Wait! Another Letter from Tom Hanks?
Why We Love Football, Twitter/X and the absuridty of Judge and Soto.
A few months ago, you might remember, I got a fan letter from Tom Hanks. It was an utterly surreal, once-in-a-lifetime moment, and obviously, I wanted to figure out a way to celebrate it. This was tricky. That letter, typewritten, of course—Tom Hanks is probably America’s most famous typewriter guy—was written on a typewriter scroll, which makes it quite a bit taller than Eddie Gaedel.*
*The letter is roughly the same height as 4-foot-5 Charlie Hughes, a good-fielding middle infielder for several Negro leagues teams in the 1930s.
After much deliberation, we decided to custom-frame the letter as is, without cutting between the pages. It took quite a long time to do that, but, last week, it was finished, and I love the way it came out. Now that letter is next to my typewriter desk in a corner nook of my office, and for the last few days, I have walked over a bunch of different times just to read a section or two.
Yes, that’s our “That Thing You Do” poster right next to it. Pretty great, right?
That seems like a pretty good way to end our brush-with-celebrity story.
Except, I went to get the mail yesterday. And …
Yeah, that’s right. I got ANOTHER letter from Tom Hanks.
This one is also four pages long, but it’s typed on normal-sized stationery, so it’s ACTUALLY four pages. And I’m freaking out all over again.
I thought I’d give you a few highlights of the letter—I don’t think he’d mind. As you can see in the photo, he wrote it in London, where he found himself thinking and dreaming of baseball (though as you can also see, he does enjoy football and is a fan of Aston Villa). Among other things, he wrote:
— He saw a bat-and-ball game being played in Hyde Park that he believes was rounders, and mused about that being the true antecedent of baseball. (Note to self: Write back a bit about the marvelous history of people arguing about baseball’s roots.)
— He says that these days he’s a Dodgers fan, not out of great love for the Dodgers—he has in his life been a fan of Oakland, Cleveland, Seattle and his son Colin is a huge Giants fan—but because it’s where he has lived for 35 years and the only team he could watch 10 or 20 times a season. “In fact, though,” he adds, “I root for extra innings.”
— I have to quote this verbatim because, I mean, I think I told you: Tom Hanks is one of us: “You ever been on a drive across the country and saw the lights of some local night game and stop for a burger from the local Kiwanis Club and a few pitches? Heaven.”
— He gave me his definitive opinion of whether Dottie drops the ball on purpose at the end of “League of Their Own.” I’m going to keep that one to myself for now.
— He said that the two movies he would make over again are “League of Their Own” and “That Thing You Do.” These just happen to be my two favorite Tom Hanks movies, though I feel the same way about Tom Hanks that Bob Dylan felt about Gregory Peck in the brilliant song, “Brownsville Girl”: “I’ll see him in anything.”
“There is not a moment of either movie that I did not love doing,” he wrote.
— When I wrote back to him the last time, I asked him about a very specific moment that is so obscure, I imagine only one or two of you will get it (but you two will get a huge thrill out of it): One of the most memorable sports moments of my entire childhood (a barren sports childhood in Cleveland, I admit) was watching Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, in the show “Bosom Buddies,” throwing the football around while Tom shouted, “Brian Sipe to throw! Ozzie Newsome is open! Touchdown!” I so vividly remember this moment because (1) That sounded EXACTLY like me as a Cleveland kid, and (2) Having both my favorite quarterback, Brian Sipe, and all-time hero, Ozzie Newsome, mentioned on one of my favorite sitcoms was like having a ton of dopamine flood my brain all at once.
But did it happen? Am I remembering it right?
Tom wrote two things about it. One, he did not specifically remember that moment, but he suspected it was true, because he and Peter were given free rein to chuffa—a comedy term that sort of means ad-lib but goes deeper than that. Tom typed “chuffa” in red ink, which is delightful.
Two, he said it’s probably true because they had decided that the characters, Kip and Henry, had grown up in Cleveland—specifically in Shaker Heights—so that Tom could lob a few Cleveland references into the dialogue. (Tom worked summers at the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland during the late 1970s, and he can to this day name the entire Tribe lineup from those days.)
One other thing: Tom signed the letter saying he’d like to get together for a doubleheader but, “until then, Skitch, how did we get here?”
I’m spent. That’s all I can say, really.
