Those Damn Yankees (and a Few More Words About the Book)
Hi, everybody. So first thing on this lovely Monday morning … I got a couple emails over the weekend asking me to stop writing about my upcoming book WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. I get it. I do. I mean, I’m not going to stop, but I get why people would be like, “Enough of the book already.” In that spirit, I am going to put a little warning on this and future posts: If you don’t want to read about the book, please skip this section. I even put a skip-ahead line for your convenience. I promise, there’s a full post on the other side.
And this seems as good a time as any to talk about what JoeBlogs is.
A couple of weeks ago, someone was asking me for advice on how to start a newsletter, and I told them that I am probably the wrong person to ask, because JoeBlogs isn’t ABOUT anything. To me, a good newsletter probably should be about something — about the NBA or about television or about Japanese baseball or food or international politics. That’s not to say these and other top-notch newsletters don’t stray into other places — of course they do, that’s part of the fun — but they are still ABOUT something.
JoeBlogs is really not about something. It’s about whatever happens to be on my mind. Yes, it’s true, much of the time, that thing is baseball — I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m in love with baseball — but even my baseball posts are all over the map. I just write about whatever happens to be on my mind — maybe it’s a rabbit hole story from 1923, maybe it’s a list of, I don’t know, the best team you can put together with players smaller than 5-foot-9, or maybe it’s about my unhealthy obsession with the hated Yankees (guess what today’s is about).
But very often, I don’t write about baseball. If you look at my most-read posts, many of them are not about baseball, they’re about football or Springsteen or Taylor Swift or family or golf or tennis or chess or magic or a movie I just saw or a ranking of television characters or infomercials or whatever else is going on in my life.
I don’t know that this is an especially good business model. I’ve had people tell me that this newsletter would do better if it were more organized, more focused, and maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, I try to be as honest as I can here. What you see is what’s happening with me.
Right now, there are two things utterly governing my life. One, this week, we are moving both of our daughters — Elizabeth and Katie — into their college dorms. We are about to be empty nesters, and I suspect that I’ll write about those emotions as they happen.
The other is WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL coming out on Sept. 5. I put everything I have into this book, and I truly love it, and I honestly cannot wait until it’s in the world. In fact, over the weekend, it started to get out there a bit on social media as some cool people in and around the game began getting copies in the mail, and they’re posting on social media, and I’m giddy about it.
This book isn’t even out, but it already has spurred a whole new kind of attention— my book tour is up to 22 cities with perhaps more to follow, and there are going to be some incredibly fun things happening around the book, and I just have to share. I know it can be a bit much; hopefully, you have already skipped ahead if you’re tired of it.
A handful more very quick book updates and then, on to more JoeBlogs stuff.
We are aware that the book event at Chevalier’s in Los Angeles on Sept. 12 with the incomparable Molly Knight is sold out — I’m told it sold out only a few minutes after Molly and I double-posted about it on Friday. We are trying to work on some things, so stay tuned.
Thank you to everybody who has emailed asking for a spot at the Substack Book Party with Farhan Zaidi on Sept. 14. Logistics are still being worked out; I promise that we will try to accommodate as many people as we can.
There are just a few days left to get TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT OFF the book price at Barnes & Noble. All you have to do is enter the code CATCH25.
OK, HERE’S THE SKIP-AHEAD LINE!
Let me tell you something I really admire about Yankees fans: In my experience, for the most part, they appreciate the haters. This isn’t necessarily true of other fans, even fans of ultra-successful teams. I have never felt like Patriots fans, for instance, embrace the hate the way Yankees fans do. This probably has something to do with the psyche of many New England sports fans, who cannot rid themselves of the gnawing feeling that, sooner or later, it will all fall apart.
Plus, the Patriots were only dominant for 19 seasons while the Yankees have been obliterating teams and winning World Series with the game’s biggest stars for a century.
The only other team in American sports I can think of that has anything even close to the Yankees’ pedigree is