Free Friday: Fired Up

It’s Free Friday, and I’m about a week away from my book deadline*, and there are three new Baseball Hall of Famers, and I’m super-excited about the championship games coming up this weekend, and I’m super-excited about Embiid vs. Jokić on Saturday, and I’m pretty excited to see if Jannik Sinner, who somewhat quietly might be ready to surpass Carlos Alcaraz as the player of his generation, wins the Australian Open after truly outplaying Novak, and spring training feels right around the corner.

*I think next week, fingers crossed, I’ll be able to give you details on the personal inscription preorder campaign for WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL! We’re going to try some cool new stuff this year, I think; the good folks at Dutton are hard at work to put this together… details soon.

OK, Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer were elected to the Hall of Fame this year. Billy Wagner fell five votes shy and looks like more or less a sure thing in 2025, though you never know, I suppose.

During my video—it seems like most of you thought that wasn’t a complete disaster, which was nice to hear—someone asked me which player came closest to election without getting in. Off the top of my head, it occurred to me that the answer has to be Curt Schilling, who got more than 71% of the vote and he’s not in and I’m not sure when or how he does get in.

And I also thought about Jim Bunning, who’s in the Hall now thanks to the veterans committee, but fell five votes short in the BBWAA voting. I totally forgot that there’s an even more heartbreaking case. In 1985, Nellie Fox appeared on his last BBWAA ballot. Fox was a superb defensive second baseman and super-scrappy hitter who led the league in hits four times. He almost never struck out—in 1954, he came up 706 times and struck out 12.

He did stuff like that every year. He led the league in fewest strikeouts per at-bat, well, guess how many times. Go ahead, guess…

…if you guessed 12 times, you are a winner. I gave you a sneaky hint by telling you that he struck out 12 times in 1954. I could have picked 1951 or 1958, when he struck out 11. He struck out 12 times in two other seasons. He struck out 13 times in four different seasons. He once went 98 games without striking out. He was freakishly good at putting bat on ball. He was the best bunter of his time, one of the best of all time.

Anyway, in 1985—10 years after his untimely death—he came on the ballot for the last time. Everybody knew it was going to be a super-close vote; Fox had finally started gaining real momentum his 13th year on the ballot (getting 46.3%), and then, in his penultimate year, he got 61%. A clear majority now wanted Fox in the Hall. And several prominent baseball people, including the just-retired Joe Morgan, made the push for him.

“The Hall of Fame is for special people who contributed to baseball and made it a better game,” Morgan said. “A lot of guys who hit home runs didn’t do that. Nellie Fox made it a better game than it was before he came along.”

The vote happened… and Fox finished two votes shy of election. Two. He got 295 of the 395 votes, making his percentage 74.68354% He was so close that there was a bit of an uproar; nobody had ever gotten between 74.5 and 75%.

The BBWAA immediately asked Hall of Fame president Ed Stack to round up, but he refused, saying that in order to get in, a player needed a “pure 75%.” He said that if the Hall of Fame let Fox in, it could lead to unforeseen consequences. This led to some writers insisting that Fox get another year on the ballot. Stack refused that, too. Jerome Holtzman was so upset, he sent a public letter on behalf of the BBWAA.

“I am confident that thousands of baseball fans join me in challenging your decision,” he wrote. “In baseball, as in general accounting practices, all figures are rounded out to the next fraction… this fraction applies to all baseball statistics where fractions exist: fielding averages, slugging percentage, earned run averages, etc.

“The argument that reconsideration of the Nellie Fox case would open a pandora’s box is specious. What would prevent the future election of a player who receives, say, 73.7% of the vote? The answer is simple: 73.7 is the equivalent of 74, no more, no less.”

Stack and the Hall of Fame did not budge. Fox was not elected to the Hall of Fame until 1997.

Happy Friday! Our Friday posts are free so everyone can enjoy them. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support. And here’s an extra 20% off!

So what happens on the Hall of Fame ballot next year? Well, you would have to think that Billy Wagner will get elected. I guess we’ll see on that.

