Emptying the Notebook

Weekend musings on front office changes, The Bear and the book I'm trying to finish.

Hi Everyone!

So, this week’s going to be a lot of emptying the notebook … because I’m finishing the final version of FIFTY SEASONS: Stories of the Baseball Years That Echo. I’m going to be honest with you because that’s what we do here — this book has kicked my butt like no other, not because it’s been hard to write (the writing has been SO fun) but because I keep thinking of new ways to make it better. This has meant tearing up the framework a dozen times or more. I have come to think of this as the baseball book I was meant to write because it is basically a lifetime of fandom in one book. All the things I love about the game are in here. And, thinking about it that way, keeps pushing me to new places.

I honestly believe that it will lead to a very special book.

But, I just came up with another new idea, and that means some heavy work, and, yeah, it’s kicking my butt.

Surely, you have seen my buddy Gary Gulman’s famous bit on how the states got their abbreviations. It is, in my view, the most perfect piece of comedy written since Carlin’s Baseball and Football. But here’s the thing about it: Gary worked on that bit for like a decade. He had the whole idea years and years earlier, but couldn’t quite figure out how to turn it into an actual comedy routine.

Then the documentary about Helvetica came out (As Gary says it: “A documentary about fonts? No. A documentary about fonT”), and he thought about the abbreviation of the states as a documentary he’d just seen, and, yes, magic.

I can’t claim to have made THAT kind of breakthrough on FIFTY SEASONS. But I’ve had my own mini-breakthrough, and it’s like the whole book came to life in an entirely different way. That’s exciting. So exciting. I cannot WAIT to share this book with you.

But, yeah, that means there’s a lot of work to do.

So we’ll be emptying the notebook this week.

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Meet The Mets

All my life, I’ve been close friends with Mets fans. It’s just something that has followed me around. My best friend in high school, Robert, is a Mets fan. My brother Vac is a Mets fan. I can do this all day. And so, I’ve long viewed myself as sort of a Jane Goodall, but instead of studying chimpanzees and the like, I study the Mets.

As such, I’ve looked all my life to uncover a single story or artifact or video that fully and completely explains what the Mets are.

Finally, I have found the holy grail. We have all found it. Let’s go out to the stadium to talk about the last-place Mets, who just fired their manager, Carlos Mendoza.

How did we get here, Steve?

Utter perfection.

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Angels Fire General Manager Because … Why Not?

Look, I’m not going to tell you the California Angels should not have fired Perry Minasian as general manager. I mean, he was hired in 2020, and the Angels have had losing records every year, even while Shohei Ohtani was putting up some of the greatest seasons in baseball history. The Angels’ farm system rankings according to MLB.com have looked like so:

• 2024 preseason: 30

• 2024 midseason: 29

• 2025 preseason: 30

• 2025 midseason: 27

• 2026 preseason: 28

So, I’m not here to defend Perry Minasian, exactly.

At the same time, I think of the question that Lorne Michaels asked Bill Hader when he did a Vincent Price impression for his SNL audition: “Why now?” What did owner Arte Moreno THINK was going to happen this year?

Team president Molly Jolly announced the firing with the usual “Perry has been a valued leader” rap, and that’s fine, but I think it’s very important to say that the Angels president is named Molly Jolly. It is a grand thing that the Angels hired a woman to be president of the team, and she worked her way up for 26 years in the organization, and everything about her suggests competence, and enthusiasm, and good vibes.

Also, her name is Molly Jolly.

The Angels play less than four miles away from Disneyland. And their president is named Molly Jolly.

That’s all I’m saying here.

The team brought in longtime Cardinals chief John Mozeliak to be the interim GM, and everything about Mo suggests competence, and organization, and long-range thinking. He is a guy who can build a minor-league system. He is a guy who can give an organization focus.

And it won’t work because we all know that the Angels are not going anywhere good until, as Molly Knight writes, Arte Moreno fires himself, something he probably won’t do.

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The Bear

We binged the final season of The Bear and … it’s absolutely wonderful. We have been Bear-obsessed more or less from the start — I’ve come to believe that Forks from Season 2 is the single best television episode ever made — but the last two seasons have left us cold. You don’t want to hear all my theories about why the show lost us, but it did. We watched for the moments of brilliance, which popped up now and again (especially when buddy Brian Koppelman showed up as Computer), but those moments popped up less and less often.

And then this season came along — I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the whole season, leading into the final episode, happens on a single day — and it‘s just so joyful. Maybe that’s what was missing from the last two seasons. Sure, there has to be intensity in The Bear, there have to be unsolvable problems, there have to be broken dreams and lost hope. That’s part of the show. That’s part of life.

But it’s like the show lost its joy. That’s back for this final season.

There is also, in the final episode, a hat tip to the late Rob Reiner that will break your heart and make it soar all at the same time.

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Supergirl

I guess we’re going to go see Supergirl, even though the reviews and early buzz have suggested that it’s not very good at all. You probably know my Movie Plus-Minus formula — I believe that your expectations for a movie will determine how much you enjoy it. If you go in expecting a four-star movie and it turns out to be three stars, you will not like it nearly as much as seeing a three-star movie when you expected two stars.

We went into Superman last year expecting a four-star experience, and it was better than that, which made it one of the best movie experiences of the year.

If we go into Supergirl with that level of expectation and hope, I suspect we’ll really not like it.

So the plan is to go in expecting a 2-star movie at best, and that we will very much like Milly Alcock as Supergirl.

I’ll let you know how it goes.