‘You bring something to the broadcast that nobody else can bring.’ I thought, ‘Really? I bring something nobody else does? What?’ And he said, ‘You bring yourself.’ I really took that to heart.”

He told O’Malley that he thought that he should stay with the same style that he had in New York. O’Malley trusted Scully. And it turned out to be a brilliant business decision, as well as a brilliant artistic decision. It turned out that people in Los Angeles had already heard their share of minor league announcers, like the announcers for the Hollywood Stars, who cheered for the hometown team… and something about that felt minor league to them. When the Dodgers arrived, finally, Los Angeles was MAJOR LEAGUE. And when Scully arrived, when he told stories about players and managers on BOTH teams, when he expressed delight at a great play no matter which team made it… well, that felt MAJOR LEAGUE.

They loved him from the start. Scully instantly connected in a way that no radio announcer had ever connected with a city, not even Red Barber. Los Angeles was perfect for baseball on the radio. It was so spread out, so many neighborhoods, so many cars stuck in traffic, no place to go, nothing to do but listen to the ballgame. Old Memorial Coliseum, where the Dodgers played their first four years, was vast and had bad angles for baseball-watching, so people grew accustomed to bringing their transistor radios to games. When things on the field quieted, you could hear Vin Scully’s voice echoing and repeating throughout Memorial Coliseum, a radio wall of mirrors.

Scully had fun with it sometimes. One game, he noticed that it was umpire Frank Secory’s birthday and, on a whim, he decided to ask the fans at the game to shout “Happy Birthday, Frank,” on his count. Only later did he realize that this could have badly backfired, that it was possible that no one would shout and he would be left looking like a fool. But it wasn’t really possible. Not for Vin Scully. The “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANK!” was even louder than Scully had expected, and he found himself once again marveling at the good fortune of his life.

“I managed a game once, did you know that?” he asks me. I did know it, but I asked him to tell the story again. It was a Sunday day game, the last of the 1965 season. The Dodgers had clinched the pennant on Saturday, and there was, of course, a lot of partying on Saturday night, and things were loose for the Sunday game. Dodgers manager Walter Alston used a makeshift lineup and even put in Tommy Davis, who had not played for four months because of a fractured ankle. Davis hobbled his way out on an infield grounder.

Alston was in a grand mood, so at some point between innings he called up to the booth and told Scully, “OK, I know you’ve always wanted to be a manager…. (“I never wanted to be a manager,” Scully says in parentheses as he tells the story.) … Well, OK. You’re the manager. You decide what to do. But you have to say it fast.”

Well, Scully couldn’t pass up a chance like that. He told his radio audience that he was now the manager. And the way he remembers it, Ron Fairly came to the plate — Fairly was Scully’s mother’s favorite player (“He was left-handed and had red hair and that was enough for my mother,” he said). He got on base. Fairly, like the rest of the Dodgers, had some fun the night before and was probably not in the greatest condition for the game (though he drove in the Dodgers’ first run). “I hate to do this to Ron Fairly,” Scully remembered saying, “but this seems like a good time to steal a base.”

He asked the fans at the stadium to look at Fairly’s face when he saw the steal sign. And sure enough, in memory, the shock on his face was apparent. He ran on the pitch, and the ball was fouled off. He went back to first base.

“Oh boy,” Scully remembered, “Now, I really hate do to this. But I was always told if it was right the first time then you should stick with it. Sorry, Ron, but the steal sign is back on.”

Again, Fairly looked stunned. Again, the fans were thrilled beyond words. This time in memory, Fairly took off for second, the catcher could not handle the pitch, and Fairly was safe. Scully, realizing that it could not get any more perfect than that (and not wanting to embarrass the Braves) then said: “OK, Walter, I got you this far, you’re on your own now.”

It’s such a wonderful story. A review of the box score from that game, though, suggests that it isn’t exactly right. Fairly didn’t steal a base in that game. Newspaper reports from that game do mention that Walter Alston had turned over manager duties to Scully up in the radio booth, so that’s the right game. Maybe Scully is confusing Fairly with Willie Crawford, a 19-year-old rookie who did walk and steal a base. Or maybe Fairly did try to steal the base and maybe the batter hit the ball — Fairly WAS doubled off in that game on a line drive hit by Sweet Lou Johnson.

Not that the details matter too much. What matters is the joy — the joy of the moment and the joy of Vin Scully’s retelling. That’s what it is all about for Vin Scully. That’s what it has always been all about.

“How about Hiroki Kuroda?” Vin Scully is saying. His voice is on television now — he only does three innings of simulcast on television and radio these days, the rest is strictly television. Kuroda has thrown 7 1/3 no-hit innings against the Phillies. And Scully will talk about the goose bumps he feels. He will turn 83 years old in November. And he will come back next year for his 62nd season as an announcer for the Dodgers. Why? The goose bumps.

“They always come back,” he will say with wonder in his voice.

It’s funny that all those years ago, Vin Scully looked around Los Angeles for the essence. So many things have happened since then, for the city and for him. Happy things. Sad things, too. His first wife, Joan, died of an accidental overdose in 1972. His oldest son Michael died at 33 in a helicopter crash. He has found his faith tested. He has had many doubts in many lonely hotel rooms.

But those happy things — they have been there for him, too. So many moments. So many legendary calls. His final inning call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game was poetry (“On the scoreboard in right field, it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California”). His simple words, “It gets through Buckner,” would send half of New York into hysterics and all of New England into months of mourning. His call of Kirk Gibson’s home run in the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers — “She is… gone” — is perfect Scully, the way he used his voice, the way he used the crowd, the way he called a home run “she.” And then he followed it up with the classic: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” He will say, like he has often said before, that he still doesn’t know where that line came from. He thinks it was a gift from God.

With Scully, though, his greatness does not come from the legendary calls, the ones everyone remembers. No, they come from summer nights like tonight, under a dimming sky, when he kindly calls another baseball game. It is 9:46. p.m. in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California, and traffic is stuck, and tourists mill around, and deals are being made, and deals are falling apart, and people are sleeping, and people are suffering, and actors are waiting tables, and, yes, after all this time Vin Scully did find the essence, the center, the heart of the city, even if he would never say it. The heart of Los Angeles is his voice.

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle
of a Forgotten Spot in the Caribbean
by providence impoverished in squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
— The opening words of “Alexander Hamilton.”

The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books, and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am.

But she is 14, and in some ways that explains everything. In some ways, it doesn’t. There are times I feel closer to her than ever … and times I feel so much further away. Farther away? Further away? One gorgeous day in autumn, I was sitting on the porch, working, and she came outside and sat next to me, and it became clear after a few choice words about tattoos and nose rings and such that she had come out for the sole purpose of starting a fight. There was no specific reason for it other than she’s 14, and I’m her father, and this is the timeless story.

There have been other things, trying things, unforeseen things, a punishing year, and one day I came up with this idea. I would take Elizabeth to see “Hamilton.”

We have a flaw in my family, one that goes back generations: We tend to grow obsessed with, well, stuff. What kind of stuff? OK, my mother through the years has had been possessed by countless activities including (but not limited to): paint-by-numbers; cross-stitch; stamp collecting; Harlequin Romances; computer programming (the most profitable of such obsessions); various soap operas; various reality TV shows; crossword puzzles; cookbooks; Candy Crush; all sorts of collectibles and, most recently, coloring books. She recently had coloring pencils shipped from Sweden or Switzerland or some such place. She’s very good at coloring. You can find her work on Facebook.

This is just how the family mind works, I guess. I have known all my life about my weakness for growing obsessed by things. This is the reason I haven’t seen Game of Thrones or The Americans or Downton Abbey or House of Cards or any other recently popular television show. It isn’t because I dislike television — it’s the opposite. I like television too much. I know the only way to avoid free-falling into that television hole is to never start watching in the first place.

I don’t mean this theoretically. For years, people have been on me to watch “Mad Men.” Three weeks ago, I caved in and decided to watch. I have now seen every show, all seven seasons, 92 episodes. That’s in three weeks. In other words, I have spent roughly four of the last 21 days doing nothing but watching Mad Men. That’s not healthy. I mean, the show was superb, but I’m glad it’s over. I would rather obsess about something else.

Elizabeth is one of several million people — so many of them teenagers — who have become obsessed with the Broadway show “Hamilton.” It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda. When I was Elizabeth’s age, we all wore Rush and Black Sabbath T-shirts and sang about how Mommy’s alright and Daddy’s alright, they just seem a little weird.

These kids are singing about Alexander Hamilton’s argument with Thomas Jefferson over a plan to establish a national bank and assume state debt.

All of Elizabeth’s friends seem to be into Hamilton. One of them will periodically and for no obvious reason break into “You’ll Be Back,” a song where King George tells the colonies they will eventually return to England’s rule (‘’Cuz when push comes to shove/I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”). Another somehow got to see the show back before it became a national phenomenon, and this has turned her into something of a superhero.

But of course, Elizabeth is more consumed by the show than most. She has memorized every word of the musical, read every word she can about Alexander Hamilton, and, naturally, she has asked us to start calling her “Eliza” after Hamilton’s wife, Eliza Schuyler. She wears one of her three Hamilton T-shirts every single day that she’s allowed, and she regularly says things like “Thomas Jefferson was the worst,” though it has nothing at all to do with what we were talking about, and she will actually tear up a little thinking about poor John Laurens.

