Last night, I walked the dog so a member of my household didn’t have to miss any Sunday Night Football. This is the opposite of how things normally proceed in my home on Sunday nights. Congratulations to Taylor Swift on disrupting another industry.
Upon returning from the walk, most lines of questioning (after confirming with Fargo that yes, it was a very fun walk, and yes, there were lots of interesting smells) revolved around whether Travis Kelce was playing well and whether Travis Kelce might be nervous with so many more people paying especial attention to him. To the former, I said I didn’t know. It’s hard to tell sometimes. To the latter…
To be a successful athlete, it sometimes helps to have stupid confidence. I don’t mean “stupid” as in “a lot of.” I don’t mean “stupid” as in “you should yourself be stupid.” I mean that it’s sometimes advantageous for a smart person to be willfully stupid in one specific area. There are decades of sports talk shows proving out this hypothesis. There is also Travis Kelce.
Travis Kelce is a confident guy, or he at least plays one on TV. He’s not the most brash shit-talker the NFL’s ever seen, but he is not of the cool and calm Greg Maddux school of confidence. He is a ham. He wants the spotlight. He wants the moment to revolve around him. It’s part of why Kelce sometimes gets eyes rolled at him in discussions about great tight ends. It’s not that he’s a bad blocker—he’s decent, not great—but that he doesn’t seem to crave blocking as much as George Kittle does or as Rob Gronkowski did. Gronk used to giggle while pushing some of the strongest and fastest men in America out the back of endzones. Travis Kelce wants the ball.
So, was Travis Kelce nervous last night? It’s hard to believe he would be. Everything about the guy suggests that he either was born with or has cultivated a confidence which echoes like a little tape recorder in his brain: “You’re the best! Nobody’s better than you! You’re the best! Nobody’s better than you! You’re the best! Nobody’s…” Playing at the biggest stadium in the NFL in front of the biggest TV audience of the season so far while his celebrity–crush–turned–girlfriend watches from the luxury boxes? If anything, you’d think Kelce might be too adrenaline-filled and overzealous, traditionally not things you worry about affecting tight ends.
This stupid confidence is bigger than football, though, and it’s part of why you can believe Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will, theoretically, work out. Conventional wisdom says that celebrity relationships struggle because of the issue of confidence. It would be easy to be insecure dating one of the most successful entertainers of her generation. It would also be easy to be insecure playing on Sunday Night Football. Best wishes to Taylor & Travis, we aren’t here to wish ill on anybody (hmm you know what we’re gonna talk about the Astros in a few paragraphs, so disregard that), but of all the reasons the Swift-Kelces might not work out, confidence is unlikely to be among them.
R.I.P. Tim Wakefield
There’s always a sadness to the end of baseball’s regular season, even for playoff-bound clubs. The days grow shorter, the air is getting colder, and even the best teams are in situations full of apprehension, facing odds much longer than 50% to earn the crown which makes that apprehension worthwhile. Baseball’s regular season bobs and flows, crackling radio against the sunset in one long, beloved song. Baseball’s final weekend brings a wistfulness and an air of death.
We did not expect the death to be so literal.
Tim Wakefield passed away this weekend after a quiet battle with brain cancer. Others have eulogized him better than I can. Others knew him personally, which I did not. But one memory, before we turn our attention to the playoff field:
My family had a trio of baseball games on the computer in the basement when I was growing up. I forget what the first was—I want to say Tommy Lasorda Baseball, but it may have been Tony La Russa—but the second and the third were Hardball 5 and Hardball 6. It was Hardball 5 that my oldest brother taught me how to play, sometime around 1999. I was four or five years old, and he was probably eleven. He set me up to play with the Red Sox, something which kickstarted a Nomar Garciaparra fanhood we’ve talked about elsewhere on this site. But before I knew Nomar existed—Hardball 5 might have even been released before his debut—I knew about Tim Wakefield. Because in Hardball 5, Tim Wakefield was among the Red Sox’ starting pitchers. He may have even been the number one starter.
