Welcome to our new feature here at JoeBlogs: The Batting Order.

Every Wednesday, we’ll post a full lineup of thoughts, essays, snippets, and trivia from the JoeBlogs universe. Hope you enjoy.

The Undefeated

One of the fun parts of early-season baseball is seeing who can go the longest at the start of the season without losing. At this exact moment, the Los Angeles Dodgers are 7-0 and look as if they might never lose … but just 120 miles to the South, the San Diego Padres are 6-0 and might be playing even better. Gavin Sheets for MVP!

*Sheets is hitting .500 so far this season with a 1.390 OPS, and I DESPERATELY hope that he is part of a new Padres trend of finding former prospects who had flamed out and now are suddenly awesome. That’s how it went with Jurickson Profar last year (though his recent PED suspension puts a damper on that one). Sheets was never nearly as big a prospect as Profar, but he is the son of former big leaguer Larry Sheets, who once kindly signed an autograph for a 16-year-old me at a Charlotte O’s baseball game.

Here are the longest unbeaten streaks to start a season the last decade:

• 2024: Detroit, Pittsburgh, and the Yankees all started 5-0. The Tigers shocked everyone by making the playoffs. The Pirates, alas, shocked few by not making them.

• 2023: The Rays started the season 13-0 — remember that craziness? For about a month there, they looked like the greatest team we’d ever seen. And they did win 99 games, but that wasn’t even good enough to win the division.

• 2022: Nobody got off to a hot start. The Rays and Mets won their first three. Whatever.

• 2021: The Phillies and Astros each won their first four. The Astros won the pennant; they always did in those days.

• 2020: Covid year and nobody even won three in a row to start.

• 2019: Philadelphia started 4-0. There was some brief “Gabe Kapler is a genius!” talk. The Phillies finished 81-81, and Kapler was canned.

• 2018: Pittsburgh and Washington started 4-0. Each team won 82 games in the season. It was viewed as a pretty positive year in Pittsburgh and a dreadful year in Washington.

• 2017: Baltimore and Minnesota started 4-0. The Orioles fell hard after that and began their ugly descent into oblivion. The Twins made it to the wildcard game where they inevitably and inescapably got crushed by the Yankees.

• 2016: Baltimore started the year 7-0. Say this for Buck Showalter. His teams often came flying out of the gate; the man knows how to run a spring training camp.

• 2015: Kansas City started the year 7-0. This is actually one of the most remarkable seasons of the 21st century, in my view. The 2014 pennant-winning Royals were regarded by pretty much everyone as an absurd fluke — and they had a chip on their shoulders from 2015 Opening Day on. And they just ran away with everything; they were in first place every day after June 7, then they overpowered the Astros, Blue Jays and Mets and won it all.

Six other memorable starts over the last half century:

• Oakland’s 11-game winning streak in 1981. That was BillyBall when Billy Martin decided to let his talented young starters — Rick Langford, Steve McCatty, Mike Norris and Matt Keough — complete just about every game they started. How funny would it be if a manager came along and tried that now.

• Atlanta’s 13-game winning streak in 1982. This was Joe Torre’s club, and it was the season when Dale Murphy emerged as an MVP. What I love about that Braves team is that they won their first 13 games and then basically played .500 ball the rest of the season (76-73) and it was good enough to win the division.

• Detroit’s 9-game winning streak in 1984. Those Tigers had been slowly but surely improving for years. Then, with the acquisition of a pretty obscure 29-year-old relief pitcher named Willie Hernández, they suddenly became unbeatable. They rolled to the World Series title.

• Milwaukee’s 13-game winning streak in 1987. What a weird team that was. The Brewers started the year 20-3. They promptly and defiantly went on a 12-game losing streak, won a couple, and then went on another six-game losing streak. Then they won six more in a row. They finished 91-71 and in third place.

• Cincinnati’s 9-game winning streak in 1990. What’s crazy about this season is that it is in the immediate aftermath of the Pete Rose circus. They lost 87 games in ‘89 while Rose was sent into exile. Then the Reds hired fiery Lou Piniella to manage — he’d been hired and fired twice by the Yankees — and behind the Nasty Boys bullpen and some 20-somethings named Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo, Eric Davis and Mariano Duncan, they somehow won it all.

• Kansas City’s 9-game winning streak in 2003. This will always be my favorite because I was there for all of it. That start was so bizarre, so inexplicable that we all just started to think that manager Tony Peña was a miracle worker. He was not, alas, but he did win manager of the year that season.

