BR Qs: Should They Lower the Mound?

We're talking Newhart, True Wins, baseball movies and the WWLF book tour.

Let’s answer some Brilliant Reader questions, but first, a few updates:

I have just sent in the tip-ins for WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL… these are signed (and, in some cases, inscribed) pages that the binder will put into the book. I signed almost 7,000 of them (whew), so you should be able to preorder an autographed copy from Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million or, hopefully, your favorite independent bookstore.

As for the inscriptions, you were as cruel as ever, making me write nice things about John Elway and the Pittsburgh Steelers and, of course, Derek Jeter. I’ll include two inscriptions for your enjoyment. In the first, I was challenged by a Patriots fan to write a three-verse poem with the theme: Belichick > Reid; Brady > Mahomes; Gronk > Kelce. This was the best I could do.

And then someone asked me to list my top five Taylor Swift songs. I chose the five songs that felt right in that moment. If I did it again right now, I think I’d do three different songs, including No. 1. Tomorrow, it would be a new list again.

Tickets have just started to go on sale for the WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL tour!

• I’ll be kicking off the tour on Monday, Sept. 17, at the Barnes & Noble in Clifton, N.J. This will be a free event—a few details here.

• I’m super-excited about this one: On Tuesday, Sept. 18, I’ll be doing an event at the Smithsonian! This is going to be amazing: I’ll be on a panel with Paul Tagliabue, the great football writer Len Shapiro and Brilliant Reader Phil Hochberg, who has been at the stadium for the Washington Football Team for a long time. What a blast. Tickets here.

• The next day, Wednesday, Sept. 19, I’m in Nashville, at the incomparable Parnassus bookstore. I’ll be joined by Andrew Maraniss, which is just brilliant. Fingers crossed that one of my favorite writers, Anne Patchett—owner of Parnassus—will stop by! Tickets here.

• Ending the first week of the tour, I’ll be in Kansas City for my favorite bookstore in the world, Rainy Day Books. What do you think: Should I guilt Mike Schur into joining me again? I mean, he gave me COVID. Tickets here.

The second week of the tour is pretty close to complete… I’ll give you those details soon. We’re getting closer!

I’ll be narrating the WWLF audiobook over the next two weeks AND going to Cleveland for the National Card Convention AND going to Washington, D.C., for the Pen Supershow, so things are likely to slow down here for a little while.

Finally, before we get to the questions, a few words about the brilliant and entirely wonderful Bob Newhart, who died on Friday at the age of 94. And we’ll let him have those words… as he talks about the invention of baseball.

Subscribers can gmail their BR questions to JP at JoePosnanski.com.

BR Ryan: “What are your 10 best baseball movies right now? You don’t have to put them in an order, I’m just curious to see if I’ve seen them all.”

OK, here’s you go, in alphabetical order and off the top of my head (no documentaries in here, that’s a separate list):

• “42”

• “The Bad News Bears”

• “Bull Durham”

• “Eight Men Out”

• “Everybody Wants Some”

• “Field of Dreams”

• “A League of Their Own”

• "Major League”

• “Moneyball”

• “The Natural”

I’ve written at some length about all of these except Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some,” which is basically "Dazed and Confused at the Plate.” It features a young Glen Powell, which is fun—Linklater’s ability to break out young actors is pretty spectacular.

BR Steven: In view of the lack of hitting and action, why doesn’t someone bring up the subject of lowering the mound?… It worked in the ’60s, so why not at least discuss it now?

Good question, Steven. I’d start off by saying that it has been discussed, at least a little bit, by some of the higher-ups at baseball. But you’re right in saying that it’s not something that anybody in the game is seriously considering, and the reason—from what people are telling me—is that they’re worried lowering the mound would cause even more pitchers to get hurt. I would say that trying to find a way to keep pitchers healthy is foremost on everybody’s mind in the game, and right now nobody is going to mess with the height of the mound.