I didn’t fully understand what a knuckleball was—I was still learning to read, so the concept of turbulent air flow was lost on me—but I liked it, and before long, I asked my brother to help me set every other pitcher on the team up with a knuckleball, something you could do in Hardball 5. Roger Clemens? He was throwing knucklers on young NIT Stu’s Red Sox. Heathcliff Slocumb, if I’m guessing the right year for the rosters? A knuckleballing closer. People say a knuckleballer can be a good change of pace in a pitching staff. Those people haven’t seen what Aaron Sele can do with a knuckleball when you make it a 99 overall pitch, set the difficulty for your preschool self on Easy, and set the difficulty for the CPU on Hard. In that setting, you don’t even need a screwball. (I would later add a screwball to my own repertoire when I created a player in the game as an 11-year-old, having convinced myself that if I threw a curveball from a submarine arm slot, it would act like a screwball. This philosophy would get me taken yard in the second game of the 2007 Illinois Little League state tournament. Thankfully, we came back to win that day.)
For years, I was a Red Sox fan, and Nomar and Pedro Martinez probably cemented that, but Tim Wakefield and a pixelated Green Monster started it all. From the sounds of it, this was the absolute least of Tim Wakefield’s accomplishments. Rest in peace to a baseball hero, in all sorts of ways.
Choosing a Team for the Baseball Playoffs
A couple months ago, a reader suggested we make a bunch of lists offering absurd reasons to choose a favorite baseball team for the stretch run. “Local airport reliability score.” “Proximity to a Culver’s.” “Number of left-handed pitchers on the 40-man roster.” The reason behind their request was that they, like many of our readers, had never much gotten into baseball, and they rightly thought the stretch run was the right time to try. This is a problem when you run an NIT blog. Everybody joins for the college basketball, and then the NIT ends and you start blogging about Joe Kelly and the Cubs, and everybody gets confused and disappointed, fast. You offer them college football again in the fall, and that placates them until November arrives, but you really wish they’d join you in loving baseball.
Anyway, I never got that blogpost done—kept pushing it off and then I became too spooked by the Cubs’ one-run losses to see where they lined up in “state public school tax expenditures per capita”—so consider this the next-best thing. We won’t be ranking these teams by reverse order of the size of the manager’s family. We’ll be going by something far more arbitrary: My own feelings.
Who to root for if you hate America: the Houston Astros
You would think the Canadian team would take this category, but you would be underestimating the sickness which is the Houston Astros. Led by one of the biggest hypocrites in a profession not known for moral upstandingness or mental clarity (talking about the manager here, Dusty Baker, and yes he’s a media darling but so was Mike Krzyzewski, so media folks aren’t exactly seeing the ball well), the Astros are years removed from the biggest baseball scandal since steroids and are still unlikable. They lost Carlos Correa, and they’re still unlikable. They play in an impressive, strong, industrious city, and they’re still unlikable. The Astros have managed to take Houston out of America, and while that tracks suspiciously close to a certain branch of political thought here in Texas, it’s hard to see any flaws in the logic. They cheated and they still acted like the victim. In fact, they continue to play the victim to this day. To hear Astros people tell it, we are in the wrong for thinking they were losers to cheat. We, as a country, cannot be about that.
We could go into greater detail and rehash and relitigate all sorts of previous arguments, but I think all we really need to say on this front is this: The Astros used to have a big hill in center field of their ballpark, complete with a flagpole within the field of play. They got rid of it. Does that sound American to you?
Who to root for if you want to have a complicated moral argument with a loved one: the Tampa Bay Rays
The deal with the Rays, normally, is that they have discovered ways of thinking unbeknownst to the rest of us. They’re working with calculus while the rest of Major League Baseball is figuring out how to borrow during subtraction, writing with sticks in the sand. The Rays are geniuses, finding novel ways to platoon players and optimize matchups and develop prospects and cast-offs. They are shrewdness personified.
