Hello readers! Like a lot of people, I am a sucker for end-of-the-year Best Of lists. Of course, it’s pretty self-indulgent to select a bunch of your own writing for a Best Of list, but I like to think of this as a Reader Appreciation email. If you’ve taken the time to read Undrafted or listen to the Lefty Specialists or check out the YouTube channel at all this year, I sincerely thank you and hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Anyway, if you’re new, here’s a rundown of some subjects we’ve covered this past year:
January
Legalized gambling has changed sports in ways few people anticipated, and I think many fans are pretty unhappy with the status quo. It’s worth reflecting on how we got here, and what lessons we ought to learn from this…
February
Using the Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift romance to explore where political conspiracy theories come from.
March
This was a rather impulsive post, but in some ways I feel like I’ve been meaning to write it for 10 years…
April
I’ve been covering this trend in baseball for a couple years now — the way pitching keeps getting better while pitchers become more and more expendable and it only seems to be getting worse…
May
The labor history of free agency, player empowerment, and the drama around NBA “superteams.”
June
Why haven’t more male athletes come out of the closet?
July
There’s this tendency for pro-labor fans to celebrate free agents who sign the biggest deals. But, actually, the point of labor empowerment is so workers DON’T have to focus solely on maximizing their earning power.
August
Skepticism of drug testing regimes has sort of become my thing here, so this was a take on some tennis doping controversies.
September
How owners destroyed the lovable underdog.
October
Mirin Fader was kind enough to join me on the podcast for an interview about her new book on Hakeem Olajuwon, and her prior book on Giannis.
November
Not a ton of emails went out in November, but I did conclude my video series on the legacy of Moneyball in the aftermath of the A’s leaving Oakland.
December
Ugh..