YouTube, Sasaki and Two Halls of Fame

I have mentioned that there are some really fun and big changes coming to JoeBlogs. I’ll be able to tell you a lot more over the next couple weeks, but for now, let me fill you in on a bunch of personal updates.

Yes, I Started a YouTube Channel!

That’s right, I started a YouTube channel! Because, you know, I think I was the last person in the world to not have one.

What will be on it? No idea. Well, that’s not true, I do have some idea. I’m going to try and put on some fun videos there that go along with what we do here. Tell some stories. Do some interviews. Chat with some friends. We’ll see how it goes. And it would be great if you would subscribe, because one thing that I actually do know will be on there …

PosCast Videos!

Yeah, that’s right, Mike and I are actually recording video for the PosCast now. It’s amazing how far the PosCast has come. First, microphones, now, video! Modern technology! I cannot tell you that seeing us do the PosCast will in any way enhance the experience, but enhanced experiences have never been the goal or purpose or even possible outcome of the PosCast, have they?

PosCast Team Gleason Update

We’re off and running on our 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 (JAMAOSSCOPMEBAACACBAFOOWFHBABA 2025)—thank you to Brilliant Reader and listener Jules for providing last year’s poster—and, as you might know, this year’s ALS charity are the amazing folks over at TeamGleason.

The response has already been amazing, and we’re only getting started. They do incredible work over at TeamGleason—a foundation founded by former NFL player Steve Gleason, who continues to courageously battle this awful disease—and Mike and I would love if you would do what you can to help out.

And if you do donate, you will be automatically entered into the JAMAOSSCOPMEBAACACBAFOOWFHBABA 2025 raffle, where a bunch of people will win valuable and totally random PosCast prizes. Sports cards! Special essays! Autographed books! Whatever Jason Kander is donating this year if he remembers to send it! Super-cool stuff we just find around the house, like maybe I’ll send you one of the two copies of The Good Stuff, a collection of columns that the Kansas City Star turned into a book like 25 years ago. Super-rare! I’ve seen it on eBay for $99! I’ve also seen it on eBay for $6!

I mean, you never know what will be in the prize box. Let’s just say that Mike is currently (and I literally mean he’s probably doing this right now) opening boxes of 1985 Topps Football cards, and I know he’s already pulled one Richard Dent rookie card, and he’ll probably pull at least one more, and they’re, like, super-valuable. I just pulled an autographed and numbered Ozzie Smith card AND an autographed and numbered Steve Garvey card. I imagine one is worth quite a bit and one is worth roughly the cardboard value, but, hey, you can win one of those! Donate to TeamGleason, and you’re entered!

Let me add that several of you have kindly offered to donate cool prizes to our TeamGleason charity drive. We so appreciate the offers, but this could get a bit disorderly. So if you think you have a cool prize that would blow everyone away, Gmail us at PosCastRaffle with the prize you want to donate, and we’ll get back to you whether it fits in to the package. Thanks for your kindness!

Stuff Going On

First, if you’re going to be in or around St. Louis this weekend, well, do I have a treat for you! The St. Louis Baseball Writers are honoring our brother Bob Kendrick, legendary President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, with the Branch Rickey Award! Incredible. And I’ll be there to help present it to him and to have an on-stage conversation with Bob—we’ll definitely tell a lot of Buck stories. It will be a magical night. Tickets here.

Second, this is not as specific, but if you’re in Montreal on Friday and Saturday, well, I’m not doing anything like an event, but I will be at the Canadiens-Maple Leafs game. I guess I’m just saying that if you see somebody walking around Montreal looking more than a little bit lost but hopelessly happy to be there, that’s probably me!

Third, I will be on MLB Network to talk about the Top 10 Shortstops in Baseball RIGHT NOW. I’m not exactly sure WHEN I’m on MLB Network doing that—I think it will be on at 8 p.m. next Wednesday, Jan. 22—but just know that my list and Brian Kenny’s list were not exactly the same.

My Name Is Alexander Hamilton…

For some reason, my phone kicked this old photo to me today… this was the Tweet that Lin-Manuel Miranda sent me after I wrote about taking our oldest daughter, Elizabeth, to see “Hamilton.” The date is May 30, 2016.

Who Will Roki Sasaki Sign With??????

The suspense is killing me! We’ve been waiting for weeks now—story after story, rumor after rumor, twists and turns galore—to find out that Japanese pitching sensation Roki Sasaki most definitely will sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers like everybody knew from the start. I don’t know how much more of this excitement I can take.

Vive Monfils, Part II

Gael Monfils had himself a day at the Australian Open on Monday against 21-year-old serve monster Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard. GMP is 6-foot-8 and has already set some serving records—he hit the fastest second serve ever recorded at 146 mph. There was an absurd 17-year age gap when Monfils played GMP, and it was a five-set match to remember.

It wasn’t a match to remember for the quality—it wasn’t the highest-end stuff. GMP’s serve is incredible, and he hits the ball so hard, but he also leaves pretty much EVERYTHING short. That is to say that just about all of his shots bounce right around the service line or even shorter than that, You know how in baseball, hitters will crush straight and easy-to-pick-up fastballs no matter how fast they’re thrown? Yeah, you can hit your shots a jillion miles per hour, but if you leave them short like that, Monfils will never, ever, ever miss.

Put it this way—Monfils double faulted 14 or 16 or 18 times*—including twice on match point. I mean, that’s just an absurd number of double faults. And yet, he did not face a single break point. Not one. That’s just bananas. My tennis pal Howard Bryant wonders if that’s the first time in tennis history somebody double-faulted that many times and never faced a break point. I think it has to be.

