Newsletter 14: The Morning Habit of “Quick Pitch”

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from August 2016, about how baseball season means essentially waking up to “Quick Pitch” every day. I am ready for the season to get there.

My son William and I have a routine. Every time he gets up — alarm light comes on at 7:01 a.m. — after I’ve peeled his younger brother off the ceiling of whatever room he absconded off to in the middle of the night, William asks me one question:

“Did the Cardinals win last night?”

There is a selfish reason for this question; he’s four, of course there is. If the Cardinals won, he and his brother get to watch “Quick Pitch” on MLB Network while waiting for breakfast. (His father can’t stand to have the program on when the Cardinals have lost.) But he has also become obsessed with not just the Cardinals, but sports scores in general. He wants to know the score of the Cardinals game, the score of the Charleston RiverDogs game (we go to see the Yankees’ Single A affiliate during our annual summer trip to Charleston) and the score of whatever game might happen to still be going on when he’s put to bed, usually West Coast afternoon games. His reading material is not Star Wars, or Walter the Farting Dog. He just wants to read college football preview magazines…