The Scherzer Will Continue Until ...

Hi everybody. So we will get to the sports in a minute … let me first quickly answer some questions about the New JoeBlogs.

The survey

So, as many of you noticed, we got off to a bit of a rough start. The site crashed pretty much right away, and there were a few other hiccups. I want to thank Tyler, Jacob, Preeya, Olivia and everybody for aggressively attacking the issue and getting things working quickly. Everything should be going now.

Unfortunately, the early blip did mean that a lot of you who tried to do the quick JoeBlogs survey met error messages and spinning dials. I’m sorry for that. I’d love for any of you who have not filled out the survey to take a few seconds — it’s just five questions about some of your sports preferences (favorite MLB team, favorite sport, etc), and it will help me give you some fun and personal bonus content.

RSS feed

Several of you asked about getting the JoeBlogs RSS Feed. It’s active now and here’s the link.

Go to your account

I have included a button at the bottom of the email that should allow you to go to your account. From there, you can log out, check your payment information, etc.

Comments and Likes

Paid subscribers should be able to like and comment on any post. The commenting tool is somewhat different than we used before — you can’t edit a comment, for example — but I will say that by the time spring training games begin I will add a more immersive way for our little community to have fun discussions.

Thank you so much for being a JoeBlogs reader. it means the world to me. If you have any issues, you can email [email protected].

Mike pulled WHAT CARD?

As most of you know, Mike and I are in the middle of our — deep breath — Joe and Mike’s Annual Off-Season Sports Card Opening Podcast Marathon Extravaganza Benefiting an ALS Charity as Chosen by a Friend of Ours Whose Family Has Been Affected by ALS 2025. This is the third year we’ve been doing this crazy thing. Over that time we’ve raised about $250,000 for ALS charities. It’s so incredible.

The charity this year is Team Gleason, an amazing organization started by former NFL player Steve Gleason. You might remember Steve as the guy who blocked the Rebirth Punt that galvanized the Superdome crowd and all of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

If you don't remember "Rebirth" — or would like to remember it again — it's pretty prominent in this little book called WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL.*

So far this year, we have raised more than $33,000 for Team Gleason, which is fantastic. You can enter our raffle (and, even more, do some good) by donating here:

About the raffle — we’re giving away giant prize boxes with all sorts of goodies, including a personal essay by me, something I’m going to make Mike do (he doesn’t know yet), signed books. a foursome at Pinehurst No. 1 (!), a Strat-o-Matic game and, mostly, some of the cards that we are opening up. We've opened up some pretty valuable cards over the last three years ... and we've opened up some pretty valuable stuff this year. But this PosCast was the crescendo. I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but let’s just say that Mike pulled a big fish.*

Catching up on the baseball news!

Let’s go around the horn!

Blue Jays sign Max Scherzer: I sometimes think about how l would have wanted to end my legendary baseball career — you know, if I was a legendary baseball player. My blink is the obvious choice: I'd want to go out on top, right? I’d want to go out like Mike Mussina (who won 20 in his last season), or David Ortiz (who led the league in slugging and OPS his last season) or Ted Williams (who had a 1.096 OPS in his last season and, pretty famously, homered in his last at-bat). That seems right to me.

But the more I think about it, the less sure I am about all that.

George Brett retired in 1993, and it was a touching end — he kissed home plate before his final game, and everybody cheered, and people still tear up thinking about it. But George always says that, even though he knew he was finished, he still wishes he'd come back to spring training in 1994. Why? He thinks it would have been a fitting end for this career if he'd come back to spring training one more time on a league minimum contract and tried to hustle and claw his way onto the team through sheer heart.

That specific Brett scenario is not realistic — no matter how many times he would have told people to treat him like any other player, they would not have. He’s not any other player. He’s George Brett.

But I get that impulse. I think the best ending for any career depends on the career itself. For Nolan Ryan, yes, the perfect ending seems to be the one he got — he died on his sword and blew out his arm on the last pitch of his career. For Rickey Henderson, it's hard to imagine a better ending than him taking jobs with whatever team would hire him because he just didn’t want his baseball career to end.

And for Max Scherzer, it seems to me the best ending will be him pitching until hitters prove to him conclusively that he can no longer get them out. He'll be doing that with Toronto now, his fifth team in four years. It's hard to say what he actually has left. What is not hard to say is that Mad Max is one of the most wonderfully intense competitors of his generation, and Cooperstown can wait. He still believes — he KNOWS — that he can dominate batters even as he approaches 41, and dammit, he should keep on pitching until those sons of guns prove him wrong.

Rays sign Ha-Seong Kim: The only surprising thing to me about the Rays signing Kim is that he wasn’t on the Rays in the first place. Has there ever been a more perfect match? Kim plays superior defense, he runs the bases well, he pops a few home runs, he gives you all of this undervalued value. That’s the whole Rays thing, right?

People are saying that Kim will miss the first four to six weeks of the season because of the torn labrum he suffered last year — I don’t think anybody really knows though. Shoulder injuries are unpredictable and there’s no telling how long they really take to heal and no telling how well he will throw after the shoulder does heal.

But, there’s no doubt he is the perfect Tampa Bay Ray. And it’s a wonderful counter to the Rays signing of the most un-Tampa-Bay-Ray guy out there, Eloy Jiménez, who I think is going to have a monster year!*

Tigers sign Gleyber Torres: This isn't that recent a signing but I don't think we've talked about it. The Yankees soured hard on Torres, and I get it. His second-base defense is pretty close to unplayable. He has not come close to the power numbers he put up in the juiced ball year of 2019. But I have this weird feeling that the fresh start in Detroit could get him going again, and I could see the Yankees regretting his absence.

Braves sign Jurickson Profar. Um, yay? Boo? I don't know. Profar is coming off a fantastic year — the guy got MVP votes for crying out loud — but it doesn't really match up with the rest of his career, and he's 32, and he's not a good outfielder, but he does find a way to get on base, and he can probably play some infield still, and he was once baseball's top prospect, and he sure looked good throughout the year, but that’s just one year, but maybe he’s figured it out, but maybe he hasn’t, but …

JoeBlogs Baseball Rumors!

We don’t normally do rumors here on JoeBlogs but this seems as good a time as any to start.

Pete Alonso either will or will not go back to the Mets. The hot rumor flying around as I write this is that Alonso is going back to the Mets. It makes sense. Owner Steve Cohen seemed frustrated by the Alonso negotiations but in the end, is he REALLY going to let Polar Bear go when he’s going all in like he is? On the other hand, Steve Cohen might believe he’s already spent enough money and look elsewhere.

A bunch of teams either are or are not interested in Alex Bregman: Sources tell me that some team will sign Alex Bregman. The one team that makes the least sense to me, honestly, is the Astros. I mean, they’d kind of have to tear up their whole team to make it happen — move Isaac Paredes to second, move Jose Altuve to left, it just feels like a big shuffle for a team that wasn’t sold on signing Bregman in the first place.

The Cubs are an interesting team being included in the rumors. The Blue Jays have apparently made their offer. The Red Sox may or may not be interested. Baseball offseason stories are the best, aren’t they?

A bunch of teams want to trade for Dylan Cease and the Padres might trade him. I’m seeing the Cubs, and Mets as the latest to enter the Cease race. Makes sense. Of course, the Padres also might not trade him. That would also make sense. Cease is pretty darned good and the Padres need pretty darned good pitchers.

The Cardinals may or may not trade Nolan Arenado. Count on this one, I have it from an inside source who definitely knows.