The Future of JoeBlogs?

OK, here’s a classic JoeBlogs thing: I had the next four days all planned out. What I was planning to do was give you a breezy little baseball awards rundown each day, with a bit of backstory and fun facts and arguments so on.

You know: This is just how we roll here. We give you something pretty much every day. Today, I was going to focus on the MVP award, tomorrow the Cy Young, Thursday the Rookie of the Year and Friday the Manager of the Year. It was going to be light and easy and, for me, anyway, stress-free.

Then I fell into a rabbit hole.

I do that, as you know. A very large percentage of the best stuff that JoeBlogs is, and has been, involves me falling into rabbit holes. That often leads to me giving you a winding, zigzagging, meandering, and hopefully entertaining trip through various wonderlands.

This rabbit hole reminded me that I want to try something different here. This has been an idea that has been percolating for a long time. As you might know, we just passed our three-year anniversary of JoeBlogs. It has been such a wonderful ride—thank you all—and we’ve written thousands of posts and millions of words about the Hall of Fame and the greatest players and the Browns and Springsteen and commercials and musicals and the Yankees and Djokovic and Halloween candy and advanced stats and fountain pens and anything and everything that comes to mind. We’ll keep doing all of that.

But there is something that I do feel has been missing here, something kind of hard to describe. I do so many different kinds of writing. I do blog writing, I do magazine writing, I do newspaper writing, I do book writing, I do essays and opinion pieces and profiles and trend stories and reviews and features and deep dives and sometimes even poetry. I write whatever feels right that day.

What I want to do more of, though, is… I’m calling it “the mini-book.”*

*“Send in the clone!”

What is a mini-book? That’s a great question, and one that I do not have a great answer for yet. It’s longer than a deep dive. It’s more ambitious than a magazine piece. It’s something, I suppose, that I hope would be worth saving and reading (and maybe rereading) on a plane or at the beach or while laying down on a couch.

So, here’s the plan: Every now and again, I will step away from the daily work for two or three or more days, and give you a mini-book. I have done bigger pieces here before, of course, but I want the mini-book to feel a bit more polished, a bit more immersive, a bit more like, well, one of my books.

I’ve been told by businessy people that if I’m going to follow through on this mini-books concept, I should sell them separately or create a special higher tier for subscribers who want them. That makes a lot of sense, you know, and maybe I’ll do that someday. As mentioned a few times, I do have two daughters in college.

But, for now, I’m not going to do that. For now, I’m going to include my first mini-book for all paid subscribers.

Here’s your obligatory subscribe-now button!

That first mini-book, which I hope to get to you by the end of the week, will be all about how baseball’s MVP Award got started. The REAL story. I had no idea. It’s a convoluted and fascinating tale that involves money and bitterness and infighting and scandal and Connie Mack and Jim Bottomley and Gavvy Cravath and long-term contracts and politics and arguments about what being a good baseball player means and… whew. I had no idea.

It’s a big ol’ American story.

I’m still trying to come up with the title.

This is obviously a LOT of work—for one thing, I’m truly terrible at coming up with titles—so I’m going to get to it. I’m already thousands of words in, and I’m not even to 1914 yet. I think you’ll really like it.

While you wait for the first mini-book, here are some announcements!

• Tomorrow—Wednesday, Nov. 13—I’ll be at the Dallas JCC talking WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL and such things.

• This Sunday, Nov. 17, I’ll be in Toledo at The Fieldhouse—the restaurant inside the Five Brewing Company—for a dinner and book event. Order your tickets by tomorrow.

• Next Wednesday, Nov. 20, I’ll be at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City for a screening of “The Diamond King,” a movie I co-wrote about the amazing baseball artist Dick Perez (painter of all those Donruss Diamond Kings you collected!). Dick will be there as well, along with the film’s director, Marq Evans. And, obviously, my brother Bob Kendrick will be there, so I’m sure we’ll tell some stories and lies, as Buck used to say. Tickets are free, so you’ll want to snag them immediately.*

*Here, by the way, is a clip for the “The Diamond King.” That’s the amazing and incredibly nice actor John Ortiz, who unfortunately cannot attend—he’s broken up about it; he loves the museum—because his new show, “The Madness,” is about to premiere on Netflix.

• Breaking news! Next Thursday, Nov. 21—this was just finalized!—I’m going to do an event at Watermark Books in Wichita. It’s so new that it’s not even up on their calendar yet, but I’ll be there, and Margo will be there, and I imagine lots of members of our family will be there, too. Come on out!