This is all hilarious, of course — a 14-year-old girl utterly fanatical about the Founding Fathers — that is, until you realize that it isn’t going away.

All of this reminded me, strangely enough, of the Cleveland Browns. They were my first obsession. Even now, I’m not sure I can put into words how consumed I was with the Browns. In classes, when I should have been learning how to find the area of a circle or how circuits work or what the heck Hawthorne was talking about (things I still don’t know), I was scribbling stupid little stories about the Cleveland Browns. You might think this was because I wanted to become a sportswriter, but no, I had no idea about sportswriting, no ambitions to be a writer. I was writing these Browns stories because I couldn’t stop thinking about them—no, more to the point, I did not want to stop thinking about them. I was happiest pondering Bernie Kosar and Earnest Byner and Kevin Mack and Hanford Dixon and all the rest. I was happiest dreaming up imaginary plays that might work, strategies that might pay off, preview stories that might come true.

Now, of course, I see it: The rest of life was kind of scary. School was scary. Girls were scary. My parents were scary. Homework was scary. All the other kids seemed to me to know something I did not know. They knew who they were. They knew how they fit in. They knew what they wanted to do with their lives. Of course, they did not really know any of that, but they sure seemed to know, and here I was, too small for one sport, too uncoordinated for another, too stupid or lazy (or both) to excel, too homely to ask out the cheerleader, too nearsighted to give up the glasses, too shy to be the class clown, too unimaginative to play Dungeon and Dragons, too uncool to be first, too uncommitted to think about it all very much. Ah, but the Cleveland Browns. That was a world I understood. I did not want to leave.

Elizabeth does not have any of my weaknesses — she has lots of friends, works way harder and does way better in her classes, is beautiful … but it’s only when you get older that you realize that ALL kids have at least some of these emotions. It is scary being a teenager. But it’s also exhilarating. She finds herself seesawing between childhood and adulthood, enjoying a few minutes of peace doing girlish things but then growing outraged when the waitress gives her a kid’s menu, proudly interviewing and getting a summer job, but then wanting to know why she can’t just stay home and read. It’s all so confusing.

It’s so much safer in the world of Alexander Hamilton.

So, one day, I decided to take on a speaking engagement for the sole purpose of raising enough money to take Elizabeth to see Hamilton. You probably know that it’s hard, almost impossible even, to get Hamilton tickets. This is true, but it’s also not true. It’s true that getting Hamilton tickets involves lotteries and luck and trying to buy tickets months in advance and knowing somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody.

But … it’s also true that you can simply buy resale Hamilton tickets — that is, if you are willing to spend more money than you could ever imagine spending. How much money? I still can’t say the number out loud.

Rain fell in New York the night we saw Hamilton.

And Elizabeth held my hand tight and couldn’t stop crying as we walked into the theater.

“I may not live to see our glory
(I may not live to see our glory)
But I will gladly join the fight
(But I will gladly join the fight)
And when our children tell our story
(And when our children tell our story)
They’ll tell the story of tonight
— The Story of Tonight from Hamilton

The thing about seeing Hamilton RIGHT NOW at its peak moment is that even before it begins, the entire theater is filled with wonder. Every single person would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. As a sportswriter, I often feel that sort of energy at the biggest events, at the Masters or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, but it’s even more pronounced in this theater. People look at each other with the same wide-eyed expression: “Can you believe we’re here?”

And then the show begins, Aaron Burr on the stage, talking about that bastard orphan Hamilton, and within about two minutes you realize the thing makes Hamilton magical is this: It’s going to be even better than you had hoped.

How do you know only a minute in? You just do. The charms of Hamilton are so overwhelming and come at you from so many different directions that it’s hard to pinpoint. The music is fantastic, of course, and of every style. The actors are all thoroughly wonderful. The set, which is so simple, is ever changing as people bring things on the stage and take things off, almost without notice. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics are so fun and surprising and joyful and glorious …

Here, the Marquis de Lafayette is the “Lancelot of the Revolutionary set.”

Here, George Washington is not the white-haired truth-teller known for annual white sales, he is the only hope when the Colonies are “outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned.”

Here, the Revolutionary War is not some bloodless classroom lesson, but the answer to the question: “How does a ragtag army in need of a shower/somehow defeat a global superpower?”

Here, duels are explained in rhyme:

Number one!
The challenge,
Demand satisfaction
If they apologize,
No need for further action
Number two!
If they don’t, grab a friend,
That’s your second
Your lieutenant
When there’s reckoning to be reckoned.

And maybe this begins to explain the sorcery of Hamilton: It is new and it is familiar all at once. You know these characters and don’t know them at all. You know the story and don’t know it at all. I can’t remember anything quite like that. When the second act begins, Aaron Burr introduces Thomas Jefferson (“You haven’t met him yet, you haven’t had the chance/‘cause he’s been kicking’ ass as the ambassador to France”), and then Daveed Diggs’ Thomas Jefferson rolls out wearing a glorious purple suit, looking for all the world like a revolutionary version of Prince …

… and it’s JUST RIGHT. Do you know what I mean? You might be aware that Thomas Jefferson really didn’t look like Prince, and he wasn’t much of a hip-hop performer. He was a Virginia slaveowner. But by the time the second act begins, no, this is Thomas Jefferson. It feels exactly right. This is the closest experience I’ve ever had to that feeling inside a dream. You know: In the dream, you are talking with your best friend only he’s actually a grizzly bear wearing a stethoscope, and you’re inside a car that’s not exactly a car and you’re parked inside the Taj Mahal but it’s orange and looks a bit like old Shea Stadium … and none of it seems out of place. None of it seems unfamiliar. It doesn’t just make perfect sense, it feels perfect. There are goosebumps detonating because, my God, look, that’s Thomas Jefferson.

No, I guess I cannot put you there in the theater, though I wish I could. I wish you could see it if you have ’t. I don’t even know you, but I wish you could see it because you will be happier after you see it. You will be happier after watching Hamilton and Jefferson have a hip-hop rap off about whether the U.S. should honor its treaty with France. You will be happier after watching Angelica relive the moment when she introduced her sister Eliza to Hamilton. You will even be happier after seeing the Burr-Hamilton duel, which is indescribably powerful and so utterly simple all at once.

My friend Michael told me something before I saw the show, and after he found out how much I paid to see it — I think he was saying it to make me feel better about the expense. He said it is the one thing, maybe the only thing, that lives up to the hype. He was exaggerating to make a point. After all, the Golden State Warriors, when right, live up to the hype. A Bruce Springsteen concert lives up to the hype. In-N-Out Burgers live up to the hype. Playoff hockey, The Great Gatsby, Paris, The Gettysburg Address, first kisses, baseball day games, chocolate cake, all of these live up to the hype. There are many other things too — Messi and Harry Potter and Adele and Kansas City barbecue — that rise up to our highest hopes.

What made Hamilton different, I think, was that in addition to rising up, in addition to surpassing those hopes, it felt familiar too, as if we’d already seen it long ago and are now happily remembering.

“Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, Who dies, Who tells your story.”
— The closing song of “Hamilton.”

Throughout the show, Elizabeth would periodically grab my arm and squeeze it as tightly as she could. It was as if she were trying to hold herself up.

“Dad,” she whispered in my ear during a quiet moment, “I cannot believe I’m here.” She was sobbing.

One of the enduring curiosities of parenthood is that you have no idea what moments will endure. I can vaguely remember, so many times, doing something with Elizabeth — holding her when she was just a child or taking her to her first something or other or having one of those important heart-to-heart talks — and thinking: “Oh, I’ll never forget this exact moment.”

And I’ve forgotten them. The details are lost. Oh, I’m sure they’re in my mind somewhere, and maybe they will emerge at some point, but right now they are gone. Her first day of school? Her first ballgame? Her first full-throated laugh? The unforgettable time that she … what did she do again? Gone.

Meanwhile, other moments, silly things, pointless things, they stand out, like something red in a fog of white. A bad pun, she said once. The time I helped her study for a fairly meaningless quiz. That soccer game, when she stood around talking to a friend, even as the ball rolled by her time and again.

So, while it’s fresh in my mind now, I cannot imagine forgetting any detail of sitting with Elizabeth while we watched Hamilton. But I will forget. I will forget the details of this difficult but hopeful year. I will forget the size of eyes as she stared at the stage and tried to memorize it. I will forget because the years pile on, and memories cloud as they bump into each other, and I barely remember where I was yesterday.

But she will remember. That’s the thing. She will remember every detail. She will remember it the way I remember what it was like inside Cleveland Municipal Stadium with those stupid steel beams blocking every view of the field and the wind howling off of the Lake and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke. She will remember every little thing about that theater, about that stage, about Lin’s voice, about my jacket being around her shoulders, about Burr’s unplanned little laugh when watching King George dance, about that night.

As we walked out into New York, the echo of the show still ringing, she held on to me tight, and she stumbled because she was still inside the dream. She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek.

“Are you going to start crying again?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, but she did, just a little, and she clung to me tighter, and I leaned down and sang in her ear:

‘They’ll tell the story of tonight.”

She smiled and wiped away her tears.

“They’ll tell the story of tonight,” she sang back.

The first thing I had to do when we got to Harry Potter World was stand in line. This was not unexpected. We had been told by several people to prepare for 1930s Soviet bread-length lines. However, it was a bit surprising to find that I had to wait in line just for the right to go into Harry Potter World, where I could wait in those long lines. It turns out that Harry Potter World is rather small, and they can only let in so many people at a time. So, I had to wait in a 45-minute line that twisted and turned through the park just to get a return ticket — which would allow us to go into Harry Potter World four hours later.