But.
They had this guy named Wander Franco, and he was supposed to be one of the best baseball players ever, and he’s currently suspended while authorities in the Dominican Republic investigate claims he had at least one relationship with at least one 14-year-old after he himself had turned 18. He’s not on the Rays. But he’s kind of on the Rays.
Who to root for if you want to love baseball: the Baltimore Orioles
The Orioles are the answer to all of this, you should probably be supporting the Orioles, the Orioles are a glass of lemonade on a hot summer day and then they are a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie but only after you’ve finished the first glass of lemonade and quenched your thirst and cooled yourself off enough to be in a cookie mood. The Orioles play in the most beautiful ballpark in the game, they are young and vibrant and enthusiastic, they have a weird owner but who cares about weird owners you are here to love baseball please do not look at the weird owner in the corner. The Orioles have sharp uniforms that are entirely traditional and yet entirely original. The Orioles have this catcher named Adley Rutschman who started crying when he took a major league field for the first time but is cool enough that no one can make fun of him for it. If you want to feel joy in your soul, your best chance is to get on board the Orioles train. There is magic in Baltimore.
Who to root for if you like The South: the Atlanta Braves
The Atlanta Braves’ name is a bit of a misnomer. They aren’t really Atlanta’s team. They are The South’s team. Atlanta does like them, but the Braves are more about Braves Country than the city of Atlanta. Dansby Swanson—a Georgian by birth who played for the Braves and now plays for the Cubs—got at this a little bit when he talked about how it’s cool to now play in a professional sports city (the Braves play in a sparkling new suburban development they got taxpayers to build them), and a few Braves fans got mad, but I’m getting the sense there are the same few Braves fans who get mad about everything people point out about their franchise.
I should stress here: This isn’t so much The South in the idyllic, pecan pie way of living. This is more The South in its modern, Chick-Fil-A-sponsored state of being. I love me a Chick-Fil-A breakfast sandwich, but it’s different from a fresh peach from a stand on the side of the Natchez Trace, and I want to be clear about that up front.
Who to root for if you are a fan of crows: the Toronto Blue Jays
I think a few of you are here because of your fealty to the Corvidae family of birds, and that brings us to Canada’s representative, the Blue Jays. It would be funny if Canada always got one playoff representative, but that is sadly not the case. Toronto has to earn it just like everyone else. The Blue Jays—a smart, clever, beautiful bird—earned it mostly through Bo Bichette, whose dad wasn’t as good at baseball as Cavan Biggio’s dad or Vlad Guerrero Jr.’s dad but didn’t let that hold him back (Biggio and Vladdy Jr. are having bad years).
Looking to participate in a Blue Jays conversation? Ask if Alek Manoah needs to change his cardio training to keep up with the pitch clock. I’m pretty sure that’s their biggest story of 2023.
Who to root for if you love America, but not in a weird way: the Philadelphia Phillies
Ever hear of Kyle Schwarber? No? Picture the greatest American you can imagine. That’s Kyle Schwarber.
Nominated for best supporting American on the Phillies: Trea Turner, who plays baseball like he is Lightning McQueen; Zack Wheeler, the most forgettable great pitcher in the game; Bryce Harper, a relic from the Jabari Parker/Manti Te’o/Mitt Romney days when it looked like the future of America was Mormon; and a bunch of guys with great hair. Also? They play in Philadelphia. Find me a more healthily patriotic city than the place that gave us the Declaration of Independence and cheesesteaks.
Who to root for if you love America, but in the weirdest way: the Florida Marlins
The Marlins feel like they’re trying to most embody the vibe of lip fillers. There was briefly an effort to make the Marlins fun and steer into Latin American baseball culture, but Derek Jeter removed the home run sculpture (google it if you’re curious) and the Marlins never came anywhere close to being as fun as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Curacao are in the Little League World Series and the World Baseball Classic. They’re pretty good, though. They have a bunch of good pitchers. The pitcher part of that has been the case since 2020. They’ve also won more titles since coming into the league than the Dodgers, Cubs, Braves, Phillies, Mets, and 19 other teams.
