Holiday Housecleaning

Hi everybody. Hope you’re holding up during the holidays. This year, because of some family obligations, I ended up being in charge of the whole meal at Thanksgiving. I have to say it turned out pretty well — turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, mac and cheese, peach cobbler — but, wow, I’m just terrible at carving the turkey. I watched all these YouTube videos and still ended up with sort of a turkey mess.

And so this is literally what my father said after seeing the turkey.

“You’re no Bobby Flay.”

Which, honestly, might be the title for my next book.

Speaking of books — I’m a professional writer, and transitions are my business — I wanted to mention a couple of things.

One, I heard from the good folks at Rainy Day Books in Kansas City: They still have some signed Baseball 100 books available for gift-giving. If you’re interested in getting an autographed book and having it arrive by Christmas, the deadline is this Friday, Dec. 10.

Once again, this is the link for signed books at Rainy Day.

Two, there apparently — and obviously I’m thrilled to hear this — is some renewed interest in my first book, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America. For obvious reasons. I’ve heard from the publishing house that they have put in another print order for the paperback, and I know that the good folks at Rainy Day have put in a pretty substantial order for those (and the paperback is currently in stock at Amazon and Barnes & Noble). If you’re interested in a hardcover of the book, well, good luck. There simply weren’t that many printed — we only have two copies ourselves. I know that there are some options out there.

Three, I wanted to make it super easy for you to give a Joe Blogs gift subscription for the holidays, should such an idea appeal to you. Have a lot of cool things planned for the coming year that I will be unveiling over the next few weeks. Anyway, here’s the shiny gift button!

Four, I’m putting the finishing touches on a little survey I’ll be sending out about Joe Blogs and what you would like to see in the new year. And there might be some baseball trivia in there just for fun. Keep an eye out!

Five, have you seen that new AT&T commercial where the AT&T woman is on every screen in the world telling us about AT&T? Isn’t this the plot for every movie featuring a bad guy interested in world domination?

Six, I’m debating writing an essay about the World Chess Championship, but I can’t help but think I’ve already overdone the chess thing here.

Seven, Mike Schur and I and about 2,039 of our closest friends have recorded the Holiday Draft PosCast … and it was a doozy this year. It should be hitting the street any time now.

Eight, we’ve got another bonus coming this week — it looks like the Marvelous Molly Knight (sign up for her spectacular Substack The Long Game right now) and I will be doing a little audio conversation about the MLB lockout, and we’ll each post it on our Substacks. If you like it, we might make it a regular thing.

Nine — a belated Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate those eight crazy nights.