What people HAVE talked about is moving the mound back. But this has run into a whole other problem: The early MLB test results have not been all that encouraging. In trials, there has been little-to-no improvement among hitters when the mound was moved back, and there were even some indications of strikeouts going UP, which is the exact opposite of the intention. Now, these were very limited tests, and this didn’t involve major league players, and nobody really had time to adjust to the new distance, so we still don’t know.

But it seems clear that the issue of low batting averages and one-dimensional offenses—unlike the issue of slow play, which was essentially eradicated with the pitch clock—has no easy fix.

BR Joe: Do you think Greg Maddux and Nikola Jokić are very similar? I mean, they both dominant without having traditional athletic abilities like a high-90s fastball or being able to jump.

OK, I love this comparison (as well as your name!). I do think we (present company DEFINITELY included) tend to overstate things when it comes to Maddux and Jokić—particularly Maddux. I mean, the guy was the third high school pitcher taken in the 1984 draft (after Tony Menendez and Pete Smith) and he was a huge prospect who was in the big leagues at age 20. No, he didn’t throw in the high 90s, but he could certainly pump it in there in the low- to mid-90s and he was an absolutely fantastic athlete who won 18 Gold Gloves. He might have looked like your tax accountant, but he definitely wasn’t.

And Jokić, yeah, he looks like a Muppet and he can’t jump—it seems he can barely dunk—but he’s 6-foot-10 with incredible body control and shooting touch. I do love to go back, always, to basketball coach Jack Hartman’s definition of sports talent as “just being where you’re supposed to be and doing what you’re supposed to do.” I’d say that Maddux and Jokić probably fit that definition as well as any athlete of our time so, yeah, I do think they’re similar. Great one, Joe!

Do these guys have anything in common? (Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images; David Berding/Getty Images)

BR L: How’s the fountain pen thing going? Have you picked a favorite pen?

The fountain pen obsession I’ve already written about a couple of times… and it has only expanded, I’m afraid. It now includes notebooks. At the moment, I have FIVE different “main” notebooks”—a passport-sized Traveler’s notebook I keep in my pocket, a regular-sized Traveler’s notebook I keep on my desk, a huge Midori bullet journal I update multiple times a day, a Honobonich Tech planner notebook and a Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter notebook system.

I have nine fountain pens in my regular rotation for these notebooks.

It’s a problem.

The problem is only likely to grow worse because this week I found an amazing store in Charlotte called Good Postage. The store was opened in the Camp North End part of town by a mother and daughter. I think the original idea was for it to be more of an art store—the daughter, Jane, is an artist—but it has evolved into something larger (for instance, they are one of only eight Traveler’s Company partner stores in the U.S.*

*You will notice that two of my notebooks are from Traveler’s, and I love them deeply.

When I went in, Jane was in there, and we talked for like an hour about fountain pens and notebooks and inks and our obsessions with them (she’s an artist, so her obsession makes a lot more sense than mine), and it was truly wonderful to find someone as lost in this world as I am. It’s my favorite store in town, now.*

*Seriously, if you’re in or around Charlotte, check out Good Postage, even if you don’t think you care about fountain pens or journals or any of this stuff. There’s just a really nice, peaceful vibe in there. Heck, our younger daughter, Katie, even bought a journal while we were in there.

Being in the store (and buying a few more notebook accessories) did make me ask again: Why in the world am I so consumed by this fountain pen/journaling bug? And I’m more and more convinced that it’s simply my body and mind telling me: “Dude, you’ve got to unplug.”*

*Yeah, my body and mind call me “Dude.” They’re a little too bro-ish for my taste.

But the point is, I’ve never been able to get into meditation, and my body has rejected yoga, but sitting down somewhere, anywhere—in a coffee shop, on a park bench, in my recliner, in the car while waiting for someone—and just writing in a notebook while my phone is on “Do Not Disturb,” and the news alerts of a crumbling world are on silent, it feels like my salvation.

Now, it’s fair to ask: Why can’t I get the same feeling from a simple Bic pen and a yellow legal pad? I don’t know. Part of it, I think, is the joy of trying a new pen, trying new paper, testing different nib sizes, using different-color ink (can’t wait to try out Caran D’Ache’s Hypnotic Turquoise!); all of it is part of the experience.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not trying to convince you to join me. I know it’s nuts. But it’s simply how I cope with the world right now.

