April Madness: Setting the Record Straight
OK, so Why We Love Baseball comes out in less than five months, and I’ve already talked at some length about how excited I am for you to see this book. I will tell you, I just did my last major edit on the book, and I was able to add a couple of really cool things to it. I don’t want to give too much away but … I TOLD you I would figure out a way to get that incredible Shohei-Trout at-bat into the book.
Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of private things about the book launch because, you know, I think we have that kind of relationship here.
Thing 1: So, you probably know that we have our super-fun preorder campaign going at Rainy Day Books; I will not only sign your book, but I will inscribe it however you like. I did this for The Baseball 100, and I’m proud to say we broke the Rainy Day presale record (beating out Michelle Obama!). It was awesome (even if my writing hand hurt for three days after I did all the signing and inscribing).
BUT … then someone came along, I’m not going to name him, but it was Mike Schur, and he wrote some book about being perfect or whatever, and I helped him set up a signing at Rainy Day, and I helped him promote it, and I went to Rainy Day for his big signing day, and he gave me COVID — this is all true — and you know what the guy did in return? He broke my presale record.
We HAVE to get that record back. You have to help me. Please! Preorder now!
Thing 2: The book comes out on Sept. 5… and I have marked that date as the finish line for my goal of losing a LOT of weight. About a month ago, for many reasons — health and otherwise — I set the hard goal of healthily losing x number of pounds by the day my book comes out. This is how my mind works; without a very specific goal and a very specific deadline, I’m sort of useless.
So, we’re a month in, and I’m happy to say that I’ve made quite a bit of progress, I’m recording all my meals on an app called Noom, I’m weighing myself every day (weird, but part of the Noom thing), I’m eating healthy, I’m trying to get my exercise in, I’m happy to give you more specifics if you’re interested, which I suspect you are not.
But my point is that I’m looking to be in the best shape of my life come Sept. 5, so I can hit the book tour* with full force. I’m hoping that if any of you are trying to lose some weight or otherwise get healthy or trying to finish that novel or any other big life goal, that maybe we can find a way to encourage each other for the next few months. Let me know if you’re interested; maybe we can do a weekly chat here or something.
*By the way, if you would like to try and have me come to your town for a book event, please reach out to my publicist, Jamie.
Substack Notes!
OK, one more thing before we go on to the baseball: You might have heard something about Substack starting a thing called “Notes.” You might have heard about it because it apparently ticked off Elon Musk so much that he briefly decided to shut out Substack from Twitter. He seems to have relented somewhat, but even now I can’t post a tweet in here because … well, because he’s Elon Musk.
Anyway, I’ll be trying some stuff with Notes. I’m not ENTIRELY sure how it works, but it does seem Twitter-like, sure, and if you’re a subscriber, you can see whatever I happen to post. We’ll try to have some fun with it.
And NOW, let’s get to some baseball.