I’m planting this quote up top as a teaser because I mean it when I say my baseball ramblings aren’t about baseball at all.
Paying attention is the gateway drug to giving a shit.
I went to my first game of 2026 last week, a rare Monday afternoon matchup between the Seattle Mariners and the Houston Astros, with the Mariners completing a sweep of their division rivals. It was the kind of run they needed. The M’s came within five outs of their first World Series appearance last season, and were the consensus pick to take the AL pennant this year. Naturally, they’re off to a sluggish start and are below .500.
As for the New York Mets, the squad I will always root for despite my doctor’s advice, they were also tipped as contenders despite a disappointing 2025. I saw several predictions of the Mariners/Mets World Series I have long awaited which would, of course, augur the end of civilization.
For once, I didn’t share the blind spring optimism. I couldn’t fathom why the Mets were so highly regarded considering the front office had blown up the team’s core in the offseason along with remaking the entire coaching staff. They went into 2026 with a slew of new, older players not fielding their usual positions and were somehow going to be better? True, since entering the Steve Cohen era in 2020, when the club was purchased by the wealthiest owner in professional sports, the Mets haven’t won a championship or even the NL East. But they notched over 100 wins in 2022, made it to the LCS in 2024, and for all their 2025 woes, which according to reports included a combative locker room, they weren’t eliminated from contention until the final day of the season. Now I was supposed to cheer for a roster apparently assembled by McKinsey consultants, full of players who probably should have been wearing nametags in addition to their NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital patches. I felt no connection to a team that had no identity. The joke by Jerry Seinfeld, another Mets fan of long standing, about rooting for laundry never felt more apt.
What hath April wrought for the new and allegedly improved Metropolitans? A double-digit losing streak and the league’s worst record. It hasn’t fazed me, because for the first time in years I haven’t been paying attention, skipping multiple games. I don’t know these guys. They’re just wearing the uniform.
Even after a thrilling 2025 World Series, I needed something to rekindle my love of baseball. Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It (2025) fit the bill perfectly. Leavy is the game’s foremost biographer, with acclaimed books on Ruth, Mantle, and Koufax to her credit. Here, she roams the sport from the minors to the pros, checking in with players, managers, executives, and experts of all stripes in hope of answering a single question: What the hell happened to this sport? A number of culprits are named, among them owners who won’t spend, owners who spend too much (that’d be you, Steve Cohen), an overreliance on analytics, an ill-advised embrace of gambling. But ultimately what’s tarnishing the diamond is the same thing that’s diminishing so much of modern life.
Forget the Oriole way or Cardinals baseball. There’s only one way. The uniformity in baseball exists for the same reason pop songs sound alike and SUVs look the same: an algorithm has determined what works best rhythmically and aerodynamically.
A whole damn industry of data scientists, and baseball operations guys, and layers of management had conspired to remake baseball into a world where the improbable has been rendered moot or not worth the trouble.
Or, as one of the tech advisors Leavy consults says: “We’re losing the forest because we’re only tending a few trees—the ones we can measure.”
Baseball has adjusted the rules to stay relevant, but the lifers she talks to don’t care for the result. Ex-manager Buck Showalter, who led the Mets to those 101 wins in 2022, says of the game, “It’s just boring faster,” while fellow veteran Ron Washington adds, “I don’t think I’d leave my house to go see it.” Leavy follows Wash’s comment with, “You forget how much horseshit there is in the game until you meet an honest man.”
Leavy’s as honest as anyone, her voice singular. What other sportswriter would observe “It was one thing to use data to look for bargains like my mother pawing through the return rack at Loehmann’s,” or call the distinctive scissor swing of Cleveland Guardians rookie Chase DeLauter an example of “nontraditional beauty like, say, Lauren Bacall.” There’s an outer borough familiarity to Leavy’s firecracker prose that made reading this book feel like slipping out to the back stoop to listen to your favorite aunt, puffing Tareytons while she delivers the unvarnished truth.
Pitching is an unnatural act, one of the few missing from the Bible.
Today the strike zone is a rectangle like a wall mirror hanging in a ladies’ dressing room at Bloomingdale’s. It’s hard for an ump to see both ends, especially with catchers having abandoned the traditional hamstring-aching squat in favor of a lowered tuchus and an extended chorus girl leg aimed at stealing low strikes.
Nobody would invent baseball today. It’s far too elegant for our brutalist age. They’d invent pickleball, sine qua non of the multitasking generation, an intoxicating opportunity to maximize steps taken and calories spent with camaraderie and road rage.
