Happy Friday! If you're new to Now I Know, you'll notice that today's format differs from the rest of the week. On Fridays, I pause to write the "Weekender," my  "week in review" type of thing, or to share something else I think you may find interesting. Thanks for reading! — Dan

There is no Joy in Mudville

Hi!

I’m a huge baseball fan, as longtime readers know. I rarely talk about baseball but today, I hope you’ll permit me to make an exception. It’s been a strange few days.

I’m a Mets fan but this isn’t about the Mets (although this weekend has potential to be rough for us!!). It’s about the Oakland A’s and the Chicago White Sox. Let’s start with the latter.

Currently, the White Sox have 39 wins and 120 losses on the season, with three games to play. The modern record for most losses in a season is 120, originally set by the Mets in their inaugural season of 1962. I wasn’t around for that season — I’m not quite that old! — so I can’t imagine what that was like. But now, I don’t have to. The White Sox have matched that dubious record and are likely to “beat” it before their season concludes this weekend.

I figured that there’d be nothing but disdain among White Sox fans, but I think I’m wrong. The New York Times has a fantastic article that I was going to include in today’s long reads anyway; the reporter and photographer went to a White Sox game (a rare win) and met with the fans who decided to come to the park, even though their team was terrible beyond words. If you read the piece, you’ll see that they found joy — cynically, perhaps, but does that matter? — even in losing. It’s a fantastic look not only into baseball fandom, but also into the human condition; the article reminds us that “Casey at the Bat” is a lie; even in a historically bad season, there is always joy in Mudville.

And then, yesterday happened. The Oakland A’s won their final home game of the season. With only 69 wins to 90 losses, they’re also not a very good team this year but not historically bad like the White Sox. And yet, yesterday’s win felt like a funeral, one that almost all baseball fans — not just A’s fans — attended, even from afar, as mourners. The reason? The A’s are leaving Oakland for, ultimately, Las Vegas. Yesterday’s game was the final Major League Baseball game that will ever be played in Oakland.

The A’s moved from Kansas City to Oakland before the 1968 season. (Kansas City was the beneficiary of an expansion team, the Royals, in 1969.) They’ve called Oakland home every year since, and they’ve seen major success there — four World Series wins, most recently in 1989, and 17 other playoff appearances, most recently in 2020. And their fame goes beyond the on-field wins and losses. The 2003 book “Moneyball” put the A’s on the map outside of the world of baseball fans; the Michael Lewis classic (now a movie starring Brad Pitt) tells the story about how a team without access to as much revenue as other teams could still compete by innovating, and made the A’s a model not just for other baseball teams, but for other businesses. The lesson is that, even if you’re the smaller fish in the pond, you can still compete with the big fish.

Unfortunately, A’s ownership took away another lesson: the game is unfair to teams with less revenue and maybe you just shouldn’t try. Here’s how an A’s fan described it on reddit about a year ago: “[For the modern A’s ownership], Moneyball is basically just a cover for being a cheapskate, underpaying players, and valuing profit over having an actually functional baseball team. The owners treat the team as a revenue stream and couldn't give a [you-know-what] if they win or lose. Moneyball has just become a propaganda tool to make fans accept their grift while they use the team as their own personal cash cow. It doesn't have to be this way.”

I don’t agree with the “blame Moneyball” part of the thesis but the emotional takeaway is real and right — there are some team owners that simply don’t care if the product on the team is competitive. And ultimately, that means that the team’s leadership doesn’t care about the fans. The A’s ownership proved that point by leaving the Oakland faithful behind for the perceived riches of Vegas, and if you watched any part of the end of the A’s game yesterday, you could feel the sorrow among the 40,000 fans gathered and the hundreds of thousands watching on TV. There was no joy in Oakland yesterday, and the mighty Casey and the other players had nothing to do with that.

Yesterday was a sad day for baseball fans. And the worst part is that the redditor quoted above is right: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” It’s okay to lose a record-setting number of games. It’s not okay to abandon your faithful. If you’re lucky enough to have fans, treat them right.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The Problem With Dropping Cats From Airplanes: I mean, beyond the obvious problem.

Tuesday: A Neat Way to Find the Faker at Your Dinner Table: A story about ketchup.

Wednesday: 8-6-7-5-3-0-My-y-ine: Everyone wants Jenny’s number. (Except for Brown University students.)

Thursday: Why Late 16th Century British Workers Had to Wear Hats: Blame the bad economics of mercantilism.

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And thanks! — Dan

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy.” (The Colorado Sun, 20 minutes, September 2024). The subhead: “The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims.”

2) “Why Is Custom Framing So Expensive? One Man Investigates.” (New York Times, 7 minutes, August 2024). I’ve always wondered this.

3) “How Does a Baseball Team Lose 120 Games? Every Way You Can Think Of.” (New York Times, 12 minutes, September 2024). Yes, I talk about this piece above. It’s really great, and you should definitely read it.

Have a great weekend!

Dan