It probably goes without saying that I do not like waiting in lines — this has to be like saying that you don’t like traffic or you don’t like doing taxes. But, to tell the truth, I enjoyed standing in line. It was a beautiful day, and the line snaked through Comic Strip World (or whatever it is called) so while the family was off doing amusement park things, I could look at Beetle Bailey and Cathy and Blondie exhibits. Perhaps more than anything, I had that rare “I’m a Dad” feeling of pride. I can remember my Dad doing all sorts of awful tasks like this, all just so we could do something fun. It seems part of the job. When I finally reached the end of that first line and got our return tickets, I had this great sense of accomplishment. Nobody, for the moment anyway, could argue the point.

Attorney: My client is a great Dad.Judge: What proof do you have of this?Attorney: He waited by himself in a 45-minute line so his wife and daughters could go to Harry Potter world.Judge: Case closed. Defendant is a great dad.

We had four hours before we were to stand in the Harry Potter World lines, and so we went to Dr. Seuss Land, which reminded me once again that Dr. Seuss was a disturbed man. I don’t mean this in a bad way at all — I loved Dr. Seuss as a child, and I love him as a parent, but the world he created is whacked. We had breakfast with the Grinch (who snapped at both daughters), and we rode the “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” ride (where you get sprayed with water), and we went into the Cat in the Hat Ride, where you get spun around and constantly taunted by creatures aptly named Thing 1 and Thing 2.

At one point, we also went to Jurassic Park land, and we were taken into a laboratory-themed room where a young man in a lab jacket showed us a rather large dinosaur that he said was brought back to life through cryogenics and cloning and whatever that movie was about. This placed us as parents in a rather odd position: Were we supposed to tell the girls that the dinosaur wasn’t real? Frankly, I have to admit, it gets harder and harder as a parent to remember what myths the kids still believe in, what myths they kind-of believe in, what myths we want them to believe in and so on. I finally made an executive decision: I saw no reason whatsoever for them to believe that dinosaurs still roam the earth.

“It’s a robot,” I told them.

“Are you sure?” they asked.

“And I don’t think Babe Ruth called his shot either,” I said.

Harry Potter World is actually just one cobbled street that features a castle, a wand shop, a sweet shop, a magical joke shop, a restaurant, three rides and 1.9 million people. It is not large, but there is something bewitching about the place. The scene seems pulled out of the J.K. Rowling books. To be honest, it almost feels like you are shuffling about in a pop-up version of the books … assuming that the pop-up book was placed in O’Hare Airport on Christmas Eve.

My point here is to write about the something magical that happened in Harry Potter World and not to give a review of the park, but I will say that it really was great fun despite the crowds and the long lines. In a weird way, it was great fun BECAUSE of the crowds and the long lines. What I mean is: Elizabeth had been so looking forward to the park. She has a natural habit of building things up way too big in her mind, which sometimes leads to spectacular disappointment … a habit, I fear, she may have inherited from her father. It is actually this habit that led to our magical moment.

But in this case, her fevered anticipation for Harry Potter World was met, even exceeded, and against intuition I think the large crowds and long lines had a lot to do with it. I think this for two reasons:

1. The long lines meant that we stayed in HP World for a long time. If there had been only a few people in the park, we would have been in and out in an hour and a half or two hours, and she would have realized that the park wasn’t very big. We would have ridden the rides, gone through the castle, visited the shops, and there would have been an “Is that all there is?” feeling. But because just getting into the castle took more than an hour, just getting into the sweet shop was another 15-20 minutes, getting on the ride was another 45, buying a wand from one of the street vendors was another 30 … it all felt to her like an enormous adventure.

2. I think seeing how many people from all over love Harry Potter — there had to be five or six languages going at once, not including intense Alabama accents (the Alabama-Michigan State Bowl was a day away) — made her feel a part of this larger community. This very sweet young woman from Dothan, Alabama lifted Elizabeth on her shoulders so she could see a little show (I had our younger daughter, Katie, on my shoulders), and then they talked all about goblet of fire and the Mirror or Erised and the spiders in the Forbidden Forest and whatever else. I remember as a child desperately wanting something to make me feel connected — for me it was sports. Sadly there was no Cleveland Indians world, unless you count the bleachers at old Municipal Stadium where factory workers drank schnapps from flasks and swore liberally and rubbed your head when the Indians actually scored.

So if somebody would ask me: “Should we go to Harry Potter World?” I would simply ask how much their children love Harry Potter. Because for an adult who loves Harry Potter … I don’t know what the expectations would be, and so I don’t know how annoying and off-putting the lines and the claustrophobia and the general inability to get around would become. For a 9-year-old who dreams nightly of J.K. Rowling’s imaginary and wonderful and frightening world, it was fabulous — even if Elizabeth was scared to death on the park’s main ride.

Now, finally, the magical part. As we were getting ready to leave, Elizabeth was granted her one wish, which was to buy something from the gift shop. This, even under the best of circumstances, can be a gut-wrenching experience. Every now and again, I will take the girls to Target, and they are allowed to buy one thing, and Katie tends to pick out a Polly Pocket doll or something like it within about 45 seconds.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, proceeds to turn the trip into Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1. She puts intense pressure on herself to make the right decision, as if every Target will close tomorrow, as if a meteor will crash into the earth if she chooses wrong. If she had found herself faced with the bluepill, redpill choice from The Matrix, I have little doubt the movie would have lasted 37 hours and in the end she would have asked once again if there was a purplepill in a different aisle.

So, if trips to the local Target turn into traumatic experiences, you can only imagine the anxiety and torture of picking out one thing in Harry Potter World. My wife, Margo, being smarter than her husband, announced that she was taking the younger daughter back to Dr. Seuss World — because getting drenched while riding in flying fish is far superior to dealing with the older daughter’s “what should I buy” anxieties.

It was every bit as stressful as you might imagine. There were, of course, way too many people inside the secondary gift shop (the MAIN gift shop, where there is some show involved with picking out a wand, had an hour-and-a-half wait). It was difficult to move. And Elizabeth was in her rush-from-one-place-to-another-frantic mode … she was in the 9-year-old middle ground between elation and panic.

And then we ran into Katie the Prefect. Katie was about 18 or 19, I’m terrible about judging ages, and she worked in the store and, as such, wore the robes that students wear at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books. I know she was a prefect because she wore a prefect’s badge, which is the first thing that Elizabeth noticed.

“Are you a prefect?” she asked, and her face lit up.

“Yes,” Katie said. “What house are you in?”

There are four houses at the Hogwarts School in Harry Potter. The main one is Gryffindor, which is the house of Harry Potter and his friends. For some reason, Elizabeth had decided that her house was Ravenclaw, which in my own memory plays only the smallest role in the books.

“I’m a Ravenclaw,” Elizabeth said.

“Are you now?” Katie said, and she was clearly amused, and Elizabeth was absolutely smitten.

It’s easy to forget this … but anyone can be a star to a 9-year-old. Yes, Elizabeth is hypersensitive to stardom, she likes the tween fan magazines so she can read up on Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez (her favorite) and Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers and … if none of these names are ringing a bell, I can lend you a 9-year-old girl for a while.*

*Update: It’s amazing how famous those names are NOW.

But the truth is that to a 9-year-old, a star can be almost anybody older — the police officer standing outside the mall, the soldier who walks on the plane, the boys and girls in the choir at a recital, the actors in a community theater play and, most definitely, the girl wearing robes and a prefect badge at Harry Potter World. They talked for a couple of moments, Katie the Prefect was kind and patient, and then we were back on our never-ending adventure of buying something that would somehow meet Elizabeth’s impossibly high hopes.

I’ve bored you long enough — but I should say there was still quite a bit of angst before we finally got down to two items. One was a glitzy Gryffindor bag (there was no Ravenclaw merchandise in the junior gift shop). And the other was a cute stuffed-animal owl like the one that Harry uses to send and receive mail. Getting down to these two items had pressed Elizabeth to her decision-making limits, and at this point she more or less shut down.

“Daddy,” she said in a pleading voice. “What should I do? Tell me?”

Believe it or not, there are no classes that tell fathers what to say to their daughters when they have reached a crisis point while trying to choose an owl or a bag. The options, as I saw them, were to say what I was thinking (“I don’t care just choose one already”), to go strict Daddy on her (“If you don’t choose in 5 seconds, you won’t get either”), to take the spoiled Dad route I have always promised myself not to take (“Fine just get them both and let’s get out of here”), or to try once more to guess which one she really wanted and push her in that direction. None of these options seemed to fit the occasion.

And then … I saw Katie the Prefect. And, in an inspired bit of fatherhood, I said: “Let’s go ask her.”

I had no idea what Katie the Prefect would say. Exuberance and enthusiasm can be such rare qualities in people. There are so many discouraged people. There are so many people who appear to be going through the motions — leading those lives of quiet desperation. The older I get the more I have come to believe that we can make such a difference by showing just a little bit of zeal, doing a little bit more, showing just a bit more of our spirit. But it is not easy, and it is not common.

Elizabeth quietly walked over to Katie The Prefect (while clinging desperately to my hand) and said: “Um, excuse me. I wanted to ask you a question, please.”