Leavy knows there’s no easy solution, but every remedy she suggests puts the fan experience at the center, narrowing the gap between those in the stands and the multimillionaires on the field. I don’t know that salvation lies in MLB emulating the barnstorming antics of the Savannah Bananas, but her argument made me check when the Bananas would next be in my neck of the woods. (My own first edict as commissioner: at least one afternoon game every single day. Baseball is the sport of the summer, people are on vacation, the league should embrace it.) Amp up the emotion and make it matter to us. Or, as Leavy writes in a mantra I’d put on a T-shirt:
Paying attention is the gateway drug to giving a shit.
I’d imagine Leavy enjoyed March’s World Baseball Classic. The tournament was a surprising ratings success, likely because of the joy and individuality on display. Team Italy, which made an unexpectedly deep run, downing espresso shots in the dugout following home runs, Dominican players dancing throughout the game, Team Puerto Rico exhorting the crowds. The exception, of course, was Team USA, whose nods to national pride included jingoistic military cosplay and a dimwitted refusal to shake hands with teammates on other squads. There was no fun in their play, a situation exacerbated by restrictions being placed on their availability which meant you were never going to see these stonefaces at their best anyway. Plus you had Team USA skipper Mark DeRosa, an ex-player turned TV host with no coaching or managerial experience, blithely stating that they’d punched their ticket to the semifinals when they had done no such thing. That night they lost to Italy and needed help to secure the #2 seed in their group. Still, they made it to the championship, facing off against Venezuela.
During the last WBC, I’d bought a Team Venezuela cap because it was colorful and had a huge V on the front. On the day of the last game, I put it on, hoping to troll somebody, anybody. I was genuinely rooting for Team USA to lose. I always pull for the underdog, I was fed up with the Americans’ grim style, and let’s face it, for the US to be beaten by Venezuela right now at what is still billed as our national pastime is too good a story.
I was waiting at a corner with a bag of groceries, thinking nobody had noticed my petty sartorial provocation, when a car horn blasted. The driver slowed down, pointed at me, and shouted “Venezuela! Venezuela!” as he continued leaning on the horn. After recovering my wits, I started yelling “Venezuela!” back, to the consternation of everyone standing around me. He drove off pumping his fist in the air.
Venezuela won 3-2, claiming their first WBC crown.
What I’m Watching
Miroirs No. 3 (2026 US). I’ve never regretted a second spent with a Christian Petzold movie and that includes his latest, which received the briefest of theatrical runs. The German filmmaker again riffs on Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as he did in his best-known work, Phoenix (2014). Petzold’s current muse Paula Beer plays a young woman who seems lost even before she survives a car accident that kills her boyfriend. She requests to stay in the home of the woman who found her (Barbara Auer) rather than the hospital, and the woman, a complete stranger, surprisingly agrees. The question then becomes who is getting what out of this impromptu relationship. A quiet film in every sense, as are all of Petzold’s movies, but the impact lingered. He calls Barbara (2012), Phoenix, and Transit (2018) his “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy, which makes him the bard of the moment.
The Christophers (2026). Steven Soderbergh had a brilliant 2025 with Presence and Black Bag, and he continues to throw heat. What starts as an offbeat caper—an artist (Michaela Coel) takes a job as assistant to an old lion (Ian McKellen) so she can secretly finish a series of his paintings for his duplicitous children—deepens into something thornier and richer in Ed Solomon’s screenplay. I’d watch 100 minutes of Michaela Coel reaction shots.
Our Tin Anniversary
April 19 marked the 10th anniversary of Design for Dying. The debut Lillian Frost and Edith Head mystery was the first novel Rosemarie and I wrote under our pen name Renee Patrick. Renee commemorated the occasion in her usual upbeat fashion; Rosemarie and I regard Renee as a real person, warm but formidable in the Martha Stewart mold, and we try not to cross her.
I drafted a companion post offering a decade’s worth of hard-won wisdom, but then remembered when I joined Substack I swore a blood oath never to write about writing. That’s what props this place up; take away all the tips, tricks, and analysis about publishing and the entire enterprise would implode. Still, I put in the time, so here are a few bullet points.
Your wildest promotional dreams can come true—but if the timing is wrong, it won’t make a goddamned bit of difference.
Stubbornness can pay off, but not in the ways you expect.
The money will never make sense.
That last lesson stems from Renee’s revelation that the books were optioned for TV by some big names and I worked on the project. We made more from a TV show that didn’t happen than all five books combined. That’s show business.
"They went into 2026 with a slew of new, older players not fielding their usual positions and were somehow going to be better?"
"...combative locker room..."
Oooh, takes me back to the late 80s-early 90s Mets. At least I could watch all the games on channel 9, with Tim McCarver and Ralph Kiner.
VK sentence of the week: “Now I was supposed to cheer for a roster apparently assembled by McKinsey consultants, full of players who probably should have been wearing nametags in addition to their NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital patches.”