Wasted Greatness, a Baseball Hypnotist, and Nick Offerman

By popular demand (?), we’re bringing back the Monday Rewind — a rambling, wandering journey through my notebook. Here we go!

I probably shouldn’t keep dropping hints about my next-next book* — not when I’ve barely even started the writing — but the book is very much on my mind 24 hours a day, so I can’t help but connect my thoughts to it. The book, I can tell you, is about excellence. And that includes WASTED excellence.

I’m not sure that any team in NFL history has wasted greatness quite to the level that the Cleveland Browns have wasted Myles Garrett.

Garrett might just be the most disruptive football player who has ever lived. I think most football experts would give that title to Lawrence Taylor, which is totally fair. On Sunday, though, Garrett became the first NFL player ever to have 12-plus sacks in six consecutive seasons. LT had set the record at five.

There is simply no way to block Garrett. You can double-team him, triple-team him, quadruple-team him, it just doesn’t matter. He’s too fast, too strong, too relentless, too creative to block. Sunday, against Baltimore, he had four sacks and another tackle for loss. The Browns lost anyway.

Three weeks ago, against New England, he had five sacks. The Browns lost anyway.

He has 15 sacks and 22 tackles for loss in 10 games.

Official record for sacks: 22.5 (Michael Strahan and T.J. Watt).
Myles Garrett’s pace: 25.5

Record for tackles for loss: 39 (J.J. Watt*)
Myles Garrett’s pace: 33

And the Browns are 2-8.

There were a lot of empty seats at Huntington Bank Field on Sunday because there are few good reasons to watch these Browns play. Their offense is feeble, their head coach is a relentlessly boring dead man walking*, their owner is awful, their future is still hampered by their unsoncionable decision to trade for He Who Shall Not Be Named, I mean, it’s a grim time. As one Cleveland buddy of mine texted to explain why he gave away his tickets this week: “If I wanted to go to a funeral, I’d go to a funeral.”

And all the while, Myles Garrett plays otherworldly football.

He deserves so much better than this. But don’t we all?

One final Browns thought: Shedeur Sanders finally took the field on Sunday. He only played because starting quarterback Dillon Gabriel got hurt, but there really was a brief moment of genuine excitement about it because:

Here’s the problem: The Browns might not know anything about anything, but they clearly don’t think Shedeur can play in the NFL. And they’re hardly alone. Sanders did not get drafted for 143 picks and might have gone even longer had it not been for the Browns being the Browns. The Browns have watched Sanders practice for months now, and at no point have they seemed even slightly tempted to put him into a game, even though the offense is an abomination and the season is lost.

Still, they ARE the Browns, so they absolutely could be wrong. When Sanders came into the game and completed his first two passes, there was a genuine buzz, a “Could this be the miracle that we so desperately need” vibe.

Sanders completed two of his next 14 passes, threw an interception, threw another pass that should have been intercepted, fumbled, took two sacks, barely avoided a third, and committed an intentional grounding penalty that led directly to the losing score. It’s not fair to judge a player on a first game, especially when he didn’t even expect to play. But it’s hard to imagine 30 worse minutes of football than that.

My early take on Sanders is that if he were somehow given a lot of time in the pocket, he could be good. He’s got a strong arm, he’s a good athlete, he’s loaded with confidence, and so on. But saying “if he were given a lot of time in the pocket” reminds me of my favorite line from the movie Arthur — this was when Arthur was talking about the woman his family wanted him to marry.

“Have you ever seen her face when the light catches it just right?” Arthur said. “She’s really quite beautiful.’

Pause.

“Of course,” he added, “you can’t depend on that light.”

You also can’t depend on an NFL quarterback getting a lot of time in the pocket. And without that time, Shedeur Sanders looks positively hopeless. That was the knock on him coming into the draft. So it still goes.

The 2026 Baseball Hall of Fame ballots are in the mail! So exciting. This is going to be a very interesting ballot because there really isn’t a realistic Hall of Fame candidate being added, so we’re basically working off of last year’s list, which I’ll talk about here in a minute.