Farewell to the Chain Gang

First of all, boo.

No, I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. First of all:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Starting in 2025, the NFL is doing away with the chain gang.

From the NFL’s executive VP of football operations, Troy Vincent:

“The NFL and Sony are integrating world-class on-field officiating with state-of-the-art technology to advance football excellence. Combining the art of officiating with Sony’s trusted Hawk-Eye system is a healthy recipe for success in our commitment to blah blah blah, I’m not writing down any more of this corporate gobbledygook, blah blah blah, how can you do this to us, blah blah blah, maybe you can mention Sony a couple more times in your statement, blah blah blah, data driven insights from Sony’s Hawk-Eye, yep, I KNEW you’d mention Sony at least once more, blah blah blah, Sony.”

To say I’m heartbroken about this heartless NFL decision is to understate my true feelings. In many ways, I felt like the chain gang was the last bit of humanity left in the NFL. The whole concept of having people in semi-official referee garb run on the field with large sticks held together by chains was so wonderfully outdated and dumb that it made me happy every single time. It was like a reminder that football is goofy fun with made-up rules that are all but impossible to fully enforce.

Hey, listen out there: There’s no holding, OK? No tripping. No hitting anybody in the back. No blocking anybody below the waist.

Player: How about hitting somebody from behind but also below the waist? Like, what if I just slam into the back of somebody’s legs?

I kind of feel that was covered.

Player: Seems like a loophole.

It’s not. Fine, I’ll make that its own rule. I’m naming that clipping. No clipping. Also …

Player: That’s a dumb name. Merriam-Webster defines clipping as trimming hair or wool with shears.

I know that. But if you look at the alternate British English definition, you will see it can also mean to strike briskly or with a glancing blow, as in “the steamroller clipped some parked cars.”

Player: So you’re going with the British …

NO CLIPPING! Also, no grabbing anybody by the facemask. That’s rude. And no running into the kicker after the ball is kicked, OK, everybody? You could hurt somebody doing that.

Player: How about spearing? Can we spear?

What is spearing? What do you mean by that?

Player: I mean, can I just ram into somebody helmet first?

No, you obviously can’t do that.

Player: Well, you didn’t mention it.

Fine. No spearing. And hey, no grabbing the inside of somebody’s shoulder pad or jersey from behind and then yanking them down.

Player: You mean horse-collaring?

Is that what you’re calling that? Horse collaring?

Player: Yeah. It’s exactly like collaring a horse.

You mean putting a padded part of a harness that distributes the load around a horse’s neck and shoulders when pulling a plow or wagon?

Player: Right. This is the same thing.

OK, I’m not seeing it but fine, no horse collaring. And hey, no jamming your hands up in somebody’s face, OK? And you can’t move before the snap.

Player: Can I at least flinch?

Definitely not. Let’s see, what else do we have here? Oh yeah, you can’t have more than 11 guys on the field. And you can’t just throw the ball away to avoid a sack. And …

Player: Wait, can I throw the ball away to avoid a sack if there’s a receiver sort of in the area where I throw it?

Um, how close are we talking about?

Player: Close enough that I can just point angrily at the receiver to prevent an official from calling intentional grounding?

OK, fine.

Player: Also, what if I’m outside the pocket?

What do you mean?

Player: I mean, what if I’m running away from some defensive lineman who is trying to kill me, and I’m not in the pocket? Can I throw the ball away then?

Why would we make an exception for that?

Player: Because that guy’s trying to kill me.

Fair. All right, you can throw it away then. But you have to throw the ball past the line of scrimmage. I mean that’s the least you can do. Also, for you defensive players, you can’t interfere with the receiver when he’s trying to make a catch. We’re calling that pass interference?

Player: Can you be more specific?

No. Finally, you need 10 yards to get a first down. So to get the most precise measurement possible, we’re going to have officials randomly put the ball down wherever they sort feel like and then we’ll bring out a crew of laymen, mostly middle-aged men who spend their weeks as accountants or pharmacists or plumbers or whatever, and they will carry sticks attached by a 10-yard chain. They will then stretch out that chain, doing their best to keep it sort of straight, and determine if the team got the first down.

NFL: No! The NFL and Sony are integrating world-class on-field officiating with state-of-the-art technology to raise the standards of accuracy, consistency and efficiency!

I used to love this game so much more when it felt like a game.

Read on …