Felsch Matt!
I try to be as honest about things as I can here on JoeBlogs, so I want to tell you that I’m currently in that panicked, hysterical, round-the-clock, get-out-of-my way final stages of writing my new book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. As such, for the holidays, things are (temporarily) going to get just a little bit less active here on JoeBlogs.
What does “a little bit less active” mean? I have no idea. Heck, you know me, I might write two posts a day for the rest of the year, who even knows? For me, writing JoeBlogs is like throwing a knuckleball. Even I don’t entirely know where it’s going.
I’m going to come clean here: My thought when I first started JoeBlogs was that I would write three times a week, maybe four, and I’d occasionally jump on big news. I figured that was as much as I could handle and probably as much as you wanted to read.
Here you go, month by month:
December: 19 days, 20 posts
November: 30 days, 33 posts
October: 31 days, 42 posts (!)
September: 30 days, 39 posts
August: 31 days, 34 points
July: 31 days, 29 posts
June: 30 days, 22 posts
May: 31 days, 22 posts:
April: 30 days 23 points (but included the massive Pozeroski Baseball Preview)
March: 31 days, 24 posts
February: 28 days, 25 posts
January: 31 days, 32 posts
Total: 353 days in 2022, 355 posts in 2022.
OK, that’s ludicrous. Yes, admittedly, not all of these posts were major things — some were reprints of old posts, some were (relatively) quick hits and so on. Then again, some of these were massive, multi-thousand-word monster essays.
By the way, I hope you’d say JoeBlogs is a pretty decent deal.
Of course, I’ve loved it all. But going forward, I want JoeBlogs to fit your life. So I’m going to ask you point blank: Is it too much? Would you like fewer posts? Would you like shorter posts?
I realize that these aren’t especially fair questions. Henry Ford once said something to the effect of: “If I had done what people wanted, I’d have built a faster horse.” You don’t have time in your busy lives to try and figure out what the optimal JoeBlogs cadence should be. But I’d love to hear any opinions you have in the comments.
And together we’re going to make 2023 the best JoeBlogs year ever.* I hope, as always, that you will come along for the ride.
*I assume you got the headline: Take Happy Felsch and add Matt Holliday and, yep, Happy Holiday!
I’ve already written about my friend Grant Wahl, but I do want to say that I’m thinking about him a whole lot today, in the aftermath of that amazing, glorious and joyful World Cup final, which led to Lionel Messi finally bringing home to Argentina the biggest prize in sports.
In 2010, I went to the World Cup in South Africa for Sports Illustrated. Grant was my teammate there. He was also the person I leaned on to figure out what the heck an amateur soccer fan could write.
And one day he said to me: “You have to write about Messi.”
I thought, at the time, it was an odd thing to say. Messi was, already, the widely acknowledged “Greatest Player in the World.” His story had been written so many times by so many truly brilliant soccer writers — including Grand himself — that I simply didn’t know what I could possibly add. It felt to me like someone telling a musician, “You should cover the song “Yesterday.” What possible use would there be for another “Yesterday” cover or Lionel Messi story?
Still, Grant said I should write Messi, so I wrote Messi. I watched him play like I had never seen him before and tried to write what I saw.
“Messi simply does things — little things and big things — that other players here cannot do. He gets a ball in traffic, is surrounded by two or three defenders, and he somehow keeps the ball close even as they jostle him and kick at the ball. He takes long and hard passes up around his eyes and somehow makes the ball drop softly to his feet, like Keanu Reeves making the bullets drop in “The Matrix.” He cuts in and out of traffic — Barry Sanders, only with a soccer ball moving with him — sprints through openings that seem only theoretical, races around and between defenders who really are running even if it only looks like they are standing still. He really does seem to make the ball disappear and reappear, like it’s a Vegas act.
In the end, I think, my instinct was both right and wrong: It was right in that I could not add anything new to the extraordinary (and in many ways ineffable) experience of watching Lionel Messi play soccer.
But I was wrong, looking back, in thinking that Grant was asking me to write Messi so I could add to his oeuvre.
No, I’m pretty sure now that Grant was asking me to write about Lionel Messi because he wanted me to have the experience. That’s how Grant was. His thinking was undoubtedly something like: “Hey, you’re at a World Cup for the first time in your life, who knows if you will ever be at another one, you HAVE to write about the greatest soccer player in the world. Go do it, man! It will be fun! Go see what watching Lionel Messi play this beautiful game sparks inside you!”
Yes, that’s how Grant was. There have been so many wonderful tributes to him since his shocking death and I’ve read as many as I could find because, for me at least, each little memory brings him back to life for a moment. When Messi made his penalty kick at the end of the match — the most gorgeous of all the penalty kicks as he slowly approached the ball, waited for the goalkeeper to make his move, and then gently, even lovingly, rolled the ball into the open net — I could almost feel Grant sitting right next to me with that big smile on his face.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he might have said. And yes it was. Beautiful.
If you publish it, I’m going to read it. I’m not here to complain about the frequency.
This is akin to the late Vin Scully asking if fans would like him to call more or fewer baseball games. Please write as much as you like and I’ll hit refresh on my phone like a monkey on crack hoping you’ve published another JoeBlogs entry.