Before July of this year, I bet I hadn't written with a wooden pencil in 10 years.
Maybe it was even longer than that. Any writing I did with any kind of pencil would have been notes. It might have been a quick mark-up of a sheet of music in college. I added occasional underlines in books and notes in the margins. But I bet those were all with a mechanical pencil anyway.
I think the last time I used a wooden pencil was keeping score at my first and only game at Wrigley Field. That's relevant, in more ways than one, to recent experiences that I found meaningful.
Today
- The joy of scoring a baseball game
- More about my fellow old guys, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander
- The Mariners, the Brewers, and competing to be the team of the moment
Slow down, keep score
Over at Joe Blogs, Joe Posnanski offered up a fun invitation for this past weekend of baseball games. Grab a scorecard, score a game, then send it to him and tell him how fun it was.
I took Joe up on the idea. It was great. Here's the scorecard I sent in.
I never had any connection to the Toronto Blue Jays until a couple years ago. I still don't, really, other than the fact that my son Declan picked them out as a favorite team. He liked their logo.
With the ability to watch any team's games and a willingness to mix up my viewing schedule given the sad state of my Colorado Rockies, I have watched a lot of Blue Jays games the last couple years. Our house cheers for them now.
That's where I started when I was picking a game to score this weekend. Then I went to the pitching match-ups, and it was an easy decision. Max Scherzer was the scheduled starter for Toronto on Saturday.
Besides being the rare pro athlete who is both active in the year 2025 and older than me, Scherzer has always been one of my favorite pitchers to watch. He was auto-drafted onto my keeper league fantasy baseball team back when he was on the Detroit Tigers and I was unmarried, childless, and still in graduate school.
That puts us in 2010 or 2011. Max and I go back.
I mentioned that he was auto-drafted to make sure I don't get too much credit for the pick. I didn't know him. But I got to know his work and watched more of his starts. I think I kept him on that same team until 2023. A lot changed for both of us in that time.
You don't need me to tell you that Max Scherzer is great. He will cruise into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. But he offers a combination of traits as a starting pitcher that make him a joy to watch: his cerebral approach to working an at-bat, his intense competitiveness (he is "Mad Max," after all), his violent downward follow-through, and his ability to work deep into games.
I'm hopeful that Scherzer is showing us that he's got more good pitching left (more on that below). I'm hoping that means he will pitch well and in meaningful games beyond this season. But he might not. This might be the last hurrah for him, this push for the playoffs for the Toronto Blue Jays.
I'm happy that I captured one of those Max Scherzer starts on that scorecard.
As for the game itself, Scherzer stumbled in the first inning but bounced back and pitched five solid innings. The Toronto offense was lifeless and flat until the bottoms of the eighth and ninth innings. In those last two frames, they were able to finally string together some hits, especially a relentless rally of singles in the final inning. They scored three in the bottom of the ninth for a walk-off win.
I'll share what I also shared in my email to Joe Posnanski with the scorecard. Declan actually watched like 20 minutes of the game. He was there with me and occasionally asked how it was going. But he mostly played Legos.
It just so happens that the 20 minutes he watched were the last 20 minutes. He loved it.
Fellow old men update
I feel the need to call the aforementioned Scherzer (41) and Justin Verlander (42) "fellow" old men because I am the same age (turn 40 this year). It doesn't seem fair to just point the finger and call them old when I've also got my share of gray hair and deteriorating skills.
Anyhow, I wrote recently about a Sunday when Scherzer and Verlander both started and both reminded us all about the cruel passage of time. As I noted then, I would love to see both of these guys stirring the echos and pitching deep into September and October baseball games. It was just starting to feel unlikely.
As we sit here two weeks later, it feels like much more of a possibility.
Verlander is still 3-10, but wins and losses for starting pitchers are fickle. The more important measures show us that Verlander is dealing. He pitched six shutout innings against the St. Louis Cardinals on September 6th, and he followed that up with seven innings of one-run ball against the dang Los Angeles Dodgers.
Both of those games were must-haves for the Giants. With the Mets absolutely collapsing and opening up the race for the third wild card spot in the National League, there's an outside chance we might actually see Verlander start a playoff game in 2025 (although it doesn't help that the Giants have since lost four straight). That seemed downright impossible as recently as that newsletter I sent earlier this month.
As for Scherzer, his team was always on more solid ground for their playoff spot. As you know by now, Scherzer gritted out a tough start on Sunday. As long as he's healthy and trending the right direction, he will be part of the playoff picture for the Blue Jays.
I love it. Keep it up, guys, so I can root for a couple players who are still older than me and be free to mercilessly root against Aaron Rodgers.
Now witches are involved
I pegged the Seattle Mariners as the potential "team of the moment" for 2025 last month. I wrote that shortly after a victory that was prefaced by Ichiro throwing the first pitch to Randy Johnson. Tell me that doesn't feel like a team of destiny.
Well, now you've got Cal Raleigh breaking a record that was previously held by actual Mickey Mantle; he passed him for the most home runs by a switch hitter when he hit number 55 on Tuesday. He might actually hit 60 home runs as a switch hitting catcher.
It's incredible. It's also not necessarily the thing people are talking about with the Mariners.
The thing people might be talking about instead is an Etsy witch. If you haven't heard by now, a Twitter user who goes by @notBObR055 shared that he paid a witch on Etsy to fix the Mariners (that's not what he said, but this is a family newsletter).
What happened next? They have won 10 straight games, that's what. That winning streak is ongoing.
In the meantime, the Milwaukee Brewers continue to dominant and maintain a stranglehold on the best record in baseball. They were the first team to clinch a playoff spot. Their manager is pulling pancakes out of his pockets.
Brewers manager Pat Murphy pulled a pancake out of his pocket and started eating it during an interview last week The Brewers have won 7 straight games since And now they're selling "Murph’s Pocket Pancakes" at Sunday home games 😂🥞
— MLB (Bot) (@mlbbot.bsky.social) 2025-08-09T18:45:57.000Z
And they have Uecker magic on their side.
So, which of these teams feels more like the team of the moment? I voted for the Mariners previously, as we discussed, and I am weary to bet against a witch's spell. But Uecker magic is in a category by itself. And I bet Bob Uecker would have loved the idea of pocket pancakes.
Now watch as the Guardians get hot and win the World Series. I also presume that business for witches on Etsy has picked up. Good for them!
Odds and ends
- It's been quite the adventure for the New York Mets over the last month or so. David Roth wrote about watching them (Defector $).
- The Miami Dolphins are off to a rough start, and we aren't that far removed from when they looked like an innovative team on the rise. Mike Tanier wrote about the state of things for the Dolphins (Too Deep Zone).
- Shohei Ohtani did another incredible thing, throwing five no-hit innings in the same game that he hit his 50th home run. Then his bullpen cost the Dodgers the game. Never trust bullpens (ESPN).
Today's video send-off is Nick Kurtz, the young star for the Athletics, nuking a grand slam. A 493-foot home run is incredible and the longest in baseball this season, but this might have gone even farther than that.
Happy Wednesday.
