The list starts with a severed finger in a hot dog bun and ends with the Orioles, which is all the same thing, I guess.
During the World Series, more than one baseball writer told me some variation of the same thing: The 2018 baseball season was boring. I wanted to disagree and respond with something snarky, like, “Oh, not enough CGI explosions for you?”, except I get it. The 2018 season was filled with promises that it couldn’t deliver.
Shohei Ohtani is an MVP-caliber hitter and a Cy Young-caliber pitcher at the same time!
And he’ll be hurt before he can even play in the All-Star Game.
Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge will help the Yankees set a new all-time home run record!
But Stanton will be good-not-great, and the record will somehow be less exciting than we could have imagined.
The Brewers, A’s, and Braves are plucky young upstarts filled with exciting young players!
The Red Sox and Dodgers will still be in the World Series, and you’ll be sick of both of them before the first pitch.
It was fun. It always is. But we were promised more fun. Always underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around, baseball. For example, most of my stories are usually a complete waste of your time. This is my promise to you. However, there are occasionally articles that are only a partial waste of your time, and it makes them twice as special.
Here are 10 articles that meet that criteria!
Oh, god, I just over-promised, didn’t I ...
10. The Call of Phthulu
Fiction? Fiction! It’s ... uh, well, I’m not quitting my day job. But when I was tasked with writing a Halloween story, I immediately thought of creepy-ass mascots and had some fun.
9. The Hall of Fame case for Omar Vizquel
Would I vote for Omar Vizquel? No. But I would also not be mad if he gets into the Hall of Fame, and the feelings in this article have been brewing for more than a decade. Sometimes it’s okay to overrate the players who make you enjoy baseball more.
8. Rob Manfred is using a bulldozer to fix a leak in baseball’s roof
I probably should have just written the damned story when I got the candid picture a couple years ago. Ronan Farrow would have written it, and it would have ruled. But I was too timid about the sourcing and ... eh, I blew it.
But at least it was a good jumping-off point for my concerns with the aggressive tinkering of Rob Manfred. Beware the aggressive tinkerers!
7. Searching for the Mendoza Line of on-base percentage
The common thread, I guess, is that most of these articles had been percolating in my brain for a while. For years, this was on my to-do list, and when I finally cranked it out, someone tweeted “You forgot about Jeff Francoeur” at me, and they were absolutely right. It ruined everything.
Well, not everything. Just pretend that I mentioned Francoeur prominently.
6. Why gambling used to scare baseball and why it doesn’t anymore
My favorite kinds of stories are the ones that allow me to shut the rest of the world out and read through century-old books online. This medium-deep dive into the history and future of baseball and gambling was fun to write. Seeing Pete Rose alone at a table in a Vegas memorabilia store helped provide some of the inspiration, even if I didn’t mention that in the story.
If you’re looking for more of my fiction for some reason, I can sneak a link to a piece that I wrote about the dystopian future of baseball gambling, too. It’s not very good, but it does start with the line, “The security lines are long because President Grohl is attending the game, but the slow line gives me time to finalize everything,” and I’m proud of that.
5. Facebook’s baseball broadcast was a vision of the hellish future we deserve
It’s nearly impossible to read, but that’s the point. Also, please refer to this excuse for any future articles of mine that are also nearly impossible to read.
4. The benign explanation of baseball’s slow offseason
Months later, I would write a long-winded piece that rehashed a lot of this stuff, and I’m not sure why. It was all laid out pretty clearly the first time. Young players are better; young players are cheaper; teams are focusing on young players. Sounds simple, but it’s absolutely going to lead to a strike or lockout.
Pay young players more. That’s it, that’s the solution. And you know that it won’t happen without a bloody labor war.
3. The 5 best things about the worst play of the 2018 MLB season
One of the reasons that I felt like I couldn’t disagree with the writers who claimed this season was boring is that I did notice a dearth of exceptionally stupid plays or moments. Maybe it’s because I included them all in my weekly column, which was a tremendous exercise in overstuffing a column and burying six ledes.
But this play was so dumb that I absolutely had to write about it when I got home at midnight. I was exhausted and had no business writing anything coherent, but the play was just that dumb and beautiful. It was my muse. It will always be my muse.
2. The misremembering of McGwire/Sosa
This was my era, baby. The late-’90s are why I’m here right now, writing about baseball, which technically means they’re why you’re here, reading about baseball. And if you were there, feeling the love, you would have laughed at the idea that people would start gasping in horror, Captain Renault-style, about the steroids.
Of course they were taking performance-enhancing drugs. It’s an incredible self-own to pretend that you were so oblivious back then that the PED stuff snuck up on you. This is an article about that.
1. How the Orioles lost 21 straight games to start the 1988 season
This was supposed to be a little remembrance of a losing streak on its anniversary, and then it kept growing and growing and growing, and I was talking to Jon Miller at one point, and the words kept coming, and finally I published 5,000 words that completely surprised my editors, copyeditor, and social team, completely screwing up their day. To which I say this: lol owned.
Does it take some of the sting out of the story that the Orioles were somehow even worse this year? On the contrary, I think it makes this story even better. Not even the 2018 Orioles could lose that many games in a row. They couldn’t even come close.
Maybe the 2028 Orioles should just take the season off.
Have a great 2019, everyone. Or, at least, a good one. I’ll settle for meh.
Meh would have been so awesome these last two years.
Happy New Year!