Come on Cavs, a 1976 Reverie, and Monopoly Going Nuclear

How Good is Aaron Judge?

I mean, we know Aaron Judge is good, all-time good, a definite Baseball 100 player if I were doing that project again, a sure Hall of Famer. But I think we have to start asking:

Does he have a chance to be the greatest hitter of all time?

Yes, OK, it’s easy to overreact to an April when the guy hit .427/.521/.761 with 10 home runs … I mean, here are the 10 greatest March/Aprils on record by Runs Created:

So we’ve seen something historic from Judge — obviously that .426 batting average is just jaw-dropping. But there seems to be something even more substantial happening here. Going into the 2021 season, Judge was a superstar, yes, but a flawed one. He led the league in strikeouts in his rookie year. He hit around .270. He got injured enough to make people wonder if a player THAT large could stay healthy for 162 games.

In 2021, he played 148 games, hit a career-high .287, and finished fourth in the MVP.

In 2022, he broke Roger Maris’s Yankees home run record and hit .300 for the first time.

Last year, he finished third in the batting race, made a spirited run at the triple crown, and won the MVP award unanimously.

And this year, he’s already breaking baseball — this from a guy who has often gotten off to slow starts (he hit just .206 last April).

All the other hitters in baseball are hitting a combined .241. Judge is hitting .427. His OPS is 300 points clear of any other player in the league save Seattle’s Jorge Polanco, who doesn’t have quite enough at-bats to qualify. I don’t know how long he can keep this sort of thing going, but just for fun, if he hits the way he did last May through September:

He will hit .368 with 37 doubles, 2 triples, 62 homers, and 158 RBI.

The wildest thing? He might do even better than that.

Kathleen’s Corner

A curated guide of social media silliness and highlights from your favorite chronically online editor:

• Thirty-four years ago, Rickey Henderson set the record for stolen bases. Here’s the highlight.

• Two quick notes for our Royals contingent: Bobby Witt Jr. leads the league with hits in 21 consecutive games and leftie Noah Cameron carried a no-no into the seventh inning of his Major League debut last night.

• Talented designer, creator and SABR member Liz Thompson has created a digital scorecard you can fill out on a tablet! You can even get it customized.

• We don’t talk a lot of soccer here, but this seems like the right kind of vibe. Luke Plunkett put together this guide for Aftermath on video game kit sponsorships.

Come On Cavs! Gotta Make it Happen!

I don’t write a lot about the NBA — there are just people out there like my pal Tom Haberstroh who offer so much more than I ever could  — but I’m pretty invested, particularly this year, with my Cleveland Cavaliers playing otherworldly basketball.

My relationship with the Cavs has always been, I don’t know, a little bit different from the other teams I love. I am, sadly and somewhat pitifully, a die-and-die-harder Cleveland Browns fan, with all the angst and despondency that goes with it. I grew up an enormous Cleveland Indians fan, and I still like the Guardians a lot, but, being honest, my time in Kansas City has left my devotion split. Plus, I spend most of my fanhood simply rooting for the game. I get most of my baseball thrills these days from great things happening wherever they happen.

The Cavs felt apart somehow. I suppose that’s because they played all the way out in Richfield back then, and Richfield felt like a long way away — heck, it was almost in AKRON! Even so, I was totally into the Cavs in 1976, when I was 9 and a motley group of scrappy guys named Footsie and Bingo and Campy somehow, some way, made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals. We called that year “The Miracle at Richfield” — only in Cleveland could a loss in six games to the Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals be considered a miracle — and I was hopelessly in love.*

Then, the Cavaliers went into their Ted Stepien phase, when Stepien owned the team and the Cavs made so many bad trades that the league had to step in to stop them. This was when the halftime entertainment, more than once, was “Fat Guy Eating Beer Cans.” I was bemused by the team during this time. Then, when Stepien was finally dispatched, the team got really good, like championship-contender good, with a starting five of Mark Price, Ron Harper, Larry Nance, Hot Rod Williams and Brad Daugherty. I convinced myself that they were good enough to beat anybody.

Michael Jordan, alas, was convinced otherwise.

After that team faded, well, everybody knows the story, they were terrible, then they got LeBron, and he lugged them to the NBA Finals in what I’m still convinced is the most remarkable one man feat in the NBA this century, and then he got tired of lugging them around and took his talents to South Beach, then he came back and supported by Kyrie Irving and a few other terrific players, gave me the only Cleveland championship of my lifetime with a stunning comeback over the unbeatable Golden State Warriors.

