Let’s do a Wednesday free-for-all — we’re talking my favorite inning of the season, maybe the best story going in baseball, a suggestion for the Brewers … and some bonus football talk about why the Bengals just didn’t fit. All kinds of fun!
First, a couple of announcements. The good folks at Dutton are on Goodreads, and they’re giving away ten free galleys of my upcoming book, FIFTY SEASONS: Stories of the Baseball Years That Echo. Totally free to enter; all you have to do is head over to Goodreads and sign up.
There are 118 days left until FIFTY SEASONS comes out — the same as the number of triples credited to Hall of Famer Turkey Stearnes. You bet Turkey makes an appearance in the book; he’s one of my all-time favorites. Preorders are open everywhere. And if you preorder from our good friends at Rainy Day Books, I’ll sign the book and personalize it any way you like.
Molly Knight and I have had an incredible run of guests on The Joy of Baseball podcast … and I’d say, yeah, it continues this week as we talk with the one and only Nick Offerman. I call him the one and only Nick Offerman because, hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen these commercials during these playoffs, but it sure looks like Home Depot has hired some Nick-Offerman-light actor to talk about tools. I mean no offense to the actor himself — I’m all for actors finding work.
But, again, there’s only one Nick Offerman, and he’s the best, and he talks about the Cubs, about his love of the game, and about his baseball son, Payton Tolle.
Listen to it on your favorite podcast filling station.*
*We have been alerted that the podcast is not yet on Amazon Music … we’re working on it. If you have a favorite podcast platform and TJOB isn’t on it, let us know; we’ll see what we can do.
One other The Joy of Baseball tidbit — Molly Knight and I will be going live at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight to talk playoffs and whatever else comes to mind during the Yankees-Rays game. These live video chats are totally free, and we’d love for you to join. Our original idea was to make these subscriber exclusives — we were just looking to cover all the costs for The Joy of Baseball project, you know, producer costs, podcast costs, and all the extra time. But then Molly and I decided, no, the whole point of The Joy of Baseball is to bring, you know, the joy of baseball to folks.
Of course, we’d love for you to subscribe and be a bigger part of our community. It helps. But either way, we’d love to have you come along for the ride. An email will go out from here around 8 p.m. Eastern when Molly and I go live. Come on over. We have a great time.
Browns Diary: Trying on the Bengals
I will readily admit: I came into this week’s Bengals tryout with a lot of skepticism. Can I really become a Cincinnati Bengals fan after all these years of being a Browns fan? I mean, the Bengals were basically created by Paul Brown in defiance of the Browns — and in defiance of owner Art Modell, who had fired him.
PB chose the same colors. He built the team from the ground up, using all the lessons he had picked up over the Cleveland years. He took the most delicious delight in beating the Browns. The Cincinnati-Cleveland rivalry has been intense and sometimes nasty. Who can forget Bengals coach Sam Wyche chastising Bengals fans who were throwing snowballs on the field by shouting, “You don’t live in Cleveland!”
It seems to me that switching from the Browns to the Bengals is a bit like switching allegiances from Superman to Bizarro Superman. Can I really make that big a leap?
But I tried it for various reasons. One, I lived in Cincinnati for three years back in the 1990s, and I really love the city, and I had a lot of fun writing about some truly terrible Bengals teams. Two, my great pal Chardon Jimmy is a lifelong Bengals fan, and it would be a lot of fun to share the fan experience with him. Three, I like quarterback Joe Burrow a lot … I know the team I choose must have a quarterback I can fully get behind.
Four, it would be nice to have an excuse to order Skyline Chili three ways for Sundays.
I love Skyline Chili. I will not entertain dissent on this.
So I gave it a shot and, of course, things went very badly. It has not escaped my attention that the Browns have not lost since I walked out, nor that something very bad has happened to the Bears, Bills, and Bengals in the weeks I chose them. Bears quarterback Caleb Williams went down with a nasty non-contact hamstring injury. The Bills kept turning the ball over again and again like they had forgotten how to play football. And the Bengals lost their two superstar receivers in one game — Ja’Marr Chase suffered a concussion, and Tee Higgins went down with an abductor injury.
I have no idea what an abductor is. But it looked pretty awful.
I have a feeling that football fans everywhere will start offering me money to NOT root for their teams.
But there was actually a different reason why the Bengals didn’t quite take … even though Joe Burrow is a lot of fun to root for. I don’t think the Bengals know who they are. When you have a quarterback like Burrow and receivers like Chase and Higgins (when they’re healthy), it seems to me that you should be a high-flying, chance-taking, fast-and-loose kind of football team. But they’re not that. Coach Zac Taylor seems like a pretty buttoned-up guy, and his defense almost never blitzes, and the big offensive adjustment they made for 2026 is having Burrow line up behind the center more often.
Their personnel screams “Yahtzee!”
Their play style whispers “Risk.”
All game long, I was texting back and forth with Chardon Jimmy, and he felt pretty confident they would find a way to lose to the Jaguars — or at least find a way not to win — and sure enough, the game ended when, on fourth down and 10, with the Bengals just 21 yards away from the game-winning touchdown, Burrow threw short, and Chase Brown was tackled a yard short of the first-down marker.
“THAT is the most Bengal ending ever,” Jim wrote, and I believed him, and I thought: No, I don’t need to take on this pain. It feels too familiar.
Speaking of pain: Next week I’m going to try on the Detroit Lions.
This story is beyond belief …
Maybe you know the story of Atlanta’s Ray Kerr, who once dropped out of college and worked at a 7-Eleven. He has thrown six shutout innings in these playoffs. Wonderful.
But he might not even be the most wonderful story of the postseason.
Let me tell you about Tampa Bay’s Cam Booser.