There’s another thing that Tom put in the letter that I wasn’t going to include here, but… yeah, I will include it because we’re two days away from Father’s Day, which means that you have two days left to pre-order a signed and inscribed copy of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL from Quail Ridge Books.
“I CAN’T WAIT TO READ your next book, anything you put your wit and poetry to,” Tom wrote, including the all-caps words, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do on a manual typewriter.
You will obviously be able to preorder WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL all the way up to its pub date on Sept. 17… and I hope you will. I’m so in love with this book. Every time I pick it up, I remember just how much fun it was to write, how chock-full it is of football memories and moments, how many zigs and zags it takes. And there will be ways to get signed copies going forward—I’m signing 7,000 tip sheets right now, yikes!—but if you want me to inscribe the book any way you like, with a personal greeting or a challenge or you just want to have me on record, this will be your last chance.
Oh, also: Caroline over at Dutton Publishing put together a fun little coupon to print out if you’re giving this book as a gift for Father’s Day or any other time before its publication date. You can download it here.
OK, while we’re here, I do want to share one more personal thing, because I think it’s kind of funny.
A long while ago, I decided to leave Twitter/X for a bit. The place just seemed to be getting more and more toxic in various ways, and I needed the mental break. After some time away, though, I started to think about some of the good things about Twitter/X. I made a bunch of my very best friends on there, including the magical Ellen Adair. Most of my engagement was positive. I thought: “You know what? I should go back on, reach back out to the 120,000 or so people who followed me (well, I don’t know how many people are on that list, but some, I imagine), reengage a bit.” I figured I’ve been away long enough, that I could do Twitter/X it in a much healthier way…
…and Twitter/X won’t let me back in.
Here’s the funny part about that: If they had simply banned me for leaving, well, OK, fine, that seems silly, but, hey, whatever, my life has been quite fine without Twitter/X. Thing is: That’s not what seems to have happened. It seems that I’m locked out of Twitter because of some sort of two-factor access thing on my account. When I try to sign in, they ask me to “use my code generator app to generate a code,” and I don’t have a code generator app connected to the account.
Underneath, there’s an option to “contact support.” So, I did that. I immediately got back an automated email that asked me to try and sign in again, at which point they would sign in and turn off the two-factor access. “We typically respond within a few days, but some cases can take longer,” they wrote. Great. I waited a few days… nothing happened. So I wrote back and got the same messages.
A couple weeks later, I tried again… same thing. Two weeks later, again… same thing. Three weeks after that, again… same thing. A few days ago, again, same thing. I’m still locked out, and my inbox is filled with Twitter Support emails with the same line: “Hello, thanks for your report, it looks that this is connected with your original case, so we’ve added it to that first report.”
Here, let me try it again now. And… hey, whad’ya know!
I can’t tell if this is incompetence of the highest order… or actually a bit of Twitter/X genius as they have me running in hopeless circles as payback for leaving the site in the first place.
Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support!
Aaron Judge went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts against Kansas City on Thursday… something worth mentioning because, for a while there, Judge was the hottest hitter I have ever seen. OK, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration… but not much of one. From April 27 (when he was hitting .178) to June 11, he hit .401/.520/.965 with 15 doubles, 1 triple and 21 home runs in 41 games.
Quadruple those numbers to get a rough projection of what that would look like over a whole season.
I mean, the guy was just on EVERYTHING. He put the ball in play 104 times during that stretch, and 36% of the time he got an EXTRA-BASE HIT. When this guy locks in, I mean, it’s jaw-dropping.
And meanwhile, across the way, Juan Soto is just... doing Juan Soto things day after day after day. He doesn’t get hot, he doesn’t get cold, he just hits .320 and his on-base is .430 and he slugs around .600, and it’s jaw-dropping in a whole other way.
There’s a chance—obviously, it’s early, but there’s an actual chance—that both Judge and Soto with have an OPS+ of 200. The last time that happened in the AL/NL?* That would be 1930. You can probably guess from the year who those two players were—Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
*Though there are many fewer at-bats involved, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard each had a 200-plus OPS+ each year from 1937 to ’39.
Does anyone get the Tom Hanks reference to the "I’m going to keep that one to myself for now" quote???
Please someone
Does anyone get the Tom Hanks reference to the "I’m going to keep that one to myself for now" quote???
Please someone