Then, after a couple more losses to the Warriors, LeBron left again, this time as a hero.

And, well, I still cared about the Cavs in a sort of passive way, but I kind of lost touch. I guess I’d say it like this: I didn’t really understand them. One of the things I think about a lot now (for reasons that I can explain soon!) is that connection between fans and teams, and part of that connection is KNOWING your team thoroughly. Unfortunately, I know the Browns. I know what they will do before they do it. And I think I have an innate understanding of the Guardians and Royals and Novak Djokovic and Jordan Spieth and others I have invested my fandom in.

But I just didn’t quite get the Cavaliers after LeBron. I saw them making some improvements. I liked seeing the youthful energy of Darius Garland and Evan Mobley and others. But I didn’t see the end game. I couldn’t see how this team was going to take that step into the NBA stratosphere.

And then September 3, 2022, happened. I was — this is a hilarious but important part of the story — in Utah on a magic retreat. One of the joys of my professional life was writing “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini,” and it led me to make a bunch of lifelong friends, including at least a couple who read JoeBlogs (even though the magic/sports Venn diagrams only have a small sliver of shared space).

One of those friends is the incredible Joshua Jay, one of the greatest magicians* on Planet Earth, and Josh leads these extraordinary magic retreats, and Margo and I have now been on two of them — the one in Utah and one in Washington — and this year we are going to one in Mexico City, and these things are just a blast.

*By mistake, I initially typed in that Josh is “one of the greatest musicians on Planet Earth, and that of course led me to go to YouTube to see this all-time classic exchange:

In any case, on that September day, Josh raced up to me with this huge grin on his face — Josh is a Northeast Ohio guy and the Cavs are his No. 1 thing after magic. He shouted, “We got Donovan Mitchell — he’s the perfect guy for this team!” His voice echoed in the Utah mountains.

And that’s when the Cavs made sense to me.

Donovan Mitchell is SO good. He is, I think, not only one of the most underrated and underappreciated players in the NBA, he’s one of the most underrated and underappreciated players on earth, any sport. He has never been first-team all-NBA (though he probably will be this year). He has never finished top five in the MVP voting (and only got votes one year). He never puts up these jaw-dropping stats.

But Mitchell is just one of those guys who does every single little thing that helps a team win. You need a game-winning basket, he can do that. You need a decoy to draw the defense away from Garland or Mobley or a half-dozen other guys, he can do that. You need a breathtaking pass to get the crowd rolling, he can do that. You need a steal, a block, a high-flying dunk, a three-pointer, a foul-inducing drive, two clutch free throws, a rallying cry, a bit of perspective, anything that a team needs through a long season, Donovan Mitchell is there for you. No, he probably won’t win the MVP this year or probably come close.

But for this particular team, I don’t know that I’d trade him for anybody.

Now, this Cavaliers team is utterly wonderful. What they just did to the ultra-annoying Miami Heat — sweeping the four games by margins of 21, 9, 37 (!), 55 (!!) — was so utterly fulfilling and satisfying. This Cavs team comes at you in waves, everybody plays, everybody defends, everybody except Jarrett Allen shoots threes (Allen makes up for this by basically NEVER missing any of his twos), they are a team in constant motion, and it’s some of the most joyful basketball I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know that this Cavs team can actually win the title. I still think that when it comes down to it, the Celtics are going to be more than a handful, and I think that Oklahoma City is like a 2.0 Version of these Cavs with Shaivonte Aician Gilgeous-Alexander constantly doing Superman things. Other teams could take them out, too. I’ve been a Cleveland sports fan for too long to think otherwise.

But … wow, they’re good. When I was a kid, they would play this jingle before games on the radio and television called “Come On Cavs!” It had a rocking “Schoolhouse Rock” beat to it. I’ve been hearing it in my head throughout this season, particularly one bit. When I was a kid, I used to write it down in my notebook maybe as an inspiration.

So, yeah, I wrote it all down again. I’m so pumped up. I’m back in love with the Cavs again.

Falling into a Baseball Card Reverie …

Some of you on Wednesday evening received a reprint of one of the strangest (and most wonderful) rabbit hole I’ve ever gone down — my quest to crack the Topps Numbering System Code. Some of you may even remember the original piece. If I’m being honest, I didn’t mean to send that out until today … but I’m glad I did because this week’s card of the week opened so many joyful baseball card memories that I just couldn’t wait to share.

Here is the story of the baseball card that inspired it all.

Keep reading the Batting Order —