Katie said: “Oh hello. My little Ravenclaw friend. What can I do for you?”

Elizabeth explained her conundrum. Owl or bag. Bag or owl. Katie the Prefect in real life, I suspect, is a young woman who goes to college, has a life plan, undoubtedly has her good moments and bad, her good habits and bad, parents who adore her, friends who look up to her, friends she looks up to and all those things. She worked at Harry Potter world, which undoubtedly has its good points and bad points and lots of grumpy muggles (muggle meaning “non-magical people” in the Harry Potter books).

But in this moment — and I doubt she realized this entirely — she was the biggest thing in the world to a 9-year-old girl she will undoubtedly never see again. She could have simply said “Get the bag” or “Get the owl” or “Well, what do you want to do?” or anything else. That was, I would guess, part of her job.

What she did, though, was lean down close to Elizabeth and look her right in the eye. And she said: “Well, it’s a difficult choice isn’t it? They’re both such wonderful things. But it seems to me that you could use the bag every day. You could use it to keep your books when you go to school, and school is very important. I had to study very hard to become a prefect. And the owl …”

With this she leaned even closer and almost whispered in Elizabeth’s ear: “I must tell you: Owls are not of much use in the muggle world.”

That was it. That was the magic. Elizabeth’s face lit up like like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. She nodded, and she gave Katie the Prefect a huge hug, and for those 20 seconds of her life it was like she was in the Harry Potter book, being offered advice by the most popular student at Hogwarts. Owls are not of much use in the muggle world. Katie hugged her back, disappeared into the crowd, and Elizabeth got the bag which, for once, was EXACTLY what she wanted. It was, in fact, the greatest thing she had ever gotten in her entire life. Every time she drapes it around her shoulder, she tells the story of how she got it and the advice Katie the Prefect had given her.

It was just a few seconds of kindness. It might even just be viewed as part of the job of working at Harry Potter World. But that — more than the multi-million dollar rides, more than the authentic butterbeer or the cauldron made of chocolate, more than the remarkable effects in the castle, more than anything — that is what Elizabeth will remember, perhaps even for the rest of her life. A young woman probably making something like minimum wage, wearing a robe and a badge, had made Elizabeth feel special and magical. Owls truly are not of much use in the muggle world. I thanked Katie the Prefect before she went off to help other customers, but I’m not sure she heard me, and I’m not sure she would have understood anyway. There’s so much we can do in this crazy world with a little effort and imagination. There’s so much we can do that it’s easy to miss what we have done … even after it’s over.

—Bob Uecker in his Baseball Hall of Fame speech

Bob Uecker followed up that line, that incredible line, the funniest line ever uttered in any Hall of Fame speech—which, by the way, he ad-libbed along with the rest of the speech—with eight seconds of deadpan silence and let the laughter build all around him. That’s how it was his whole life. Laughter always built around him.

Nobody in the history of American sports could deliver a line like Ueck.

He hit .200 for his career—matching, as he often said, the average of another all-time sports legend, bowler Don Carter.

He set the big-league record for passed balls—“and,” he added, “I did that without playing every game.”

He was traded three times in three years. The first time he was traded, Milwaukee to St. Louis in April of 1964, the legendary Branch Rickey was a Cardinals consultant and personally tried to veto the deal. This is absolutely true. But Bing Devine overruled Rickey, and the headline in the paper was “Braves Swap Bob Uecker for 2 Cards.”

You can almost hear Ueck say, “But at least one of those was a Bob Gibson card.”

Those Cardinals came from 11 games back to win the pennant, but Ueck did not play in the World Series.

“I was on the disabled list,” he told Bob Costas and Joe Morgan in the booth during Game 6 of the 1995 World Series.

Costas: Fouled to the screen. Why were you on the disabled list?

Uecker: I got hepatitis.

Costas: Swing and a miss. How did you get hepatitis?

Uecker: The trainer injected me with it.

Line after line. Story after story. Laugh after laugh. It was Johnny Carson who nicknamed Ueck “Mr. Baseball”—Uecker appeared on “The Tonight Show” a hundred times or more. After the first couple of times, Ueck was never asked to do a pre-show interview. Carson didn’t want to know what he was going to say. He just knew it would be gold.

Jack Ogden lived a remarkable sports life. In 1918, during his brief time with the New York Giants, he roomed with Jim Thorpe. In 1921, while pitching for the International League’s Baltimore Orioles, he won 31 games. The No. 2 pitcher on that team was a wild and hard-throwing left-handed pitcher called Bob Groves in the papers. Later, he would be known as Lefty Grove.

Ogden returned to the big leagues for a while. He became general manager of the Orioles. He also became manager of the professional football Baltimore Blue Birds. He was basketball coach at the University of Baltimore. He officiated college football games. Then he became a scout. In his long scouting career, he would sign dozens of major league players. He signed Dick Allen.

On Feb. 3, 1956, in a Milwaukee restaurant, Ogden signed a young catcher who had just been discharged from the army at Fort Belvoir. The star of that championship Fort Belvoir team was the shortstop, Dick Groat, who was already a star for the Pirates. But Ogden liked the catcher, particularly his powerful arm.

The catcher, of course, was Bob Uecker.

“The Braves signed me for $3,000,” as Uecker told the story. “That bothered my Dad at the time because he didn’t have that kind of dough. But he wanted me to play. I remember sitting around our kitchen table counting all this money, coins out of jars.”

“Here’s the thing that was easy to miss about Bob,” Bob Costas is saying now. “Above everything else—even above how funny he was—baseball was his life. You had to see this up close to understand it. When he was announcing with the Brewers, he was one of the players. This went beyond even what you would see with beloved announcers like Jack Buck with the Cardinals or Tom Hamilton with Cleveland. They treated Ueck like he was an actual player.

“You know, he had this great arm, and he used to throw batting practice well into his 70s. In 2018, when the Brewers made the run all the way to the National League Championship Series, they voted him a full share (which he donated to charity).

“Baseball kept him alive. Even in his last year, when he was so ill, when he got to the ballpark and stepped on the elevator up to the press box, he would come to life. He was just happier and healthier at the ballpark.”

Bob Uecker was Dick Allen’s best friend—Allen actually cried when Ueck was traded away in ’64.

Bob Uecker was Bob Gibson’s best friend. You probably know about the famous team photograph the Cardinals took in ’64, the one they had to discard because Ueck and Gibby are holding hands and smiling as if they’re a couple.

Bob Uecker was Phil Niekro’s best friend. You’ve no doubt heard Uecker’s famous advice about catching the knuckleball, this after he allowed a record 25 passed balls and 31 wild pitches in just 48 starts, most of them with Niekro on the mound.

“The best way,” he said, “is to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”

What often gets overlooked, though, is that Niekro at the time was a struggling 28-year-old pitcher running out of big-league chances. Everybody could see that his knuckleball was dazzling and virtually unhittable, but nobody knew if he could control it enough to pitch in the big leagues. It was Ueck, with no particular skill at catching knuckleballs, who insisted to Niekro, “You keep throwing that knuckleball, throw it again and again and again. You let me worry about catching it. You just keep throwing it.”

“Bob Uecker,” Phil Niekro said, “helped give me my career.”

They all loved him—teammates, opponents, fans, everybody. They loved him for his humor, of course, he was always the funniest person in the room. But they loved him for so much more than that.

“When the Brewers lost to the Mets in the wild card,” Costas says, “Christian Yelich was in tears after the game. He wasn’t in tears because of the loss to the Mets. Bob Uecker was in the clubhouse. And he sensed, as we all did, that this was the last time…”

Bob Costas loved him. In 1994, during a game, the television camera caught a shot of Costas’s son Keith, who was only 8. Joe Morgan said, “Hey, look, Bob, there’s your son Keith.”

At which point, Bob Uecker said, “You know, I was so proud of the kid. I tossed him a baseball. And he dropped it.”

Bob Uecker’s grandest moment as a player probably came with Atlanta on June 21, 1967. Well, it might have been the home run he hit off Sandy Koufax in ’65 (Koufax intentionally walked him later in the game!). It might have been the two home runs he hit off Ray Sadecki in ’66. It might have been the three-hit game he had against the Pirates in ’62 to support Warren Spahn’s fine pitching.

But there was something special about the 1967 moment. That would be his last year in the big leagues; he had already been traded once and would soon be released. He came into Atlanta’s game against San Francisco that day hitting .114. He was bleary-eyed; he had just played all 15 innings in a game against the Dodgers the night before.*

*He did manage a hit in the 10th inning of that game, breaking a long hitless streak. “I turned to the umpire,” he told reporters, “and asked for the ball.”

The Braves started him anyway—their regular catcher, Joe Torre, was injured, and Ueck was the only option—and in the second inning, he came up with Mack Jones on second. He blooped a game-tying double off Joe Gibbon.

In the next inning, Gibbon got in some trouble and was pulled for right-handed reliever Ron Herbel, who has his own big-league distinction—Herbel has the lowest batting average in baseball history for any player with at least 100 plate appearances. Herbel went 6 for 206 in his career; that’s an .029 batting average.

Herbel walked Mack Jones to load the bases. That brought up Bob Uecker. He immediately felt uncomfortable because he was a right-handed hitter and, as such, was almost never used against right-handed pitchers. “About the only time I see right-handed pitchers,” he told reporters, “is in the hotel lobby.”

Herbel threw a pitch. What was the pitch? Uecker was never exactly sure.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “Either I made a mistake hitting it or Herbel made a mistake throwing it, but you can be sure that mistakes were made.”

Uecker smashed it to left-center, where it carried over the 365-foot sign on the wall. It was his first home run in more than a year. It was the first grand slam of his career.

For the rest of his life, Bob Uecker told that story as only Bob Uecker could. “When his manager, Herman Franks, came out to get him,” was the punch line, “he was carrying Herbel’s suitcase.”

But, even better, I like what he said that day. You think of all he did in his life. He was a regular guest on Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He was a star of his own television sitcom. He was two of the greatest announcers in baseball history, first as himself, Bob Uecker, second as Harry Doyle, who called Cleveland games in “Major League.” Juuuuust a bit outside! He’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame, the National Radio Hall of Fame, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, and even the WWE Hall of Fame.

He was Mr. Baseball, king of the game, the guy who always got seats in the front row. And he was, yes, as beloved as anyone who ever stepped onto a baseball field.

That day, after he hit the grand slam, someone asked him how happy it made him feel. Bob Uecker died on Thursday at age 90. Even still, you can see the deadpan look on his face all those years ago.

“Heck,” he said, “I’m happy when I hit a hard ground ball.”

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A friend recently gave me an incredibly generous gift — this business card from a Century 21 Travel salesman named Jim Hedge in Tarzana, California. I’ve tried to enhance it a little bit so you can see it clearly, but basically, this is what it looks like.

I had no idea just how much this card would take over my life.

It’s a long business card — probably 1.25 times longer than a typical card — and it screams 1960s business style. This is the sort of card you could imagine Harry Crane carrying around. It’s a bright yellow, it has that funny CABLE: “CENTURYTRAV” thing in the top left-hand corner, and my second favorite part about the card is that it has Jim Hedge’s home number on there.

You could imagine Jim giving this card to clients and saying, “My home number is on there. If you need anything, call me anytime. I never sleep.”

When this friend gave me the card, he thought he was giving me fun little gift.

What he did not know was that he was giving me an obsession to chase.

Who was Jim Hedge? What was his deal? What did he like to do? What were his hopes? His dreams?

And why, oh why, was the back of this card signed by Willie Mays?

Settle in, folks. This is going to be a wild and strange ride.

Have any of you seen this show on BritBox called “Ludwig?” Margo and I just started watching it, and it’s truly wonderful — we started watching it because a friend told me that it has an amazing assortment of pens and notebooks.

The story is that Ludwig (that’s his pen name) is a creator of puzzles, and through a very funny series of events (he has a twin brother, his twin brother is missing, he’s probably in love with the wife of his twin brother, we’re still early in the show), he ends up solving murders. The thing about it is, he doesn’t want to solve murders. He only wants to go back to his home and create puzzles. Unfortunate for Ludwig, once he hears about a murder, he can’t help but try to solve it because murders are the ultimate puzzles … and he is incapable of letting go.

When Jeff, the friend, gave me this card, he undoubtedly thought I would just like to have a Willie Mays autograph. And I do. It’s lovely. It’s clear and authenticated, and it even has the fun “To Pal” on it, which, I don’t know if Willie signed every autograph like that, but it’s cool. To Pal.

But, like Ludwig, I had to at least try to find out what happened here. I mean, was Willie just walking by? Did he happen to be in Tarzana when he had the urge to go on a trip? Did Jim go to a ballgame, get a chance to meet Willie Mays, and the only thing he had to sign was one of his business cards?

And who wrote WILLIE MAYS in all caps on the bottom? I assume that was Jim.

Did Jim get a lot of famous people to autograph his business cards? Did he put all of their names on the bottom so he would remember which card was which? Or did he ask Willie Mays to write his name on the bottom? Or did Willie voluntarily write his name on the bottom just to be nice?

The first thing I found out about Jim Hedge is that he was a bowler. There are so many things I miss about the golden age of newspapers … one of them is that just about every paper had a weekly bowling column. It was somebody’s job to record the top bowling scores from leagues around the city; one of the great joys of my childhood was seeing my father’s name in the paper when he would bowl a 200 game or 600 series. Community journalism … it brought us together somehow.

“Hey,” people used to say. “I saw your dad’s name in the paper.”

Sigh.

Anyway, Jim Hedge was a regular in the Greater Los Angeles bowling columns, particularly in Ray Rosenbaum’s column in the Valley Times of North Hollywood. He was mentioned so often that every now and again, Ray would just throw a little side into his column wondering how “our friend Jim Hedge” might feel about something. For instance, in 1964, a Tarzana bowling alley started hosting risque entertainment in order to bring in larger crowds.

Jim wasn’t a fan of that. He believed in the sanctity of bowling alleys.

“I have nothing against this type of show,” he said. “But I don’t think it belongs in a bowling alley. I have bowled for 20 years and am a member of the Professional Bowlers of America. The game has been brought up to a high standard and should be kept that way. Women and children bowling in daytime leagues should not be exposed to burlesque shows.”

Of course, I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that this is same Jim Hedge.

But I’m 99 percent certain. Tarazana ain’t that big a place.

Jim Hedge lived a sort of Fred Flintstone existence — he bowled a lot, obviously, and his wife was involved in numerous church activities at St. James right there in Tarzana, and he seemed to belong to a couple of men’s clubs.

“Yeah!” Annie from “Field of Dreams” says, “But what’s it gotta do with baseball?”

In February 1965, Jim’s daughter Patricia married William Hardwick at St. James Church. Pat, as she was apparently known, had attended Reseda High … and I thought I had my first clue. Do you know who else attended Reseda High School … and precisely at the same time as Pat? Big league pitcher Jim McGlothlin.

And I imagined the scene — maybe Pat Hedge and Jim McGlothlin dated or something. Maybe they were just friends. Maybe Jim and Jim and stayed pals. Maybe pitcher Jim introduced Century 21 Jim to Willie Mays. Maybe!

Yeah, it’s weak sauce.

I started to give up on this whole thing.

Before I closed off the investigation, I ran across one more bowling story about Jim Hedge. This one was a little bit different. This one wasn’t about Jim as a bowler. This was about the bowling prowess of Jim’s son-in-law, William Hardwick.

Billy, everybody called him.

It turns out Billy had a knack for bowling — he had a knack for bowling, even though he had lost a finger in a machine shop accident. The lost finger, for some reason, kept him from getting a lot of spin on the ball — he bowled dead straight and also much slower than many of the other top guys. Somehow, even with that style, he racked up so many strikes that people began calling him “The Magician.”

Billy was such a fine bowler that Jim staked him $3,000 and encouraged him to try his luck on the fledgling Pro Bowlers Tour. It was money well spent. Billy struggled at first but soon became one of the top bowlers in the world. In 1965, an Akron lawyer (and non-bowler) named Eddie Elias came up with this idea for a big-money bowling extravaganza called the “Firestone Tournament of Champions.”

“I think bowling is a better game for TV than golf,” Eddie told Sports Illustrated. “It’s like a game show — if he does it, he wins the money. If he doesn’t, he loses.”

Billy Hardwick won the very first Firestone Tournament of Champions. In fact, he became the first to win the triple crown of bowling — Firestone, the U.S. Open and the PBA National. He was Pro Bowler of the year in 1963 (just after marrying Pat) and 1969, when he set the record for most titles won in a season.

Billy Hardwick is in the Pro Bowlers Hall of Fame. In 2008, the PBA ranked him the 12th greatest bowler ever.

“Yeah!” Annie from “Field of Dreams” says, “But what’s it gotta do with baseball?”

OK, here’s my guess: Billy Hardwick and Willie Mays were at the same event somewhere. Maybe it was an Alabama event — Billy was born in Alabama (“I’m the biggest Alabama fan there is,” he was quoted saying”), and so was Willie Mays. I can’t actually FIND the event, but I feel like it had to … HEY, here’s a Billy Hardwick quote that ran in The Cleveland Press in 1972 when he was asked about losing his passion for the sport.

“You know, guys like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are older than me,” he said. “And they are still doing the job. But they don’t have to be mentally geared up for an entire game … maybe for part of a game or one certain game, they are bending their mind, but it’s a fluctuating kind of intensity. But in a game like bowling you aren’t going to get paid unless you go out to win.”

No, that doesn’t really say anything at all … but it is Billy Hardwick and Willie Mays in the same paragraph.

I think Billy Hardwick introduced Jim Hedge to Willie Mays.

And I can imagine the scene:

“Hey Willie,” Billy Hardwick said. “Come on over here. I want you to meet my father-in-law Jim.”

“It’s a great honor for me,” Jim Wedge said.

“Oh, none of that,” Willie Mays replied. “You want me to sign something for you?”

“Oh,” Jim said as he reached for a pen and one of his card. “Could you sign the back of my business card?” And Willie signed “To Pal, Willie Mays.”

And as the greatest ballplayer who ever lived walked away, Jim Wedge memorialized the moment but writing on the bottom of the card, very neatly, “WILLIE MAYS.”

OK, where else can this absurdity go? Well, I just typed in “Willie Mays” and “Billy Hardwick” into the search engine.

And a story came up from comedian, actor, and podcaster Chris Hardwick.

Yes, Chris Hardwick is the son of Billy Hardwick.