Who to root for if you really like parking lots: the Texas Rangers
I think the best way to describe the Rangers is that they play in the Cowboys’ parking lot. They have some likable players, but every team has likable players. Even the Astros have some likable players. The Rangers are just kind of there. They exist. Good on them.
Who to root for if you love slides: the Milwaukee Brewers
The Brewers’ mascot is a gigantic foam man named Bernie Brewer. He rides a big yellow slide after Brewers home runs. As if that wasn’t fun enough, his name is Bernie Brewer, his supporting cast is a crew of footracing sausages, and he used to live in a stadium named Miller Park.
The downside here:
Brewers fans are probably in for a rough upcoming stretch. Not this month, but these next few years. The guy thought to have been the one who turned them into a Rays-esque efficient production is leaving for the Mets, the stadium needs repairs, and the Brewers were third or fourth fiddle in their state even before the Bucks got good. Now, it’s pretty clearly Packers, Badgers, Bucks, Brewers. That can be endearing, but over the long term I think it might get a little old. There is a lot that is cool and fun about the Brewers but there isn’t much that’s magical.
Who to root for if you love pain: the Minnesota Twins
I like pretending that the Twins’ postseason losing streak is worse than it is, by which I mean I always forget the Twins’ postseason losing streak is actually exactly as long as I think it is. When I think of it, I get it right, but then I think, “That can’t be true!” It’s true, friends. The Twins have not won a playoff baseball game since 2004. We aren’t talking series. We’re talking a single game. The Twins have not won a playoff game since John Kerry was still in the running for President. This is their seventh trip to the postseason in the years since.
If you want to go for it, go for it, and honestly you’ll probably break the streak. It’s hard in a given year to get swept after playing well enough over 162 games (161.9 if you’re the Marlins, but we won’t get into that here) to make the playoffs. But you also might not break the streak, and this might feel quite anticlimactic. Honestly? Trying to get into baseball by picking a playoff baseball team is probably a bad idea. Doing that will, in 67% of scenarios, result in elimination in the first two weeks. It’s probably better to try to get into baseball by watching the playoffs and then seeing what your heart desires. But we have made it way too far for that.
Who to root for if you love speed: the Arizona Diamondbacks
The concept behind the 2023 Diamondbacks is, “What if we got a bunch of fast dudes?” This works a lot better than you might think. It is exhausting to have Diamondbacks on base.
(I don’t mean meth, but that too, I guess? I don’t know a lot about meth, guys. I have never tried meth. I have bought a lot of allergy medicine with decongestant in my day, but I have yet to use it to make meth, and I have no plans to start. I should probably stop talking about meth now.)
Who to root for if you love Joe Kelly: the Los Angeles Dodgers
Ahh, yes. My own interests. Do you like me? Do you like the things I like? Well, then, join me, and tolerate the Dodgers in exchange for supporting the greatest baseball player of all time.
Two things here:
First, people do not remember how dominant Joe Kelly was in the 2018 postseason. That is maybe fourth on the list of things Joe Kelly is known for. Possibly fifth, if you read this blog. He was so good in that postseason, though. He was so, so good. Joe Kelly’s 2018 postseason had the essence of Michael Jordan’s career. I’m not kidding. Red Sox fans remember. Dodgers fans remember. Joe Kelly was lights out. I’m still chasing that high.
Second, the Dodgers would be a good villain for baseball. If you’re going to have a villain, you want a good one, and the Yankees have abdicated the throne, leaving options both repulsive (the Astros) and annoying (the Braves). The Astros aren’t worth our hate. They only deserve our dismissive scorn. The annoying sector of Braves fans have such a perception that everyone’s out to get them and thinks they’re racist (I mean, the Chop doesn’t help) that they would never carry themselves with the cocksure attitude of a true king of the castle. The Dodgers? Those are Lakers fans with better style. I pray my nieces and nephew grow up in a world where the Dodgers are frustratingly good. I want them to know what the 90s Yankees did for this sport.
