Some quick announcements before we get to the ballgame:
Our latest Joy of Baseball podcast is up — this week we are talking with the incomparable Bob Kendrick from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He tells so many great stories, including one about Tom Cruise. Available on all the podcast apps. As the kids say, like and subscribe!
One thing I did not expect this month was to be spending so much time talking about Harry Houdini. But this Halloween will mark the 100th anniversary of his death, and I’ve been getting barraged with requests to talk about why we still care so much about this guy from a century ago who would get out of handcuffs and boxes.
Here’s a fun interview I did with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
There are a bunch more to come.
And, hey, if you haven’t read my book on Harry Houdini, that was one of my all-time favorite writing experiences. I love that book.
Speaking of books I love, yes, I’m going to tell you again how much I love FIFTY SEASONS — I just sent in the final version (only emergency fixes from here on in) with the dedication. I always do the same dedication for every one of my books — To Margo, Elizabeth and Katie.
Well, for WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, the dedication was actually: For Patience, Sunshine and New One … and Buck, who gave them those names. Buck called Margo “Patience,” Elizabeth “Sunshine” and Katie was “New One.”
This one, I changed slightly.
I dedicated the book to “Margo, Elizabeth, and Katie, and in memory of our good boy Westley.”
I realize that I wrote my last SEVEN books with Westley constantly at my feet. I’m not sure how I’m going to write the next one without him.
You can preorder FIFTY SEASONS from pretty much everywhere, and if you enter your receipt number in the form on this page you immediately get a complete list of the seasons in the book along with a bonus chapter.
And at Rainy Day Books, you can pre-order a signed copy that I will inscribe any way you like.
We talk all the time about baseball being the game without a clock. It is not the only game without a clock. Tennis has no clock. Golf has no clock. They all have timers — baseball has a timer now, too, obviously — but there is no ticking clock governing the game. It’s perhaps the most wonderful thing about baseball.
“Since baseball time is measured only in outs,” Roger Angell famously wrote, “all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time.”
Or as my friend Linda Holmes says: “You always have enough time in baseball.”
Yes, you always have enough time. The clock will never hit 0:00.*
What you don’t have is enough outs.
*The 0:00 on a clock has always depressed me. I’ve talked about this before, but when I was young, and Cleveland Browns football was my life — really, ALL NFL football was my life — I would feel a little piece of myself dying in the final seconds of the 4 p.m. game. These were like the last seconds before a time bomb goes off. I’d see the shadows cross the field, and I’d hear the announcers thank their executive producer, and the clock would relentlessly wind down to that dreaded 0:00, and that meant Monday was here, school was about to start, undone homework was due, tests I wasn’t prepared for would be unleashed, bullies would bully, it would be a whole terrible week before Sunday, and football, came again.
And then the last football game would end, and I’d hear the horrible ticking sound of the 60 Minutes stopwatch, and it would beat and echo through my chest, and, yeah, let’s just say that 0:00 haunts me still.
Because time in baseball is measured only in outs, they are the most precious commodity of all. Everything a player does in baseball, more or less, is geared toward outs — getting them or preserving them.
A batter’s most important job is to avoid making one of those invaluable 27 outs.
A pitcher’s most important job is to get one of those invaluable 27 outs.
A fielder’s most important job is to turn batted balls into one of those invaluable 27 outs.
There are a million nuances, of course. But outs are at the core of this game. A mere one or two outs made, one or two outs avoided, one or two outs bungled is all that separates baseball teams. This is especially true come the postseason.
The Cleveland Guardians have been in the postseason seven times since Michael Martinez grounded out to Kris Bryant to end the earth-shaking 2016 World Series. That particular Guardians team was loaded with talent — Lindor, J-Ram, Napoli, Santana, Kipnis, Cy Young winner Corey Kluber, an electric bullpen with Andrew Miller in the starring role and Terry Francona in the dugout. Slowly, surely, all of them except José Ramírez would age out or be shipped out.
And the Guardians settled in as the little engine that could. They kept finding new pitchers like Shane Bieber and Tanner Bibee and Gavin Williams and Emmanuel Clase and Parker Messick to carry the day even when the lineup couldn’t score runs. In 2025, they won 88 games and took the meh American League Central even though they finished dead last in the league in runs scored. This year, they won 85 games and again took a division title despite being near the bottom of the league in runs scored again.
Winning without scoring many runs is a delicate art form. It requires great pitching, of course, but it also requires that your batters time their hits just so, and it also requires that your fielders get all the outs they can get, and this is doubly true when facing a better team.
The Guardians are playing a better team right now in the Tampa Bay Rays.*
*Interestingly, the difference between the Rays and Guardians might come down to one bizarre decision made almost exactly five years ago. For reasons that still aren’t clear, the Guardians became infatuated with a 22-year-old minor-league pitcher named Tobias Myers. I mean, he was an interesting enough prospect — his fastball showed some decent movement — but he was also undersized, and Tampa Bay had not even protected him, so he was available in the Rule 5 draft.
Cleveland didn’t want to risk missing out on Myers in the draft, so they called about a trade. And the Rays inquired about an 18-year-old who had banged nine home runs in the Dominican Summer League. Cleveland gave up the kid without even a fight. The Guardians got their man Tobias!
And all it cost them was an 18-year-old Junior Caminero.
If you take Junior Caminero off the Rays and put him on the Guardians, it’s possible that Cleveland would be favored in this series.