First, there is one semi-interesting player being added to the ballot: Cole Hamels. In years past, Hamels wouldn’t have had any chance of even making it to a second ballot — not with a 163-122 career record and a 3.43 ERA. But won-loss record means somewhat less than it used to mean (somewhat less), and Hamels has 55 combo WAR and that fantastic postseason run in 2008, when he won both the NLCS and World Series MVP awards. That will likely get him at least a few votes.

I think he’s the only new player on the ballot who has a genuine shot at 5%. Ryan Braun might have had a shot at a second year on the ballot were it not for his PED admission.

SO that leaves us with this group — along with their vote percentage from last year:

I’ll obviously have a lot more to say about all this over the next few weeks, but what strikes me today is that every year I have voted for the Hall of Fame — I’m pretty sure that’s more than 20 years now — I have voted for the maximum 10 players. I have done this on the advice of Bill James, who many, many years ago explained the Hall of Fame math to me and why it just made good sense to fill out the whole ballot.

I’m pretty sure I can’t find 10 players on this year’s ballot who I believe belong in the Hall of Fame.

I mean, MAYBE if I squint and blink a few times and let my imagination wander, I can find 10. Maybe. But it will be a real reach, and this is coming from somebody who is a BIG Hall of Fame guy, a guy Bob Costas once asked, “Is there anybody you think DOESN’T belong in the Hall?”

I really wish that the Hall would change its whole process. But even assuming that they won’t (and they won’t), it sure seems to me that there at least should be a way to bring back a couple of candidates who were swamped by the steroid cruish of the mid-to-late 2010s, a “second chance” section of the ballot, a place for Kenny Lofton and Johan Santana and Jim Edmonds and Jorge Posada and guys like that. I think enough time has passed that we can look back at those insanely clogged and confusing ballots from 2013-2021, when nobody knew what to do, and say: “OK, yeah, some players were not given a fair shake. Let’s bring them back.”

And yes, I’d be up for a historical version of this too — a second chance ballot for guys who were criminally overlooked, like Lou Whitaker and Dave Stieb and Rick Reuschel and so on. But with the Hall deeply committed to the whole veterans committee concept, I don’t think that can happen. A steroid correction, though, that would be in the Hall’s best interest in my view.

I’m not the right person to give you a detailed review of the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, because it is based on a book by my friend Candice Millard called Destiny of the Republic, and I do not exaggerate when I tell you that Destiny of the Republic is my all-time favorite non-Robert Caro history book ever. I love it with every fiber of my being — I’ve probably read it a half dozen times — and so there’s no way to make a series about it without me saying, about 10,000 times, “Wait, that’s not in the book,” or “Why is there so little about Alexander Graham Bell?” or “Where’s all the fascinating medical stuff?” or “Why in the hell is there so much Guiteau in this movie, he’s not interesting to me and he’s not the main point of the book.”

Friends who have not read the book — or read it much more casually than I do (which is everyone) — love the series unconditionally, and I imagine you will too.

But here’s one thing I can say that we will all agree with: Nick Offerman was born to play Chester A. Arthur. It’s one of those performances that does what I imagine historians would have long thought impossible: It turns Chester Arthur, perhaps the most obscure president of them all, into a fascinating, full-blooded, and unforgettable character of American history. In a much shorter time, Nick does for Chester Arthur (Chester Arthur!) what Lin-Manuel did for Hamilton. Breathtaking.

And it just so happened that over the weekend, we also watched the 2024 movie The Life of Chuck — which Nick brilliantly narrates. We absolutely loved it. We didn’t just love it because it was fun and moving to watch, though it was. We loved it because it exists. Movies like The Life of Chuck — sweet slices of life with no grander ambition than offering something just a little bit profound to hold onto — are rare gems in a Hollywood overrun by superheroes and horror and remakes and sequels.

Thank you to Mike Flanagan for finding a way to make this movie.

I’ve seen two kinds of reviews of The Life of Chuck — the first, which generally love it the way we did, and the second that complains (sometimes quite ferociously) that it’s facile and overly sentimental and all that stuff. Of the second group, OK, if that’s the way a movie this wonderful and straight-from-the-heart hits you, I get it, but I can’t help but think of Kurt Vonnegut’s line about critics:

“I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”

In late June of 1949, the St. Louis Browns were 18-46 and well on their way to another lost season when the strangest story appeared in newspapers across the country. It was the story of a hypnotist named David F. Tracy. Well, he was not just any hypnotist — he was the head of the New York Society of Hypnotists, whatever that was.

