Nothing Beats a Great Pennant Race. Here's Why

As we head to Pittsburgh, let's talk about the best things in sports and... children's books.

Fantastic WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL Wednesday night in Chicago, hanging out at the Book Stall with Jeff Garlin and a bunch of Brilliant Readers. Just the best. Saw an old pal, Max Berman—I tell you this because Max and Kaitlin have a baby boy, Charlie, and the one thing Margo said to me before I went out on this leg of the book tour was: “You have to buy Charlie a couple of books that meant a lot to our girls.”

And so, before the event, for the first time in way too many years, I walked around the children’s section of a bookstore and looked for books that I used to read to Elizabeth and Katie. Maybe it was the exhaustion of being on Day 5 bajillion of a book tour. Maybe it was the emotion of being in one of my favorite cities while it suffers through an epically bad sports moment. Maybe it was just seeing long forgotten friends that once were at the center of our lives—“Hug” and “Giraffes Can’t Dance” and “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” (key word there being “very”) and so many other books that we spent hours and hours reading.* I don’t know.

*I didn’t see perhaps my favorite of all the children’s books, Some Dogs Do.

Yeah, it was a little bit emotional. There are certain moments in your life when, if you let your guard down, you realize just how much time has gone by. Sometimes these moments are designed to do just that—graduations, weddings, anniversaries, things like that, and, if I’m being honest, those rarely really get inside me. It’s the unexpected moments that do, like a bookstore visit in Chicago when I’m there to talk about Dick Butkus.

Here’s what I bought Charlie, by the way:

Obviously. And …

Oh, did the girls love to Press Here.

Tonight, I’ll be in Pittsburgh at Riverstone Books, and I don’t have any Pittsburgh friends who recently had babies, so I should be fine just talking Jack Lambert, Franco Harris, James Harrison and what it was like growing up in Cleveland in a time of Steelers’ dominance. Hope to see you there.

I’m supposed to be at the Bookmarks Book Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Friday and Saturday, though obviously everything throughout the South is on hold as we wait to see the wrath Hurricane Helene brings. Our thoughts and hopes are with those in its path. On Tuesday, Oct. 1, I’ll be at Park Road Books in Charlotte with my friend Gavin Edwards.

Speaking of Hurricane Helene… it has upended baseball’s playoff races before even making landfall. On Wednesday, the game between the Mets and Braves—who are a game apart in the race for one of the final two wild-card spots—was postponed because of rain, and Thursday’s game was preemptively postponed because of Helene, and now the Mets and Braves are scheduled to play a Monday doubleheader.

Also, the Royals, who are locked in their own wild-card race in the American League, are supposed to be starting a crucial series in Atlanta on Friday, and that’s obviously very much in peril, too—it’s not even clear how the Royals can get to Atlanta anytime soon.

I’ve written many times here, in one form or another, that in baseball I greatly prefer pennant races to playoff series. (And yeah, I know, they’re technically not pennant races anymore, but I’m still calling them that.) Football, hockey, basketball, yes, playoff games are the best. But in baseball, I truly believe, the final two weeks of a great pennant race is as good as the sport gets.

Here are four reasons why: