Seven Days Till Kickoff!

A preorder offer for WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL, baseball's MVP races and more.

Sep 10, 2024

We’re down to the final week before WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL hits the shelves… and it’s going to be a super-busy week. Well, it’s going to be a super-busy next month or two. But I’m so thrilled. I love the way this countdown of the 100 greatest moments in football history came out, I love the early reaction from reviewers and readers. I just have to share with you a quick call I got from an acquaintance of mine who read an early copy of the book:

“I have to tell you, I really loved this book. I loved it as much as I loved your baseball books. I wasn’t sure I would; I used to be a football fan when I was a kid, but I’ve lost touch with the sport. But I just devoured the book. I couldn’t stop turning pages, I really wanted to know what moment was coming next. It gave me so many smiles.”

That felt like such a lovely reaction—exactly what I want people to feel.

I hope it brings you a lot of smiles.

This week, yes, I’m going to highlight a few of my upcoming events and share a few thoughts about the book. Yes, I’ll also write some sports, so you can skip ahead if you must.

Tour Spotlight: Smithsonian, Wednesday, Sept. 18

When Brilliant Reader Philip Hochberg—sports and entertainment attorney and legendary P.A. announcer for Washington football—reached out to pitch me on the idea of doing an event at the actual Smithsonian, well, you know there have been a handful of moments in my life when I felt a bit like George Bailey did at that instant when Mr. Potter first offered him the job of his dreams.

“You’re not talking to somebody else around here, are you? You know this is me, remember me? George Bailey?”

The Smithsonian. Wow. I went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for the first time when I was 10 years old—going to Washington was the first and unquestionably most ambitious trip my family took throughout my entire childhood. We took a tour of the White House* and walked around the Lincoln Memorial, but what I remember most was Air and Space and how overwhelmingly awesome it seemed. It started a lifelong love affair with the Smithsonian—I’ve been to 15 of Washington’s 17 Smithsonian Museums, several of them multiple times, and, I don’t know, going to the Smithsonian inspires a sort of patriotism and American pride that’s hard to describe.

*My youngest brother, Tony, was 1 year old when we went, and he fell asleep in his stroller while being pushed through the tour, which led to one of my family’s core jokes: He would be the only one among us to sleep in the White House.

Phil didn’t just pitch me on the idea. He put together an extraordinary panel of football superheroes—all Pro Football Hall of Famers. I guess, you know, it is the Smithsonian.

Len Shapiro is in the Hall as a writer; he was The Washington Post’s national pro football correspondent for two decades and he wrote a biography on Sam Huff.
Darrell Green was the fastest player in the NFL—he reportedly ran a 4.4 40-yard dash at age 50!—and one of the most respected and admired players in NFL history.
Paul Tagliabue was NFL commissioner for 17 years, and that covers a lot of ground, but I do wonder if his proudest moment was making sure that the Saints returned to New Orleans after Katrina. There’s a chapter in the book called “Rebirth,” about that return, and it might be the most meaningful chapter of them all to me.

The event is Wednesday, Sept. 18, at the S. Dillon Ripley Center. Tickets are $25 for members and $30 for non-members. Books will be sold by the great folks at Politics & Prose.

Smithsonian Tickets

Preorder Offer: Get 3 Months of Joe Blogs FREE!

With seven days left to kickoff, I’m offering JoeBlogs readers a special, last-week preorder offer. If you preorder the book from anywhere during this final week, I’ll give you three months of JoeBlogs free. This is for anyone who preorders the book between today and Monday, Sept. 16.

All you have to do is preorder the book and then fill out this form (using the email for your JoeBlogs account). If you’re a free reader, you’ll get the last three months of 2024 free. And if you’re a paid subscriber (thank you!) you’ll get three free months tacked on to your subscription.

You can preorder from pretty much everywhere, including:

More Deshaun Watson Allegations

On Monday, another woman sued Deshaun Watson, alleging that he sexually assaulted her during a date in 2020.

It’s hard to keep up with all of the Watson lawsuits, what’s been settled, what’s still pending, and so on, but this allegation is fundamentally different from the others. This time, Watson is accused of being violent. The details are ugly.

Of course, as always, we have to be careful to say that these are allegations, and as far as I know, nobody from Watson’s side or the Browns’ side has yet said anything about them. But what we can say is that the NFL suspended him for 11 games and fined him $5 million for violating the league’s personal conduct policy. What we can say is that he has settled almost two dozen sexual misconduct lawsuits.

