Fifty-five days until pitchers and catchers … and here’s your daily splash of joy.
Why do you love baseball?
Brilliant Reader D’aniel: “Every time something mundane happens while watching a game on TV, like an inning-ending double play, I’ll say ‘hey, pitcher’s best friend,’ and then a beat later the announcer will say it — and my wife will quickly say, ‘Hey! You should be a broadcaster!’”
Brilliant Reader Mark: “Watching Alex Gordon dive into the stands, crash into the wall, and still make the catch.”
Brilliant Reader Max: “Every ballpark plays ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ during the 7th-inning stretch, and they all replace ‘the home team’ with the name of the home team! (In my case, I always yell ‘Blue Jays’ regardless of the ballpark I’m at and regardless of whether the Jays are actually playing.)”
Brilliant Reader Steve: “Travelled to Baltimore in August, and I caught a foul ball. Found this kid who looks like someone out of a Norman Rockwell painting and handed it off.”
Joe: This might be the most Joeblogs photograph ever sent in — a baseball fan wearing a St. Louis Browns jersey with Brownie the Elf on the sleeve gives a baseball to the cutest kid in the world at Camden Yards? I mean, it’s like a team of designers went through the 12 billion things I’ve written through the years, worked around the clock for 10 months, and then posed a photograph that would fully represent everything I’ve ever believed. Bravo, Steve.
By the way, I just learned that Bill Veeck decided to “borrow” Brownie the Elf from the Cleveland Browns in 1952-53, just before the team moved to Baltimore.
If you would like to send in the reason why you love baseball, we’d love to hear it. And in that spirit, we’re also now collecting photos and artwork too — old snapshots, ballpark scenes, favorite scorecards, kids’ drawings, ticket stubs, whatever captures the joy of the game for you. Some people are sending song lyrics. Some are sending poems. It’s utterly wonderful. Just send along your baseball joy to [email protected].
— I’m going to do a live PosCast with Molly Knight today at noon Eastern over at the ol’ YouTube channel. I suspect we’ll take questions — so come on over.
— Tom Tango has a fun little game up where you can pick your favorite Rob Reiner movie by playing this or that for as long as you like. He also spells it “favourite,” which is delightful. You can take the boy out of Canada …
— Mike Schur and I are signing our names way, way, way too many times as our deadline for signing 11,000-plus copies of BIG FAN grows ever closer (the book publishes May 19 — our deadline is, um, quite a bit earlier than that). For those who are preordering from our good friends at Joseph-Beth, yes, we are also creating limited-edition signatures you might get. For instance, I just created a five-set limited edition called “Mike names three professional wrestlers.” I think he’s created a five-set limited edition called “Joe names three Tampa Bay Rays.”
I should add that we are JUST STARTING to start putting together the book tour. We’ve had so many bookstores and groups put in bids to host us, it’s so cool and so exciting. We should be able to start announcing dates fairly early in the new year.
— We’ve got some fun new merch in the JoeBlogs store, and our daughter Katie, back from her semester of studying abroad in London, is working on adding a few new things.