*I saw all three of these numbers when I tried to look up stats for the match. Can I just complain about this for a minute? Tennis stats STINK! I mean, our guy Jeff Sackmann does absolutely incredible work over at TennisAbstract, but the ATP and WTA and the various entities that cover tennis, yikes, I can’t find anything even basic like forced or unforced errors. It’s ridiculous. Fix this, Tennis Universe!

It just came down to Monfils Mokeskiing his way to victory. You might remember my invented verb “Mokeski” in honor of Paul Mokeski, an awkward-looking 7-footer who played in the NBA, mostly as a backup, for 12 years. Years after he retired, I saw Paul Mokeski play in a Kansas alumni game and he just DOMINATED all these younger players because he simply understood things about basketball that they didn’t. All those years of experience, all those back-to-the-basket battles with and Dave Corzine and Robert Parish and Bill Laimbeer and Jeff Ruland and Moses Malone and Steve Spinaovich had taught him things you just can’t learn in school.

GPM has a bright future in tennis—as he himself said after the match, “I’m still young, I can still learn”—but Monfils knows those things. And Monfils won in five pounding sets. Perricard actually won more points in the match. But that’s not how they keep score in tennis. Monfils already knew that.

Thoughts on Football and Baseball Hall of Fame Voting

The 2025 Baseball Hall of Fame Class will be announced this coming Tuesday, Jan. 21—on Monday and Tuesday, I will be doing my final two parts on breaking down the 2025 ballot.

For today, I have a thought about football and baseball.

ESPN recently ran this story with the headline, “HOF voters confront tough question: Should a Chiefs great who committed murder-suicide get in?”

The story is about Jim Tyrer, one of the greatest offensive linemen in pro football history and, yes, a man who one early morning in 1980—six years after he retired—shot his wife to death and then killed himself. Tyrer, the football player, was unquestionably a Hall of Fame-caliber player. He was a six-time first-team All-Pro. Of the 54 eligible players in NFL history with at least six first-team All-Pro appearances, only two are not in the Hall of Fame.

One is former Raiders punter Shane Lechler. Nobody knows what to do with punters and the Hall of Fame.

The other is Jim Tyrer.

Mark Fainaru-Wada’s story at ESPN is very interesting—it gets into some of the hard questions about the role football and likely CTE played in Tyrer’s breakdown and he talks to some of the family members who long ago forgave Tyrer. (“We knew that the guy who did what he did to our mom that night wasn’t our dad,” Tyrer’s son Brad said.) He also offers this tidbit about the Hall of Fame voting:

It’s utterly jarring how differently people in football and baseball think about the Hall of Fame. Of course, there is no secret meeting of Baseball Hall of Fame writers*—everybody just votes from home without any discussion. Even so, could you imagine baseball writers wanting to talk about Barry Bonds’ PED use or Pete Rose’s gambling or the accusations against Omar Vizquel and having a Hall of Fame member CUT THEM OFF? It’s kind of mind-boggling; especially because (as we have seen again and again) Baseball Hall of Fame members are, for the most part, the last people in the world who want Bonds or Rose or Vizquel in the Hall of Fame.

*There is a semi-secret meeting of 16 players, executives and writers to discuss veterans committee Hall of Fame candidates—but even the Baseball Veterans Committee releases some of the vote totals. 

I mean, none of this is exactly “new.” We’ve talked many times about how the Baseball Hall of Fame includes a character clause in its voting bylaws and takes that very seriously, while the Pro Football Hall of Fame very specifically and purposefully keeps everything on the field. The idea that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling, Pete Rose, Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez would not be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame is utterly and completely ludicrous.

I’ve heard from many baseball fans who wish the Baseball Hall of Fame was more like football’s.

I’ve never once heard a single football fan wish that the Pro Football Hall of Fame was more like baseball’s.

And, yet, this must be said: Nobody cares about the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I mean, we “care” in a very general way, but the passion surrounding the Pro Football Hall is nothing like the passion surrounding Cooperstown. When Mike Schur was opening up those 1985 Topps football cards on the PosCast, I had to stop him a bunch of different times to look up whether a player was or was not in the Hall of Fame.

• Clay Matthews is not.

• Andre Tippett is in.

• Stanley Morgan and Too Tall Jones are not.

• Dan Hampton and Art Monk are in (it took forever for Monk to get in).

• Randy Cross is not, but Jimbo Covert is, I think.

• Wes Chandler is not (how??) but Cliff Branch is in, I think.

• Roger Craig is not. This still blows my mind.

• Ottis Anderson is not. Fred Smerlas is not. Mark Gastineau is not. Joe Theismann is not. Joe Jacoby is not. Raymond Clayborn is not. Everson Walls is not. And so on.

Maybe you knew all of those. I didn’t. I missed at least half of them,* and I think I keep up pretty closely with football, particularly when it comes to football greatness. I’m not saying that I’m advocating for any of the non-Hall of Famers (though Wes Chandler and Roger Craig seem like terrible omissions). I’m saying I don’t have any idea who’s in or who’s out.

*Even more embarrassingly, Mike opened up an Al Baker card, and both of us said we didn’t remember him. But OF COURSE I remember Al Baker, he was awesome. The problem was, in the heat of the moment, I didn’t put together that Al Baker is actually Bubba Baker. Hell, Bubba Baker played his last two years for the Browns. Bubba Baker had 131 sacks in his career. Bubba Baker was Defensive Rookie of the Year in 1978, which was obvious, but he also should have been named Defensive PLAYER of the Year. Bubba Baker has a strong argument for the Hall of Fame. He’s not in, though.

In baseball, you know.

I don’t know if Jim Tyrer will get elected. I sort of doubt it, but, hey, if the family wants it, I can see it happening. In baseball, for better and worse, well, nobody would even bring it up.