Anyway, David F. Tracy was convinced that he, and only he, could turn around the St. Louis Browns.

“Nothing else can save them now,” he told United Press’ Claire Cox. “So they might as well let me try.”

The story is wonderful in every possible way … and it includes what might just be the single greatest quote in baseball history:

“I think they’d make a clean sweep for the rest of the season after a few sessions of hypnotism,” Tracy said. “If I can get my 104-pound wife so receptive to suggestion that I can jump my 200 pounds up and down on her stomach, I can get the Browns to hit home runs and catch flies.”

I’m not sure if Claire ever followed up on the whole “I can jump my 200 pounds up and down on her stomach” part.

Everybody knows the famous scene in The Natural where the psychiatrist tries to convince the Knights that while “losing is a disease,” it is also “curable.” I don’t know if that character is based on David F. Tracy, but sure enough, the Browns were so desperate that they actually hired him for the 1950 season.

“We’re satisfied,” Browns president Bill DeWitt said as the season began. “Dr. Tracy has been received favorably by most of our players, and he has already helped some of them.”

By May, Tracy announced to reporters that the Browns were “the most relaxed team in the American League.” They were also 5-15 in their first 20 games, but it was a relaxed 5-15. He was canned a few days later.

“It has been my experience during the last three months that I can do much for a ballclub, and I would like to join another club,” he said. “But I can accept a position only under the circumstances that I get better cooperation from management.”

No other club emerged for David F. Tracy, but he did write the book “The Psychologist At Bat,” with chapter titles such as “The Round Ball and the Round Bat” and “Three Strikes, Not Out.” It wasn’t a huge seller.

It’s no secret that I love NFL chain gangs. I love them for their preposterousness. I love them for their absurdity. And, most of all, I love them because they offered a funny bit of self-awareness that you cannot find anywhere else in the National Football League.

Here’s what I mean: Football cannot be officiated. It’s too chaotic, too sprawling, too violent, too disorderly. There are, unquestionably, a half dozen penalties committed on every single play. There’s no precise way to know where to spot the ball, no universally accepted way to determine what is or isn’t a catch, no reasonably close game that ever ends without losing fans believing (with all their hearts) that the officials determined the outcome. That’s just baked into the fiber of American football.

There has been a 30-plus-year effort to use increasingly advanced technology to take the chaos out of the game. That is what fans want — I am probably the only person on planet earth who thinks football was more fun before replay, back when we embraced the chaos — and there’s no doubt that replay has eliminated most of the egregious calls and given the game a patina of order that just about everyone appreciates.

But, let’s not kid anybody — football is still madness. And the chain gang was the NFL’s one concession to the madness. When the ball was spotted close to the first down, officials would call out local factory workers, accountants, and plumbers carrying large sticks linked by a 10-yard chain, and would have them measure.

It was ridiculous! It was hilarious! It was so wonderful because it was an admission: Yeah, we’re all just kind of guessing a little bit.

Then, this year, the NFL introduced its stupid, stupid, stupid virtual measurement system, and I could not possibly hate it more.

When they first announced they were introducing the system, I honestly thought that meant they were going to use cameras and, I don’t know, chip technology and radars and AI and whatever else they have to determine precisely where the ball should be spotted. I’m not in love with that either, but it at least made sense.

But NO! They’re still having the officials spot the ball based on, you know, where they think the ball should be spotted. The only thing the virtual system does is use cameras to determine if the spot is a first down. I mean, that’s WHAT THE CHAIN GANG DID.

Not only that, but the chain gang did it quicker, more efficiently, and much more entertainingly than the stupid, stupid, stupid virtual measurement system.

I don’t see any argument for the new system. None. Maybe this is just a first step for an all-in-one spotting system that is coming soon, I don’t know. And you know what? They can let us know when they have that ready. For now, bring back the chain gangs!