The Substack split

Giving me the flexibility a single blog could never have.

As I began to contemplate my future post-monoblogue writing endeavors, there was a part of me that really wanted to keep a couple of the pages I started there going. I’ve been doing Shorebird of the Week (or Month) since 2006, so while I’m going to retire the new selections after the 2022 season, the tracker and Hall of Fame deserve to live on. (It’s a testament to how long these pages have gone on that many of its honorees are no longer playing - some of them are now the coaches.)

Because I built up my blogging reputation in the political world, though, I sort of kept the baseball side of monoblogue focused on the Shorebirds and never really expanded it to my love of the history of the game. That’s going to change once the Shorebirds season ends and I get through doing this year’s Shorebird of the Year on September 22.

October 1 sounds like a good day for The Knothole to debut new content. I mean, it’s already there on my Substack main page but if you click on it all you see is the brief description of the page, which reads, “This is my baseball Substack page, with an emphasis on the beauty and history of the game. It's also going to be the new home of my Shorebird of the Week Tracker and Hall of Fame.” Somewhere around the end of the season I will update the Tracker and migrate my Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame to be the first two posts on the site, assuring they’ll be in a place I can keep them updated.

So why did I call it The Knothole? Back in the day, many teams (I seem to remember my hometown Mud Hens included) had a Knothole Club for kids, with the reference being that of a youngster looking through a knothole in the outfield fence to watch the games for free. It is a metaphor for how I view the game of baseball: although I played as a kid up into high school, now my perspective is that of someone from the outside who watches from afar. I go to perhaps 25 minor league games a year, but it’s been six years since I saw a big league game in person. I’m happy paying 10 bucks a game for my half-season ticket to the Shorebirds and watching players chase a dream like I did, although at a much higher level than I ever attained. Thus, I have a love affair with the game stretching back a half-century, ever since I started collecting baseball cards and talked my mom and dad into letting me play at the league down at the nearby park. It was the one and only time I rooted for the Yankees, because that’s who I played for. A couple years later, I played for the Indians, and again…

(Among the teams I played with, my favorite was the first team I played for when we moved out to the rural area of Swanton, Ohio: the Lytton Fox Hunters. I remember those sharp red jerseys like I was still suiting up in them. Lytton was - and still is - a little speck on the map, but they had a ball team. Somewhere in a closet I have a team ball signed by my coach and dedicated to “The Bird” - that’s what he called me because I was a huge fan of Mark Fidrych in that 1976 season. Go figure, right?)

As far as baseball goes, as it is with politics I am very much a traditionalist. If Rob Manfred stepped aside and they gave me complete control of the game, you would no longer see pitch clocks, designated hitters, runners starting extra innings on second base, or interleague play except for exhibition games, the All-Star Game and World Series. You would see two new teams in order to balance the leagues back out, with four divisions of four teams apiece based on geography. Maybe I would set up the spring training schedule to put those city rivalries at the end so that the last four exhibition games would be home-and-home between the Yankees and Mets, Cubs and White Sox, Giants and A’s, and Angels and Dodgers. I might be convinced to add Reds-Indians (and yes, they would be the Indians again), Cardinals-Royals, Marlins-Rays, and Rangers-Astros (because Houston would go back to the National League where they belong) to those exhibition closers as well. Since I would likely give Montreal its team back through expansion, I would also have les Expos play the Blue Jays in a similar Canadian series.

To continue this trip into what’s become my version of fantasy baseball, I would restore the rules of baseball’s golden era of 1969-72, a time after the mound was lowered to 10” but while the designated hitter was still someone’s bad idea. It was a time when pitchers took pride in finishing what they started and the benches were long enough to have several potential pinch-hitters, and the maturation of four expansion teams was a story in and of itself, with the Kansas City Royals and Montreal Expos already becoming respectable by the 1972 season. San Diego and Seattle/Milwaukee were lagging a little behind in that aspect, but they were on their way to success a decade later.

If you liked where I was in those last couple paragraphs, that’s going to be a taste of the focus and style of the historical aspect of The Knothole. And while I won’t be doing Shorebird of the Month anymore, it will give me the space to keep my Tracker and Hall of Fame up as these players go through their careers.

I know I have a few folks who follow me for the Shorebirds side of monoblogue, so I hope they’re the ones who start me out in making The Knothole a success.