And among the first-year nominees:

• Ichiro Suzuki will obviously be elected. Maybe unanimously?

• CC Sabathia will be fascinating to watch. I think he has a shot at getting elected first-ballot, even though his career stats are only marginally better than Andy Pettitte’s or Mark Buerhle’s. I think for many voters the Hall of Fame line cuts right between Pettitte and Sabathia.

• It will be utterly fascinating to watch what happens with Félix Hernandez. On the one hand, Johan Santana’s one-and-done on the ballot does not bode well for King Félix, who has a similar “short but awesome career” case. On the other hand, and look, I just can’t get past this, there is no way in the world that Billy Wagner was as great a pitcher as Félix Hernandez. He just wasn’t. At some point, the voters are going to have to take a good, hard look at how to evaluate pitchers in this new era.

• Dustin Pedroia won the MVP in 2008, he was probably even better in 2011, he sure looked like a future Hall of Famer after another dazzling season in 2016. Then his career just ended because of injury. It’ll be interesting to see if the voters give him the David Wright treatment (enough support to stay on the ballot, but no more) or take him even more seriously because he was truly great for 10 years.

• There are a bunch of other good players coming on the ballot—Curtis Granderson, Ian Kinsler, Troy Tulowitzki, Ben Zobrist, Adam Jones and so on. I don’t think any of them are second-ballot guys, simply because the competition is so fierce, but any of them COULD be a second-ballot guy.

I’m so fired up about the Lions. I’ve long had an argument with my friend Michael Rosenberg about whether the Lions or Browns have the more haunted history. I think I’m right, because the Browns have had so many more heartbreaks than the Lions in my lifetime—Red Right 88, the Drive, the Fumble, the move and about 200 others.

But Michael’s argument—and I can’t deny him the logic here—is that the Lions are more haunted precisely because they have NOT had those kinds of heartbreaks. For the most part, they haven’t even come close enough to have them. In the 1991 season, they got utterly destroyed by Washington 41-10 in the NFC Championship Game. Since then….

1993: Lost wild-card game to Green Bay on that crazy Brett Favre to Sterling Sharpe pass (this qualifies as heartbreak).

1994: Lost wild-card game to Green Bay when Barry Sanders ran for minus-1 yards.

1995: Lost wild-card game to Philadelphia after throwing six interceptions and giving up 58 points.

1997: Lost wild-card game to Tampa Bay after falling behind 20-0.

1999: Lost wild-card game to Washington after falling behind 27-0.

2011: Lost wild-card game to New Orleans in a furious passing duel that Drew Brees won easily in the fourth quarter.

2014: Lost wild-card game to Dallas after leading for three quarters (a bit of heartbreak)

2016: Lost wild-card game to Seattle in a game they were never really in.

There you go—eight straight playoff losses, all wild-card games, no realistic hope of the team getting to the Super Bowl. In fact, I’d say that in the 57 years since the Super Bowl began, the Lions have only once had any kind of reasonable hope of winning a championship, and that was in 1991, when Washington was clearly a better team.

Will Goff and the Lions make history? (Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)

That sort of annual hopelessness, which, you would have to say, the Browns have more than matched over the last 30-plus years, will wear on you in ways that even heartbreak cannot. And so, having this Lions team more or less come out of nowhere with a legitimately good offense—Jared Goff is really good, it turns out, and running back David Montgomery was a brilliant pickup—is one of the most delightful things to happen in football.

They’re a touchdown underdog to the 49ers, yes, and if Deebo Samuel is healthy enough to be a threat, it’s somewhat hard to see how the Lions match up. But hope is alive in Detroit, and hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things.*

*And yes, I just saw a little bit of Shawshank Redemption because it’s both wonderful and inescapable in today’s modern media world.

Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!

On Thursday, I listed all the CASEY Award winners, which was very fun and hopefully gave you some good reading options while we wait for baseball to begin again. Today, I’ll give you the 2023 CASEY finalists, because this was a really good year for baseball books.

• Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas, Jesse Cole

• Baseball Photography of the Deadball Era: Rediscovering the Early Lensmen and Their Indelible Images that Brought the Game from the Field to the Fans, Jim Chapman

• Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years, by Steven P. Gietschier

• Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Erik Sherman

• The Fireballer: A Novel, Mark Stevens

• From the Front Row: Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and Modern Art Dealer, Jeffrey Loria

• The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball, Russell A. Carleton

• Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry, David Vaught

• Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer, at the Perfect Ballpark, at the Perfect Time, Ryan McGee

• The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual and Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams, Adam Lazarus

I’ve read most of these books and will want to read the rest… you know, minus the Jeffrey Loria book. Ugh. How did that happen? Anyway, some really good stuff here. Let me give a special shoutout to my buddy Ryan McGee, because his book is really a blast.

Here would be a team you could put together of remaining baseball free agents:

C: Gary Sánchez
1B: Brandon Belt
2B: Whit Merrifield or Elvis Andrus
SS: Amed Rosario or Tim Anderson
3B: Matt Chapman
LF: Tommy Pham
CF: Cody Bellinger
RF: Jorge Soler? Can he still play the outfield? Otherwise, Randal Grichuk or Wil Myers or Aaron Hicks or David Peralta or somebody
DH: J.D. Martinez or Carlos Santana
P: Blake Snell, Clayton Kershaw, Jordan Montgomery, Brandon Woodruff and, I don’t know, maybe ZACK GREINKE!

Could that team compete? Like, if I were a bajillionaire and decided I just wanted to sign all of them and start a big-league team, could that team win?

Answer: Yeah, I think they’d be favored to win the American League Central for sure, probably other divisions, too. I mean, it would be an old team, and you’d be counting on people staying healthy and so on. There would be weaknesses. But I mean, a middle of the lineup with Bellinger, Chapman, Soler and J.D. Martinez would be no joke. And that rotation would be super-scary to face come playoff time.

On the PosCast this week, Mike and I were back opening up packs of sports cards to raise money for Project Main Street. We even include a code that you can use to get into a special raffle that will include all sorts of crazy, cool prizes. We include that code in perfect PosCast style; we just drop it in somewhere in the podcast, never repeat it, we figured there’s no WAY that people will listen to all 800 hours of the PosCast just to get that code.

Hundreds of you found the code and donated to Project Main Street. You’re amazing.

So, after next week, when I get the football book done—things might be a little bit light here at JoeBlogs while I finish the book—I’ve got this plan for a baseball preview that, I think, will be awesome. My idea is to do a big essay on each of the 30 teams that answers one question.

For instance, my Yankees essay might answer the question: Are the Yankees still the Yankees?

My Phillies essay might answer the question: Why is Ellen Adair so wonderfully the way she is?

My Royals essay might answer the question: What the heck is this team about?

Or it all might go in a totally different direction. Like, my Royals question might answer the question: Just how good can Bobby Witt Jr. be? Or my Phillies question might be: Kyle Schwarber. Explain.

Here’s the best part: You are going to get to pick the questions for each team.

If you would like to start filling the comments with ideas: a single question for your team, could be a big question or a small one, could be about today’s team or something from the past, it’s a wide-open world. But the key is, I’m only answering one question per team.

As we get closer, I’ll round up all the questions and let you vote on which ones I should answer. I think it will be a lot of fun, and, heck, I might even turn it into a little bonus PDF book for subscribers. We’ll see. I’m sure the idea will round into shape as we get closer to baseball.

In the meantime, of course, I’d love for you to subscribe. We’re going to have a blast. Here’s a 20% off coupon you can use. Well, it’s not exactly a coupon, but close enough.*

*Remind me, and I’ll tell you the story of my mother’s obsession with coupons and her brief and exciting connection with the coupon magazine, Refundle Bundle.

JoeBlogs Week in Review

Last Friday: Remembering the glory of Sports Illustrated.

Monday: I broke down the Hall of Fame pitchers.

Tuesday: What a day! First, I revealed the cover for WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL. Then, since it was Hall of Fame day, I made my predictions, opened a Hall of Fame discussion thread and did a little wrapup video answering your questions.

Thursday: Exciting news about the CASEY Award!