What we can say is that the Browns were fully aware of his situation when they traded three first-round picks, a third-round pick and two fourth-round picks to get him, and then gave him the largest contract in NFL history. What we can say is that they understood Watson’s character as they were anointing him as the team’s franchise quarterback and entrusting him to fill the desperate hopes of a Northeast Ohio fan base that has never seen their team in the Super Bowl.

I honestly believe it’s the most cynical move—and, inevitably, based on their complete misjudgment of his remaining football talent, the worst move—that any team has ever made in the long history of American sports. Someday, probably soon, it will make for one hell of a “30 for 30.”

Baseball’s MVP Races!

Joey Votto joins the PosCast this week, and so, of course, we talked about the most pressing issues of the day, such as: “Do you believe Dave Roberts when he calls himself a first-ballot Hall of Fame hugger?” and “Who do you rank as the best hugger during your career?”

We also talked MVP races in both leagues. And while talking about that, it occurred to me that we’re basically reliving some classic MVP arguments:

In 1942, Ted Williams won the Triple Crown convincingly. He won the batting title by 25 points, hit nine more home runs than second-place Chet Laabs and had 23 more than RBIs than Joe DiMaggio.

The writers, incredibly, gave the MVP that year to Joe Gordon. The reason seemed to be two-fold. One, there was this sense—even if they did not have the advanced numbers to back it up—that Gordon’s good offense and stellar defense, combined with his good attitude, trumped Williams’ great hitting and chaotic nature (he was fined and benched by manager Joe Cronin for his lack of hustle on a couple occasions).

In 1947, it happened again—this time Williams’ Triple Crown was beaten out for the MVP by Joe DiMaggio’s meh season (by his standards), because the writers wanted to believe that Joltin’ Joe brought all these intangibles to the table that Williams did not.*

*Though it should be said that by then DiMaggio, at 32, was pretty clearly not the breathtaking outfielder or brilliant base runner he had been. He also didn’t even drive in 100 runs, which was already, by then, the key MVP metric.

Now, obviously, much of this was simply anti-Williams sentiment. But some version of the Williams Conundrum has played out through the years, as MVP voters try to weigh raw offensive awesomeness against a darkhorse’s total baseball contribution.

Does Ohtani’s offensive awesomeness compensate for him not playing defense? (Harry How/Getty Images)

The most famous of these recently happened in 2012, when Miguel Cabrera became the first player in 45 years to win the Triple Crown. He hit .330 (four points higher than Mike Trout), slammed 44 homers (one more than Curtis Granderson and Josh Hamilton) and drove in 139 runs (11 more than Hamilton).

But advanced stats were just beginning to take hold of baseball writers’ imaginations, and the advanced stats suggested that while Cabrera’s Triple Crown was a shining piece of baseball history, a 20-year-old rookie named Mike Trout was ACTUALLY having the better year. Trout slashed .326/.399/.564, hit 30 home runs, led the league in runs and stolen bases, and played an electrifying centerfield. By bWAR and fWAR, he was about three wins more valuable than Cabrera.

Cabrera won that MVP battle, but WAR has basically won the war… Since 2015, of the 16 MVP winners, 10 led the league in position-player bWAR, and another three were within a half-win of the leader. The chances of someone who’s three or four wins behind the WAR leader taking home the MVP are pretty much gone.

So what about this year? Aaron Judge is a much better offensive player than Bobby Witt Jr.—he’s 32 batting runs ahead of Witt. Does Witt make up that difference with his superior baserunning and shortstop defense?

Shohei Ohtani is 30 batting runs ahead of Francisco Lindor and is on track for the first 50-50 season in baseball history—including baseball history in our imaginations. Does Lindor make up that difference with his shortstop defense, considering that Ohtani doesn’t play defense at all?

These are fun arguments to have… and not ones that WAR offers a compelling answer for. The combo-WAR gap between Judge and Witt (0.35 wins) and between Ohtani and Lindor (0.3 wins) are not statistically meaningful for stats with so much noise in them. This is an absolute toss-up, and our choices will probably reflect all the biases that we bring to baseball and how we analyze it. Royals fans will be sure that Witt deserves the MVP; Yankees fans will likely differ. Mets fans and David Ortiz will go on and on about how Ohtani doesn’t play defense; Dodgers fans will probably point to the 170-or-so difference in their OPS.

To me, these sorts of arguments are at the heart of what makes baseball fun. There are so many ways to look at the game. There are so many ways a baseball player can be great.