I don’t know if this makes Chris Jim Hedge’s grandson — Billy Hardwick married five times, and it’s not clear how long that first marriage lasted. In truth, I don’t know how much I really learned here. This whole thing was probably nothing more than chasing ghosts on a treadmill. But what is life without wild goose chases? What is collecting autographs about if not creating memories? What is a business card worth if it doesn’t have the person’s home phone number on it?

This was where the original story ended … but Brilliant Reader Jake adds a whole new level of intrigue by asking a seemingly simple question:

“Does the inscription actually say, “To Pal?”

I just assumed it does. Jeff, who gave me this card, thought the same. It makes sense.

Only … does it? Does anyone ever really ever sign something “To Pal?” I’ve signed tens of thousands of books, and I’ve never done that. Nor has anyone asked me to do it. Maybe “To MY Pal.” But “To Pal?” Never.

And now it all comes together, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

The card doesn’t say “To Pal.” It says “To Pat.”

Willie Mays didn’t sign this card for Jim Hedge, he signed it for Jim’s daughter — Billy Hardwick’s first wife.

AND THAT’S PROBABLY WHY SOMEONE WROTE WILLIE MAYS ON THE BOTTOM!

Whoa.

It turns out Pat was Keyser Söze all along.

Fathers and daughters, man — it’s a whole thing. A whole thing. Let me recite something for you off the top of my head.

Schnitzel von Krumm with a very low tum
Bitzer Maloney all skinny and bony
Muffin McLay like a bundle of hay
Bottomley Potts all covered in spots
Hercules Morse, as big as a horse
And Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy.

Those are the dogs in Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, a New Zealand children’s book we were given by someone many years ago, and I read it to both daughters so many times that even now, 12 and 16 and 20 years later, I know it by heart. I remember it deeply. I’m at an age where I lose simple words and famous names all the time and find myself Googling embarrassing queries such as, “Name of villain in that movie with Jodie Foster and the guy who played Thor’s father,” or “synonym for move” because I could not immediately think of the word “transfer.”*

*Oh yeah, to borrow from our old friend Vin Scully’s line about statistics, I use the Thesaurus the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support rather than illumination but also for throwing up on, for friendship, for conversation, for misidentifying, for climbing …

Point is, I don’t remember anything — but I remember every word from Hairy Maclary.

Fathers and daughters, man.

They’re about to leave the house. Well, one, the older one, Liz, she’s already at college. The younger one, Katie, leaves in August. There are a million feelings about it, some I can express, and others I cannot. A lot of the feelings, I admit, have to do with time. The older they get, the older I get, the further we move away from Hairy Maclary.

Faded pictures in an old scrapbook
Faded pictures that somebody took

Liz is the Springsteen fan. The girls didn’t embrace many of my specific passions — it was more my job to love what they loved, Disney princesses and Harry Potter and “Hamilton” and Taylor Swift and, oddly, the wives of Henry VIII — but Katie did take up tennis and, for a time, the Cleveland Browns, and Liz became a Bruce Springsteen fan. She started loving Springsteen sometime in high school, when her friends were mostly locked in on the pop star of the moment.

She always regretted not making her yearbook quote, “For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside/That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” — the same quote kids like her used in their yearbooks 40 years ago.

At some point, I promised her that if Bruce and the E Street Band went back on tour, I’d take her. The moment happened on Saturday night, Greensboro, N.C., and if I’m being honest, I was just a little bit nervous about it. It was the 15th time that I’ve seen Bruce in concert, which makes me both an obsessive fan and also no fan at all, depending on your point of view.

Telling a regular person I’ve seen Bruce play 15 times: “Wow, you must really like him, that’s a ridiculous number of times to see one performer.”

Telling a Bruce fan I’ve seen him play 15 times: “Huh, I’ve seen him 149 times. Have you ever seen him in Europe? No? Australia? No? Did you go on “The River” tour? No? Did you see him at the Stone Pony? No? Sheesh. You’re not fit to wear that Springsteen shirt you have on.”

Anyway, my own Springsteen journey has gone on for many, many years … and it makes sense to me because we’ve been getting older together. Bruce is 17 years older than me, which seemed like a lot when I was young but now barely feels like anything at all. I remember Bruce the rocker, Bruce the scorned lover, Bruce the acoustic dreamer (who would ask crowds to be quiet while he worked through his songs), Bruce the wanderer, Bruce feeling what we felt during 9/11, Bruce at the Super Bowl, Bruce on Broadway, Bruce winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom and so on.

But Liz … she doesn’t remember any of that because she’s 52 years younger than Bruce and only knows him through the music. And the music doesn’t get old. In the music, Bruce is forever 21 asking Rosalita to jump a little higher, forever 25 wanting to die with Wendy in an everlasting kiss, forever 35 and reminiscing about the good old days when his friend could throw that speedball* by you.

*Fastball, dammit.

So yes, sure, I knew Bruce would put on a good show. He always puts on a good show. But, I mean — he’s 73 years old, closing fast on 74. Garry W. Tallent is 73. Professor Roy Bittan is 73. Little Steven is 72. Mighty Max Weinberg turns 72 next month. Nils Lofgren turns 72 in June. The Big Man is gone.

And this was Liz’s first Bruce show. She’d built it up so much in her mind after all the stories she’d heard. What would she see? Old people singing young songs? Willie Mays falling down in the outfield? Faded pictures in an old scrapbook? Faded pictures that somebody took?

Well, now young faces grow sad and old
And hearts of fire grow cold
We swore blood brothers against the wind
I’m ready to grow young again

The Greensboro Coliseum is the sort of place that, frankly, cities across America are tearing down. It was originally built in 1959, and it has the extremely narrow concourses and knee-scraping seating arrangement of another time. There also isn’t a drink holder to be found anywhere in the arena. This last fact, along with the Coliseum’s odd policy of removing and confiscating all bottle caps, led to the inevitable water bottle spill before the music even began. Liz and I spent the show standing in a puddle.

But the Coliseum does have soul, lots of it, Elvis played here — both Elvises, actually — as did Elton and Hendrix and Queen and Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder and Prince and Willie Nelson and the Stones and the Who and Taylor Swift. The place creaks with music. Bruce himself had been here three times before. Echoes were everywhere.

Sure, yes, I did have some reservations about having Liz’s first Springsteen show be in Greensboro. I mean no disrespect to that fine city — birthplace of Dr. Frank Jobe! — but as Brian Piccolo in “Brian’s Song” said of nearby Wake Forest University: “Nice place, but, uh, well, not exactly center ring, you understand?”

And I wanted this night to be something ultra-special for Liz … and for me. Bruce Springsteen is one of those things between us, something that has stayed true through all the years. People love to laugh about how Bruce is the favorite musician of every white sportswriter over a certain age, and there’s truth to the charge, but this was something different. Once we were in a gift shop at the Harry Potter amusement park and she couldn’t choose between a bag and a stuffed owl. Once we were in a Broadway balcony watching “Hamilton” and tears streamed down her face. Once we were at a baseball game in Toledo and she looked up and said, “These are the best nachos I’ve ever had in my entire life,” and she has never stopped talking about those nachos.

Once we were …

No. Liz leads her own life now. She does her own things. She makes her own mistakes and has her own triumphs and, yes, goes by Liz. You know, she was always Elizabeth to me.

Hercules Morse as big as a horse.
And Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy.

I wanted this night to be perfect. I needed Bruce to take us away. I mean, how many more concerts will we have? How many more magical nights can there be? Yes, I needed Bruce to take us to the top of the world.

Could Bruce do it in Greensboro? That was my question before the night began.

And the answer surprised the heck out of me.

Greensboro would turn out to be as big a star as Bruce.

When all the summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams

Bruce began the show with “No Surrender,” a pretty solid message that he was going to do a little raging against the years. Do you know how many shows Bruce Springsteen has done in his life? Well if the Internet is to be believed, the answer is 3,516. That’s public shows. That doesn’t count rehearsals or private gatherings or recording sessions or anything like that.

Think about how many times he’s played “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road” or “Dancing in the Dark” or “Badlands.” How do you find meaning in the words after playing those songs thousands and thousands of times? How do you find depth in the music?

Somehow, he always does.

It’s that “somehow” that has always fascinated me.

And this time, maybe, I finally caught the secret, maybe met the riddle, because this time I wasn’t watching Bruce and the band as much as I was watching Liz. I wanted to see her reaction to everything.

“Oh, you’re going to love this,” I told her as Bruce began “Out in the Street,” which I think is the song with the biggest gap between the sound on the record (it’s a fine song) and the sound in concert (transcendent). And Bruce sang, “When I’m out in the street,” and Liz and everybody sang, “Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh!” And Bruce sang, “Meet me out in the street!” and Liz and everybody sang “Wha-oh! Wha-oh! Wha-oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”

And Liz’s face was as bright as the sun.

“That was the greatest thing ever,” she said, and then came an improvised jazz thing for “Kitty’s Back” and then came the conga line for “The E Street Shuffle” and then Bruce went out alone to pay tribute to the years in “Last Man Standing” and then came the most hectically wonderful wall of sound for “Because The Night” and Liz was floating some three feet off the ground and then the lights all came on because the show was no longer a performance but a giant house party — and “Badlands” became “Thunder Road” became “Born to Run” became “Rosalita” became “Glory Days” became “Dancing in the Dark” became “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” The horn section blared. The backup singers rocked. The percussionists dueled on drums. The guitarists rocked. One giant house party.

And, here was the biggest part of all: The crowd was absolutely incredible. And hey, most of us, we were as old as Bruce, older even, before the show I joked that it would be the only rock concert where the people in the audience would be saying, “Hey, turn it up, I can’t hear you.”

