A Big Fan Update and Another Bummer Browns Diary

Here’s the thing about BIG FAN, the book Mike Schur and I wrote about what it means to be a fan: We finished it too soon. It is absolutely killing us to have a nine-month gap between delivering the book and it finally coming out on May 19. We are SO excited for you to see it.

But we’re getting here! Over the weekend, we got to that huge first step — the advance reader galleys arrived! I did a little unboxing video.

I’m so psyched for you to get to read this book. We’re going to give away some galleys here in the new year. And we’re putting together the book tour. And we’re signing thousands and thousands of books for preorders (available here and here and here for you Canadians). And we’re creating signed limited editions that you might get if you preorder from our friends at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. I just created a 10-of-10 set where I sign the book with a fountain pen (a Sailor Pro Gear, thank you for asking). Mike is getting a few pretty famous people to sign limited editions, too.

Anyway, we’re getting closer.

I don’t actually know if the Browns were close to winning this game. The Browns might have been — the Bills seemed pretty uninterested. The Browns also might not have been; if the game had ever REALLY been in jeopardy, the Bills probably would have turned this up. I have been watching the Cleveland Browns collect moral victories for more than 50 years. I’d probably rank this moral victory as a 6 out of 10.

Myles Garrett was credited with a half-sack on a weird play in which Bills quarterback Josh Allen fell down, and he now has 22 sacks for the season. The record is 22.5. I’m trying to think of the greatest seasons in sports history for terrible teams. There’s obviously Steve Carlton’s 27-win season for the 1972 Phillies. There’s Cal Ripken’s 11.5 WAR season for the 1991 Orioles. There’s Shohei for the Angels, multiple seasons, and there’s George Gervin, averaging 33 points a game for the meh Spurs*, and Oscar Robertson averaging (essentially) a triple-double for the lousy 1960-61 Cincinnati Royals, and Chris Johnson running for 2,000 yards for an 8-8 Titans team.

I’m sure you can come up with a lot more.

*One thing George Gervin could do was finger roll!

But this one feels particularly dispiriting. I don’t think there has ever been a more unblockable force in football history than Myles Garrett. The Browns have wasted him. As for how Myles himself feels about the situation, I present to you this question and answer:

Reporter: “Hey Myles, you know, when you went through that trade request, you said you didn’t care about records, all that Hall of Fame stuff, you just wanted to win. So with two games to go and you guys are 3-12, what’s that been like for you?”

Garrett: “Next question.”

Yeah, can’t blame him for that. There is no good answer for that. He demanded a trade because he was frustrated. He changed his mind and decided to trust the Browns to put a team around him. Sometimes there is no right answer.

I don’t want to go too deep into this Tyler Skaggs saga because it’s oppressively sad, and I’m not sure there’s much I can add to it. But I do want to say two things:

Just to recap the terrible story: Tyler Skaggs, an Angels pitcher, was found dead in his hotel room in 2019 when the team was in Texas to play the Rangers. Investigators found fentanyl, alcohol, and oxycodone in his system. It was ruled an accidental overdose.

Not long after that, Eric Kay — a longtime communications executive for the team — was arrested and later sentenced to 22 years for selling the drug that led to his overdose. Kay has denied the specific charge — he doesn’t believe it was definitively his pill that killed Skaggs. Jurors disagreed. Either way, he admits to selling drugs to Skaggs and other Angels.

It’s all awful, and the Skaggs family filed a wrongful death lawsuit seeking $118 million in potential lost income plus punitive damages.

And the Angels, incredibly, unthinkably, incompetently, decided to take it to court.

There’s an old saying — one that has been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Nelson Mandela to Nicholas Sparks — that it’s never too late to do the right thing. I have mixed feelings about the quote, but I generally believe there’s a powerful truth to it: If you just keep on doing the wrong things, the consequences multiply. The Angels could have paid the family. Yes, it would have cost them money. But they knew how troubled Skaggs was and how little they had done to help him. They knew that Kay and teammate Matt Harvey admitted to providing Skaggs with drugs.

They decided instead of taking some responsibility for this tragedy, they would go to court, provide stone-hearted witnesses to testify that Skaggs was on the decline as a pitcher, put their biggest stars like Mike Trout on the stand to answer unanswerable questions, reveal all sorts of team dysfunction, and just generally make themselves look heartless and cold-blooded.

And when the jury asked the judge where to mark down the punitive damages — signaling that they were going to award the family a lot of money — the Angels raced in to settle so that they didn’t get hit with the full weight of judgment.

I’m not saying that the Angels are unique — they’re certainly not. This is how callous companies act. But that’s the thing about doing right: The Angels didn’t have to act like a callous company. They could have acted like a team.

From a pure scouting perspective, there are a few hard questions about Japanese third baseman Munetaka Murakami.

BUT … the White Sox brought in some fun when they signed Murakami over the weekend … and this is an organization in desperate need of fun. Murakami is an old-fashioned masher. He blasted 56 home runs for the Yakult Swallows in 2022. Last season, after coming back from that oblique injury, he smashed 22 home runs in 56 games. In Japan, the man hit bombs and walked a lot, and while the overall package didn’t seem to excite the normal Japanese suitors — no Yankees, no Dodgers, no Mariners, etc. — you’ve got to give it up to the White Sox for bringing him in. It might not work. But the sole advantage of being as adrift as the White Sox have been over the last few years is that you really don’t have anything to lose. Murakami could be a lot of fun!

The Willson Contreras experiment is over in St. Louis. All in all, it didn’t go especially well. The Cardinals were coming off a 93-win season in 2022, and they signed Contreras away from the rival Cubs for $87.5 million. The thinking was that he was a finishing piece, an All-Star catcher who would give the Cardinals their best chance for taking the next step.

Roughly 12 minutes into the deal, the Cardinals determined that Contreras couldn’t catch. They made him a designated hitter, which created a big stink, and then they moved him back to catcher, which created a big stink, and then they lost 90 games for the first time in a quarter century, which created the biggest stink of all. The next year, his arm was fractured when J.D. Martinez hit him with a swing. This past year, Contreras was moved to first base full-time.

All the while, the Cardinals descended into boring mediocrity.

So the Cardinals bailed out of the deal over the weekend, sending Contreras to the Red Sox for some meh-prospects and real cash. But here’s the thing: Willson Contreras is still a good hitter. He posted a 127 OPS+ over his three years with the Cardinals, and he generates as much bat speed as just about anyone. I really like what the Red Sox have been doing this offseason; I’m not normally a fan of bringing in aging veterans, but with Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras to go with their young core, I think the Red Sox are putting themselves in a fun position to step it up in 2025.

That’s it. I’ve made up my mind. We’re going to New York this week for the holidays, and I’ve decided that I’m buying a fedora. It’s time, as I approach my 59th birthday, for me to become a fedora guy.

If any of you have any advice about buying a fedora … or you want to make a case for another kind of hat (I know you bowler people are out there) … or you know a good fedora dealer in New York (yes, I’m calling them fedora dealers) … you know where to reach me.