Oh, and my favorite pen at the moment is also my most expensive pen as of right now: My Smoke Pilot Custom 823 with a fine nib. It writes like a dream. Will it be my most expensive pen after the Washington Pen Supershow in a couple weeks? Only time will tell.

Tony: Do you think the criteria for a pitcher win should be revamped?

Funny, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, probably because I just ran across a quote from Tony La Russa saying that he thinks the win stat should be changed to reflect baseball as it’s played today. (He said this to “prove” that he’s not old-school like everybody says.)

Here’s where I come down on this right now: I don’t think changing the win statistic is viable. We have 100-plus years of what it means for a pitcher to “win” a game. We know that, under those rules, 24 pitchers won 300 games. We know that 20 wins has long been a standard of excellence. Adjusting the rule, to me, might make sense for today’s baseball, but it doesn’t line up with the game’s history.

BUT… I have long been advocating for what I think is a better way to think of pitcher wins and losses. I call it “True Wins and Losses,” and it’s the simplest thing in the world. What has every manager in baseball history wanted from a starting pitcher? You can sum it up in eight words:

“Give us a chance to win the game.”

That’s it. That was true of Walter Johnson. That was true of Lefty Grove. That was true of Satchel Paige and Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver and Jack Morris and Tom Glavine and Clayton Kershaw. Give us a chance. It’s true, in a limited way, of openers. Yeah, they only pitch one inning. But the goal is to make that a scoreless inning. Give us a chance.

So, while I wouldn’t change the rules of pitcher wins and losses, I’d put a much bigger emphasis on true wins and losses, which is, as the name suggests, simply denotes how the team did for every game started. Baseball-Reference does have this stat on the site—it’s called Wtm and Ltm—but I’d ask those good people to give it more prominence and make it more easily searchable. Right now (best I can tell), the only way to find true wins and losses is to go specifically to a pitcher’s page, click on “advanced stats” and scroll down.

I did that for a few of the top pitchers this year:

Aaron Nola: 15-4
Ranger Suarez: 14-5
Chris Sale: 13-5
Luis Gil: 13-6
Mitch Keller: 13-6
Corbin Burnes: 12-7
Seth Lugo: 12-8
Tarik Skubal: 12-7
Brayan Bello: 11-6
Zack Wheeler: 11-8

In a time when pitching statistics are growing more and more complicated, I do love the simplicity of the true win and loss. It doesn’t try to say more than it is. Aaron Nola started 19 games for the Phillies in the first half. His team won 15 of those games. Was there luck? Sure. Did he pitch better in some games than others? Sure. But one way or another, his team found ways to win with Nola on the mound, and that matters to me.

Oh, and for fun, here’s how many true wins the 300-game winners had (other than Cy Young, I’m ignoring 19th-century pitchers because we don’t have those stats:

1. Cy Young, 511 wins, probably fewer true wins*

2. Roger Clemens, 354 wins, 434 true wins

3. Greg Maddux, 355 wins, 431 true wins

4. Don Sutton, 324 wins, 418 true wins

5. Nolan Ryan, 324 wins, 405 true wins

6. Steve Carlton, 329 wins, 404 true wins

7. Warren Spahn, 363 wins, 401 true wins

8. Tom Glavine, 305 wins, 391 true wins

9. Walter Johnson, 417 wins, 390 true wins

10. Phil Niekro, 318 wins, 379 true wins

11. Pete Alexander, 373 wins, 378 true wins

12. Randy Johnson, 303 wins, 371 true wins

13. Tom Seaver, 311 wins, 369 true wins

14. Gaylord Perry, 314 wins, 360 true wins

15. Christy Mathewson, 373 wins, 353 true wins

16. Early Wynn, 300 wins, 338 true wins

17. Lefty Grove, 300 wins, 304 true wins

*Some pitchers have fewer true wins than conventional wins because they won some games they didn’t start.