But, as I say, the crowd was incredible. I’ve been to my share of concerts through the years, and crowds tend to range from a passive audience to an into-it audience. This was something different. The crowd was part of the show. Nobody sat down. Everybody sang along to every song. Everybody danced to the beat. Everybody thrust their arms in triumph. Bruce, probably 10 times during the show, just held up the microphone and let the crowd handle the singing.

Yes, it was Bruce Springsteen AND the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagara-taking, history-making E … Street … Band … AND the hearing-aid-bringing, soul-singing, arms-swinging, bell-ringing, audience of Greensboro, North Carolina, all of us, together, in one big grocery bag, on top of each other, smooshing each other, loving each other, pushing the sound higher and higher, all of us ready to grow young again.

And I could see, in a whole new way, that this was a circle. Bruce powered the crowd. The crowd powered Bruce. Bruce powered the crowd. The crowd powered Bruce.

And Liz got to be inside the tornado.

“Greeeeeeeeensboro!” Bruce shouted. “What’s in the water down here?”

And then he said something else. I heard, “You are the best audience we’ve had!” The guy next to me heard, “You are the best American audience we’ve had on this tour!” Liz heard, “You are the best f-in audience!” I suppose it’s all the same thing. As Little Steven tweeted the next morning:

Am I saying the Greensboro show was somehow more magical than other Springsteen shows on this tour? Well, yes, I am. I mean, sure, it’s possible Bruce tells every audience they’re the best, and it’s likely Little Steven throws praise to every city they visit, and Bruce’s great gift, I think, is making everyone around him feel like tonight is the best night.

But … this was Liz’s first show. That makes it the best. And when it ended, she was speechless, in part because her throat was raw, and in part, because there seemed no words to say. She called it the best night of her life but admitted that those words didn’t capture all the feelings she had. No words could, I suppose.

So we sang to each other. Just a few lyrics. When we left “Hamilton” all those years ago, it was raining in New York, and we sang “The Story of Tonight.”

When we left the Greensboro Coliseum, arm in arm, both of us dizzy, we sang the least likely of Bruce songs. I don’t know why. Fathers and daughters, man.

In my letter to you
All that I’ve found true
And I sent it in my letter you

Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown.
Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million-dollar sound.
Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go.
Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home.
— Bruce Springsteen. The Promise.

I remember the first time I heard “The Promise.” It was about a decade ago. The song had been around for a long time before I first heard it — Bruce Springsteen would say it was the first song he wrote after “Born To Run” made him a rock and roll star in 1975. It figures that this was the first. “Born to Run,” the whole album, was about longing, open highway, the amusement park rising bold and stark, the poets who write nothing at all, the ghosts in the eyes of all the boys Mary sent away. Born to Run is about that brilliant age when you know dreams don’t come true, but you still believe they might come true FOR YOU.

And “The Promise” is about the everyday numbing of those dreams. It is a follow-up to Thunder Road, that song about the guy who learned how to make his guitar talk, and the girl who ain’t a beauty (but hey, she’s all right), both of them, pulling out of that town full of losers, pulling out of there to win. Now, that guy’s got a job. It’s a night job. Some nights he don’t go. A friend told me, “You have to listen to this song. I can’t believe you haven’t heard this song.”

I listened to the version of “The Promise” on “18 Tracks.” It’s not the version Springsteen recorded more than 30 years ago. This version is stripped down to almost nothing, just Springsteen and a piano.

And the weirdest thing happened, something I can never remember happening before or since when I listened to a song. I felt myself crying.

I followed that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen.
Drove my Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes.
When the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my own dreams

If I had to pick a single memory, the memory that best summarizes my teenage years, the memory that best expresses the kind of man I hoped to become … well, it is 6 a.m., and my bed shakes. That’s how my father wakes me up. He mildly bumps the bed with his knee. It is summertime, but rain pours, so it is still dark, a harsh gray. My father walks out of the room without saying a word. There is nothing to say. It is time to get up.

I dress quickly. There are no morning showers. We have timed our morning to the minute so that we can get as much sleep as possible … or, more to the point, so I can get as much sleep as possible. Dad doesn’t sleep much except for the naps he gets in front of the television. I meet my father downstairs. He is already there — he is always there first, dressed, ready to go. He is always waiting on me. He wakes up long before 6 a.m. on his own. His lunch is packed in a brown paper sack. It is probably a salami sandwich. It is usually a salami sandwich.

We trudge out to the car, a declining Pontiac T-1000 that I hope to buy at the end of the summer. The rain hits our necks, but there’s no running. We ride in silence for a few minutes. Then we start to talk about small things. We stop at Popeyes for a breakfast biscuit. The morning gains light slowly, like an old television picture tube coming to life. The ride is 30 minutes or so. There is little traffic this early in the morning.

And then, we get out … and go into the factory. Alisa is the name of the place. It is a knitting factory. We make sweaters, I guess, though I never actually see any sweaters. Everything is yarn. It is hard to breathe because of the heat and the humidity and the dust and the cardboard boxes and because the yarn chokes the air. I feel sure that a sweater is being knitted in my lungs.

My father’s job is to make sure the knitting machines run. He unclogs jams, quiets the guttural sounds, tightens bolts that break free, loosens bolts that choke the machine. His hands are unnaturally strong; I have known this since I was a boy. Now I see that he uses his fingers to loosen bolts that are wedged tight. There is no time to find a wrench. Sometimes, when the machines run smoothly, I see him drawing Xs on graph paper as he works out a sweater color design. When kids in school used to ask me what my father did for a living, I would tell them he designs sweaters. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of what he did; quite the opposite. That was how I saw him.

My job is to stay in the warehouse and move boxes of yarn in and out, and, one day a week, Thursday, unload barrels of dye from a truck. I am doing this to raise enough money buy that old car, that Pontiac. I’m 18 years old and thoroughly without purpose except for that; I desperately want my own car. I am an accounting major at college though even the most basic accounting concepts baffle me. I can’t help but think of debits as good and credits as bad. The professors keep telling me that they are not good or bad, but I don’t believe them. I already know I won’t be an accountant but have not admitted it to myself. I don’t have any idea what I will do — or what I can do. Everything feels out of reach.

I work six days a week at Alisa, and the pay, if I remember correctly, is $4 an hour. The minimum wage at the time is $3.35 an hour, so this is the second-highest paying job of my young life. The highest paying job, at $4.50 an hour, involved calling people who were past due on their mortgage. My job there was to set up a payment schedule. I wasn’t good at this; I didn’t understand the fury and desperation of the voices on the end of dial tones. I was too young to know what it meant. I got threatened a lot. I don’t get threatened at the factory. Yelled at, yes. Threatened, no. There’s no point in threats, not here. It’s understood by everyone how easy I am to replace. I’m scrawny and weak and a non-prospect. I’m here as a favor to my father, the only guy who knows how to fix the machines if they break down.

Well now I built that challenger by myself.
But I needed money and so I sold it.
Lived a secret I should’a kept to myself.
But I got drunk one night and I told it.

Springsteen wrote The Promise for the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album. People who follow the Springsteen story know that the time when he wrote “The Promise,” that time after “Born To Run” made him a star and before “Darkness” made him an adult, that time was strange for him. He was locked in a searing legal battle with his manager Mike Appel over creative freedom — the thing Springsteen called his musical soul — and he was struggling with what it meant to be a huge success for the first time in his life. He hated success and loved it and hated himself for loving it.

And the music poured out of him like sweat. He was 27 and hungry, still hungry, but he was not entirely sure for what. He was listening to punk music. He was listening to Hank Williams. The “Born to Run” sessions were legendary for Springsteen’s refusal to compromise, his 14-month insistence on making every song sound exactly like what he heard in his head. But at least with Born To Run, there was a clear vision everyone could understand. Springsteen simply wanted to make the greatest rock ‘n roll album that had ever been made. That was what 25-year-old musicians did. The kid had ambition.

But nobody quite knew what Springsteen was trying to do with Darkness, maybe not even Springsteen himself. The band learned song after song after song. Some of the songs sounded like hits, but Springsteen seemed uninterested in those. He would give away “Because The Night” to the punk star Patti Smith — her biggest hit. He gave “Fire” to The Pointer Sisters — their biggest hit. He gave “This Little Girl” to Gary U.S. Bonds … and it would become Bonds’ first hit in almost 20 years. He gave an older song, “The Fever,” and “Talk to Me” to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He gave “Rendezvous” to Greg Kihn. In the documentary about Darkness, Springsteen’s guitarist and foil and alter-ego Stevie Van Zandt would say, seemingly without irony, “It’s a bit tragic in a way. Because he would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.”

The one thing Springsteen knew for sure is that he didn’t want to be a great pop songwriter. He did not want hits, not then. He did not want to repeat Born To Run. He wanted to say something, and he wanted to “leave no room to be misunderstood.” He didn’t want to try to make the greatest rock and roll album of all time, not this time. He wanted something else, something harder to describe. “I wanted to make an honest album,” he would say. The band rehearsed and recorded “The Promise” for three months, trying to get it just right.

All my life I fought that fight
The fight that you can’t win.
Every day it gets harder to live
the dream you’re believin’ in.