Ryder Cup Reflections
My impressions of what went wrong in the Ryder Cup are as follows: We got beat, and Keegan Bradley being left off the roster had nothing to do with it.
What I’m going to say went wrong in the Ryder Cup is as follows: Zach Johnson picked his buddies for the team and his buddies went and lost.
I don’t have any rooting interest in or affiliation with Keegan Bradley, but it’s a bad look to make it seem like you’re going to the Ryder Cup to have fun with your friends and then lose the Ryder Cup. As Axl Rose once taught us in Stockholm, there are a lot of ways to have fun with your friends that don’t bring shame upon your country. This is what we’ve been trying to tell Braves and Astros fans.
Demons and Devils and the South Dakota Coyotes
Some college football thoughts:
- I care that Jalon Daniels was out, but Texas should not. Texas exorcised its Kansas demons. It needed that win before it left the Big 12. This was more important than beating Alabama.
- I mean it when I say that Duke should request ESPN cameras not show its crowd at football games. If you just watch the players, Duke seems awesome. Once you’re reminded it’s Duke? Disaster. Duke students have an unfortunate thing going where they look like Duke students. Electric game, felt like nobody won. Does that sound like your favorite basketball tournament? Because it sounds like mine.
- I’m worried about Fargo’s Bison. I haven’t told her about the loss yet. We were a little hungover yesterday and didn’t catch up on FCS results until last night when my sister in law texted that the Saders went down to the Nerds. Worse still, we can’t pivot to Idaho fandom. For one thing, naming your dog “Moscow” raises eyebrows around the neighborhood (if it doesn’t, that’s even worse). For another, all the True Crime podcasts are undoubtedly fired up beyond belief about the Vandals. I assume. I assume the next season of Serial is going to only cover how Jason Eck rallied the team after the heartbreaking loss at Cal.
- I was telling a friend about how Oregon State plays chainsaw noises at its football stadium, because of the logging, but we were at a bar and the Duke game was on and he thought I was talking about Duke, and his mom went to Duke, and he was very polite but for a minute there I think he was done with my bullshit.
- Arizona might be sneaky good. Putting a pin in that. Not good enough to get themselves ranked but good enough to really ruin someone’s year.
Let’s See How Burnley Did
Ehh, ok. Could’ve been worse.
Let’s See How Austin FC Did
Good, good. Come to think of it, I should’ve known that. That was also on at the bar.
Let’s See How the Sens Are Doing
Ok, that’s good, I’m not seeing any major injuries and it appears they’re calling tonight’s game in Halifax the “Nova Scotia showdown” but they aren’t capitalizing showdown. I think they’re maybe floating the name? Seeing how people like it before they commit?
Man I love the Sens. That bit could not have gone better for me.
America Takes F1
Andretti Global evidently got closer to joining F1, with the FIA approving the team but F1 yet to approve. What’s the FIA? Who the heck knows. The bottom line is that we might have an American F1 team soon, and if that happens, I will look at F1 with fresh eyes for at least one season. We all know the Indy 500 and 75% of NASCAR races and 90% of IndyCar races not named the 500 (it’s just so good we have to list it separately) are better, but it’s fun to win on the world stage, and it’s also fun to chase victory despite long odds. Pride of Indiana, become the pride of America you were born to be.
In NASCAR news, the Talladega playoff race was great as always. Talladega is the best. Just a little wilder than Daytona. It’s perfect. Ryan Blaney won, I think. I was so enraptured by the finish I forgot to confirm that.
ESPN’s Going to Broadcast the WBIT
I don’t think we got to this last week, but in case it wasn’t clear: ESPN’s broadcasting the WBIT. Both NCAA-run NIT’s will be broadcast on the ESPN family this year.
