Tours and Surveys and Stuff

Unveiling a first look at my WWLF tour… and we’ve got a JoeBlogs All-Star poll!

There is way too much stuff happening for me to keep up with at the moment, which is both awesome and exhausting. I’ll share some of that with you here, and you should know that this doesn’t even include the new, all-consuming project I’m working on, which I can’t talk about yet because… well, you’ll see when it’s announced.

A batch of special UK editions of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL arrived in the mail the other day. This is just like the U.S. edition, except I added a special UK introduction and bonus chapter. I’ll have a little giveaway for a handful of these in the coming days.

I’m going to be in Cleveland on July 26 for the National Sports Collectors Convention premiere of the new movie “THE DIAMOND KING,” about baseball artist Dick Perez. I wrote the narration for this movie, and it was a blast. I believe that the amazing actor John Ortiz, who did the actual narration, will be there, along with director Marq Evans and Dick himself. And, if we can pull it off, my friend and world-renowned magician Joshua Jay will be there, too, and might even perform a special baseball card trick right out of his childhood. It’s all going to be amazing. Last I heard, the event was sold out, but they were still accepting waiting-list requests. I will admit that I don’t know how that works, but they have a contact button on the Card Convention website.

Lots and lots of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL is happening.

• I’ve signed thousands of tip-ins and still have thousands and thousands to go. Tip-ins, you might remember, are sheets that they will insert into the book. A lot of these are obviously the inscriptions that you preordered. But there will be quite a few ways to get signed copies, including at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and a bunch of different local bookstores.

• If you preorder the book from Amazon or anywhere else, you’re eligible to get bonus chapters that didn’t get into the book. All you have to do is fill out this form.

• In three weeks, I’ll be narrating the audiobook, which will be a near-full time job. I narrated part of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL with Ellen Adair, but the publishing house has asked me to narrate the whole book this time, and they’re saying it will take something like 30-40 hours. I’ll be resting my voice.

• The WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL tour is coming together. A lot of these places aren’t selling tickets just yet. We’re still about 11 weeks away from launch day and there obviously can still be some changes, but this is an early glance at what the first two weeks will look like:

Sept. 17: Barnes & Noble in Clifton, N.J. (about 17 miles NW of New York).

Sept. 18: The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. I’ll be doing a panel with some awesome folks, including former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Tickets for the public will be released on July 7, but if you’re a member of the Smithsonian, you can order now.

Sept. 19: Parnassus in Nashville.

Sept. 20: Rainy Day books in Kansas City!

Sept. 23: Left Bank Books in St. Louis. We’re still working on what this one is going to look like, but we had such a blast last year.

Sept. 24: Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco.

Sept. 25: The Bookstall in Winnetka, Ill. (about 22 miles North of Chicago), hoping to get a special guest for this one.

Sept. 26: Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh.

Sept. 27-28: Bookmarks Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.

I’ll update you on any changes, additions, subtractions, whatever. And, obviously, I hope to add some cities for the fall, and would love to see as many of you as I can. I’m so excited for this football book; it turned out very different from what I expected when I first started writing it. I think it’s just so much fun.

OK, on to some baseball stuff…

Can we talk for a moment about how amazing Chris Sale has been this year? The numbers tell their own story—he’s 10-3 with a 2.79 ERA, a 2.32 FIP and he has a 118-to-17 strikeout-to-walk. He’s absolutely a viable Cy Young candidate; right now he’s tied with Philadelphia’s Ranger Suarez for best FanGraphs WAR in the league*, this coming seven seasons since he last made 30 starts.

*In Baseball-Reference WAR, Sale is a full win behind Suarez and is tied for fifth in the league, behind, among others, Cincinnati’s Hunter Greene, who has a 3.79 ERA and a 3.82 FIP, a much higher WHIP and leads the league in walks.

Baseball-Reference WAR has this quirky way of trying to separate defense from pitching —they look at a team’s overall defense and use that to add to or subtract from a pitcher’s individual value. So, in the case of Greene, because Baseball Info Solutions ranks the Reds’ defense as horrendous, Greene has a lot of value added. And because they rank the Braves’ defense as excellent, they take away value from Sale. I get the effort—going back more than 100 years, statisticians have been trying to separate pitching and defense, that’s what ERA attempts to do—but I think this system doesn’t make a lot of sense, and bWAR gives us way too many illogical premises, such as the absurd idea that Hunter Greene is pitching better (or even as well) as Chris Sale this year.

Cooperstown is still very much in play for Sale. (Luke Hales/Getty Images)

With Sale, though, the story goes beyond this year. This guy was one of the best pitchers in baseball from 2012 to 2018. He finished top-six in the Cy Young voting in each of those seven seasons, and he piled up almost 50 WAR (both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs), and you know what? He’s 35. If he can pitch like this for three or four more years—even close to this level—and maybe take one Cy Young Award, he’s going to the Hall of Fame.

Just a reminder that JoeBlogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support!

All right: It’s time for JoeBlogs’ first All-Star voting poll. No explanation is really needed: I’m going to list four or five players at each position, in each league. All you have to do is vote for who you think is best—the key being that there are no rules beyond that. Vote any way you want. That is to say: You want to vote for the best this year? Fine. Best overall? Fine. Best facial hair? Best name? Favorite player? Totally your call.

Unfortunately, the newsletter service limits me to five names—at most positions this is more than enough, but at, say, shortstop in the National League, I wish I had room for Masyn Winn and Ezequiel Tovar and Willy Adames. So I created a second poll just for them, as you will see.

Oh, one other thing: I included all the All-Star finalists among the choices (they’re marked with asterisks or, in the cases of Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper, two asterisks, since they were the leading vote-getters). I did this even when I would not consider said player to be one of the top All-Star candidates and there’s a drive into leftfield by Castellanos…