My job at Alisa is monotonous and soul draining. Oh, it has sitcom elements — I am still young and detached enough to see that. There is the vicious boss who loves to yell at me for no apparent reason except that I’m not good at moving boxes and he probably hates his life. Once he takes me and a couple of warehouse guys, puts us in a truck, drives us off somewhere without explaining where or why. We end up in a ritzy neighborhood. Turns out the owner of the factory needs his couch moved. And so we move his couch.

There is a humorless old man who works with us in the warehouse who constantly tells us that he has seen kids come and go but that he has survived for all these years (we sometimes attempt to guess what he’s making after all these years; we think $5 an hour). There is the preposterous nature of the actual work — my job is to move boxes of yarn here, no, over there, no, back here, no, leave it there until later. There are even young non-beauties-but-hey-they’re-all-right identical twins who look better and better the longer I work here (it is fitting, I suppose, that in time I come to like one of them, the prettier identical twin if that makes any sense, but it’s the other one who seems to like me).

Still, at its core, there is little funny about the place or the job. Alisa is day after day after day after day after day of endless work that never gets completed. There is always another truck to unload, another tour of the floor (“Box ’em up!” the boss used to yell), another run to the dye part of the factory, which is poisonous and bleak and dangerous, like something out of a Dickens’ novel or the Batman movies. All the while, the machines whir and shriek and clank and buzz — the noise makes the boxes shake, but after a while I stop hearing the noise, at least while I’m in the factory. My ears ring for hours afterward, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I still hear those machines.

I make it through the first couple of weeks on adrenaline and exuberance, and make it through the next two on the promise of owning my very first car. But at that point, one month in, I lose all inspiration. I go to work simply because my father kicks the bed every morning, and I know he’s waiting downstairs, and I do not know exactly how to quit. I work all day on automatic pilot — I become proficient with hand trucks, I surprise myself with how much strength I build up, I try to hide in the gaps between the boxes every now and again, I sweat off 20 pounds that, at the time, I did not have to lose. I go home exhausted and desperate for something … something hard to explain. And the next morning I wake up at the kick of the bed, into the blurry picture of my father dressed and ready, stumble into my jeans and into the Pontiac and go through it all again.

I believe that this will not be my life. I suppose this is what keeps me sane. This is not my life. This is only temporary. I tell myself this many times. But I’m not sure. Not really. I do not know what I can do. I have a hard time looking at my life realistically. I’m 18 years old, living in my parents apartment, failing accounting at a city college, and drifting through life without any marketable skills. All I have is youth, and youth tells me that this will not be my life, cannot be my life, that this is a summer job so I can buy my Dad’s car and drive off and that I really will do something bigger … all I have is youth telling me that someday summer will end.

When the promise is broken, you go on living
But it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken, and it don’t make no difference
Something in your heart runs cold

In the end, Bruce Springsteen stripped everything out of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” except for the hardest songs.

“Badlands,” I think, might be the quintessential Bruce Springsteen song, about defiance in the face of the bitter winds of daily life.

“Adam Raised A Cain” is about a son clashing against a father who “worked his whole life for nothing but the pain.”

“Something In The Night” is about two people trying to find escape in the night but getting caught at the state line.

“Candy’s Room” is a hard-bitten love story about a boy who loves a beautiful prostitute who cannot be shielded from her sadness.

“Racing In The Street” — probably my favorite song on the album — is about a man who has lost his dream (haven’t they all lost their dreams) and finds his last bit of wildness and hope racing his ’69 Chevy Chevelle with a 396 turbojet engine at night. There’s a love story in here too, a love story with a woman he won in a race against a Camaro and who now “stares off along into the night/with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

“The Promised Land” is another anthem, the flip side of “Badlands” — “I get up every morning and go to work each day/But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold/Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.”

“Factory” is … about Bruce Springsteen’s father going to work at the factory in the rain.

“Streets of Fire” is more about those lost nights — “I walk with angels that have no place.”

“Prove It All Night” — this was an entire album about endless nights leading into unchanging days, the same endless nights that inspired a million country songs, a million short stories, a million brilliant paintings and almost every sad thing Frank Sinatra ever sang.

“Darkness on the Edge of Town,” I think, is about the same guy from “Racing In The Street,” only now his woman has left him, and he tries to keep his secrets, and all he has are “things that can only be found/in the darkness on the edge of town.”

Anyway, this is what I hear when I listen to the songs. The album is dim and black and unrelenting, there is no escape. There is not one bar song on the album, not one beach song on the album, not one happy song on the album (even though right at this time Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt messed around one day and wrote one of their happiest songs, “Sherry Darling” — they left it off the album). There is not even one hopeful song on the album. And yet, the album is not without hope. The music is the hope. The music soars and it swoops down, and it grinds, and it quiets to near silence. It is the music that insists on that notion, that notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, the seminal lyrics from the album, I think, the thing that it’s all about in the end.

And, as you know, as you can see, the song “The Promise” is not on “Darkness.” The band played it, and they knew it was great, knew that it might be the best song that Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. And it fit on the album, it was in many ways everything that Springsteen was trying to say on the album. Only Springsteen could not let go of it. The song was too close to him. He has never been able to explain it any better than that. Some think “The Promise” is really about his fight with Appel for control of his own music. Some think it is about his fear of losing himself in success, his fear of losing what he thought was the best part of himself. Some think it is about his friends who got left behind.

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter what The Promise means to Bruce Springsteen — doesn’t matter beyond trivia. Like all great songs, all great art, it only matters what it means to the person who accepts it. Springsteen did not put “The Promise” on “Darkness,” though for a while he played it at clubs. Then he stopped doing that too. By the time he released it in 1999 on 18 Tracks — the first version I first heard — it was a different song, more wistful, less bitter, more sad, less rebellious, all piano. And now, more than 30 years later, Bruce Springsteen releases an album of those songs that he recorded and left by the side of the road while making “Darkness.” There is the bar song “Rendezvous” and his raw version of “Because The Night” and the upbeat (if disturbing) “Fire” and a remarkable rock version of “Racing In The Streets” that sounds like it belongs on “Born To Run” (In this version, the car is a Ford, with a 383 — probably a Mercury Marauder Engine from the late 1950s). Springsteen is 61 now and he writes now that these songs are like old friends.

And, of course, “The Promise” is on this re-release. On this version, the song seems to be more personal and less universal than his piano version, it is more about what Bruce Springsteen was going through at the time — the Challenger is almost certainly Bruce’s music, the secret is almost certainly the depth of feeling he had for his music, and he sold it, he told it, and this has brought him to doom. It’s a beautiful version of the song, but I’m glad it’s not the first version I heard. Because the version I heard isn’t about Bruce Springsteen and Mike Appel and a fight for art. The version I heard is about a car ride to the factory …

Thunder Road
For the lost lovers and all the fixed games
Thunder Road
For the tires rushing by in the rain.

My memory, the one that echoes in my mind, is not of my time in the factory, or the work, or the people (I cannot remember their names) or the death I’d feel at the end of the day, or even the fear I had that this is all I would become. No, the memory is of that rainy day in North Carolina, my father driving, me staring out the window, both of us sitting in what would become my first car. That Pontiac did not have a 396. It struggled to go uphill.

And I think, for the first time, I understood, really understood, what my father did. I knew of other fathers who brought home their frustrations, their fears, the discouragement, but that wasn’t my Dad. My father did not drink. He did not rage. He did not race cars in the street. He smoked two packs of Kents a day, and he bowled on Sundays, and he played chess with a club one night a week. He coached my Little League team, and he drove all of us around the neighborhood so we could see the fireworks on July 4th, and he always bought champagne and caviar for New Year’s Eve. He came home with oil on his pants, and salami on his breath. He fell asleep in front of the television.

I don’t remember what we talked about in the car. Sports, maybe. Television, maybe. Factory politics, maybe. I only remember the rain — the tires rushing by in the rain — and the way the wipers squeaked against the windshield. I only remember the way the realization hit me — that this was my father’s life. I still had years and the promise to shield me. My father was smarter than I was — still is smarter than I am. My father, like all men of his generation (it seemed to me), could fix anything, could solve anything, could lift anything — I had none of these skills. My father also could play chess with grandmasters. My father could hit any target with a rifle (though he hated guns; he had learned to shoot in the Army). My father could dribble a soccer ball forever, it seemed, and throw pop-ups high above my imagination, and quote lines word for word from any song of the 1950s. And this was his life, this morning drive to the factory, every morning, for another sunless day in the howl of sweater machines.

I had this weird experience a couple of weeks ago — I was on a plane, and I was watching the movie Invincible, you know, the one about Vince Papale, the Philadelphia bartender who tried out and made the Eagles in the 1970s. I had seen it before. I have no idea why the movie was even playing — it’s a few years old. But I was watching, and it’s entertaining enough, and then there was this scene when Vince’s father was telling him how Steve Van Buren’s touchdown, the one that gave the Eagles their championship over the Chicago Cardinals in 1948, how that touchdown was what kept him going through all the painful days.

It was just a corny line in a corny movie on a plane heading to the next city and the next assignment, and dammit, I felt tears in my eyes. The same tears from The Promise. What kept my Dad going? It isn’t the sort of thing you talk about except in movies and songs. In the car that day, I finally figured it out … finally figured out what kept Dad going through all those long, dull, painful, agonizing days at the factory. He didn’t say it. I didn’t say it either. The rain kept coming down, but gently, a gentle rain, and we stopped for our biscuits, and then we pulled up to the factory just as the gray darkness turned to light.