Last Night's Baseball Takeaways
Let's look at every MLB game and see what we learned!
Got a whole bunch of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL interviews today—six days away!—so I’ll get some of the book stuff out of the way and then dive into some baseball game-by-game takeaways from last night’s action.
Tour Spotlight: Parnassus Books, Sept. 19
I have just learned that the word “Parnassus”—referring to Mount Parnassus, which in Greek mythology was home to the muses—has a long and cherished connection to books and bookstores. In 1917, Christopher Morley wrote a novel called, Parnassus on Wheels, about a woman who buys a traveling bookstore.
Parnassus Books in Nashville—one of America’s greatest bookstores—was opened in 2011 by publishing rep Karen Hayes and author Ann Patchett, because, at the time, Nashville simply didn’t have a great bookstore. I am so happy to live in a world where people like Karen and Ann open bookstores because their towns need them. I’m also generally a huge fan of Ann Patchett; I love many of her books, but am partial to The Magician’s Assistant, which, wow, I was just lamenting to a friend that the older and busier I get, the harder it becomes for me to just get lost in a novel. I totally got lost in The Magician’s Assistant.
In any case, I showed the awesome folks at Parnassus an early version of the WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL cover before I showed anyone else. It just so happened I was visiting the story (as I always do when in Nashville) exactly when the Dutton team emailed me the cover design. I showed it around at the store and they said, “You have to come back when the book comes out.” I’m beyond thrilled that it worked out.
The event will be moderated by author and professor Andrew Maraniss, who has written a bunch of great books, including Strong Inside, about Perry Wallace, the first African-American to play college basketball in the SEC. I will be meeting Andrew for the first time, but I’m friendly with his father, David, who is something of a hero of mine.
Anyway, it should be an absolute blast. Tickets are $37.05 and include a copy of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL, which I will be personalizing and signing at the event. Come on out!
Preorder Offer: Get 3 Months of JoeBlogs Free!
If you preorder WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL between now and Sept. 16—as I mentioned, six days left—I’ll give you three months of JoeBlogs for free! Kind of a fun deal, I think. All you have to do is preorder the book from anywhere and then fill out this form and, voila, you’ll get the last three months of the year free, which will include a bunch of postseason baseball, lots of Hall of Fame stuff, Browns Diaries and whatever else comes into my head.
A few preorder links:
All Around the Bases
Because nothing at all was going on last night, I found myself bouncing from game to game on my MLB app… and it sure seemed like Tuesday night was a truly representative baseball night. Lots of things happened that seem to summarize this wild season so far. So, I thought: Hey, it might be fun to go game by game for all those who were willing to endure my continuing promotion of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL.
And for those of you who skipped ahead to here… sure, OK, I get it:
Tigers 11, Rockies 0
I don’t know how many people outside Detroit have noticed, but… this actually has been a pretty darned good year for the Detroit Tigers. Yes, sure, it helps to have the White Sox in the division—Detroit has won nine of 10 games against the South Siders—but you play whatever team is in front of you, and the Tigers are now three games over .500 and just three games behind Minnesota in the wild-card race.
They’re doing it despite a punchless offense: Riley Greene and Matt Vierling are the only Tigers with more than 250 at-bats who have a better-than-league-average OPS+. That must mean they’re getting some darned good pitching, and they are, led by soon-to-be-coronated-Cy-Young-winner Tarik Skubal.
And in this game, 23-year-old Keider Montero threw a three-hit shutout. Well, more to the point, he became the fifth player this year to pitch a Maddux—a less-than-100-pitch shutout.
April 17: Boston’s Tanner Houck against Cleveland, 94 pitches.
April 23: Atlanta’s Max Fried against Miami, 92 pitches.
May 24: Miami’s Braxton Garrett against Arizona, 95 pitches.
July 3: Oakland’s Joey Estes against California, 92 pitches.
Tuesday: Montero against Colorado, 96 pitches.
Five seems like a lot of Madduxes for one year. There were only two last season, and two the year before that. I don’t remember if we talked about it back in April, but Fried’s Maddux against Miami was the third of his career.