The preorder campaigns for FIFTY SEASONS have begun! If you preorder FIFTY SEASONS from Rainy Day Books, I’ll inscribe your book any way you like. I’ve heard about some of the inscriptions already and, yeah, there are some doozies.
And if you preorder it from anywhere, be sure to save your receipt — we are putting together a special deal for all preorders (including ebooks and audio). In September, we will put up a form to enter your receipt, and you will (IMMEDIATELY!) get a PDF of the table of contents from the book (so you can see which fifty seasons I chose and all the bonus chapters), plus a specially selected chapter cut from the book.
FIFTY SEASONS comes out February 2.
There’s a part of me that finds all the big market/small market panic going around baseball here in 2026 to be pretty hilarious. One example: Our pal Joe Sheehan — whose newsletter is always great — found himself in a small battle with David Pegram on Bluesky. Joe wrote that baseball has excellent competitive balance. David countered with this chart:
Joe countered, rightfully so, that the NFL and MLB are not the same. There are no “small markets” in the NFL because the vast majority of revenue comes from the national television deals and is shared equally. NFL money flows like nowhere else, and the other owners decided to share that money long ago.
But it’s also true that David kind of cheated on this* — the teams he put on the list are MLB SMALL MARKETS, yes, but they’re not NFL small markets.
*He also got it wrong — Kansas City has won three Super Bowls, not four.
Do you know which nine NFL small markets rank lowest by revenue?
No. 32: Arizona Cardinals
No. 31: Buffalo Bills
No. 30: Cincinnati Bengals
No. 29: New Orleans Saints
No. 28: Indianapolis Colts
No. 27: Detroit Lions
No. 26: Carolina Panthers
No. 25: Los Angeles Chargers
No. 24: Jacksonville Jaguars
Those are your quote-unquote “small markets.” How many Super Bowls have THOSE GUYS won in the last 15 years? Answer: Zero. You have to go back to 2010, when the Saints beat the Colts, to find a “small market” Super Bowl — and that was because Drew Brees and Peyton Manning were the quarterbacks.
I guess one point is you can spin this sort of thing however you like.
But I have a different point to make, and it’s one I’ve been hammering away for a very long time to no avail. I realize that I’m very much on the outside of the mainstream on two major points in sports. One, I don’t think that instant replay review has been a net positive in most sports, and especially baseball. I’ve long made my peace with that, and I get the same dopamine hit that everyone else gets when a bad call is overturned, and I’m not here to argue with anybody about it. You (most of you) won. I lost. Replay it is.
The second thing is the baseball playoffs. I’ve lost this argument too. The playoffs have expanded. They will keep expanding. I know that. We might get an AL West division winner this year with a losing record. Great. We’re definitely going to get some meh teams in the playoffs because we always do. Fine. This is what the vast majority of baseball fans want, and I am all for making baseball fans happy.
But I believe that the 162-game season is the most perfect way ever devised to determine which teams should play for the championship. I believe a real pennant race is way more exciting than a three-game, five-game, or even seven-game playoff series could ever be. I believe the playoff crapshoot, like instant replay, does give us those dopamine hits, and maybe that’s the point of sports.
I’d take the long season, personally.
I bring this up now for the most obvious reason imaginable — while people are freaking out about the Dodgers and the fact that small-market baseball teams don’t have a chance to compete and Pittsburgh this and Cincinnati that and Minnesota the other thing, well, can we just say this out loud:
Best record in the American League: The Tampa Bay Rays.
Best record in the National League: The Milwaukee Brewers.
Yeah. That’s right. Tampa Bay is 28th in total payroll, and they’re currently four games up on the Yankees. Milwaukee is 19th in total payroll, and they’re currently three games up on the Dodgers and 10 bajillion games ahead of the New York Mets.
This is as everyone around baseball is telling you the small markets can’t win.
Could you even IMAGINE how exciting September would be if those teams were competing for one of two spots in the World Series?
No, we’re never going back to those days. Fans, generally, don’t want it. Fans want a March Madness sort of free-for-all in October with upsets, and dramatic twists, and surprise guest stars, and cliff-hangers. I love it too. Of course I do. I love candy, superhero movies, and tweener shots in tennis too.
But they don’t fill the soul.
Pennant races, I do believe, fill the soul.
I’ve done this before — I keep a list on my computer: What would the World Series have looked like these last 25 years without playoffs, if the team with the most wins in the National League played the team with the most wins in the American League in the World Series?
