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The Yankees Are Now Hitting With ‘Torpedo Bats’ and I’m Supposed to Pretend This Is Still Baseball

Duke Holloway
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The Yankees Are Now Hitting With ‘Torpedo Bats’ and I’m Supposed to Pretend This Is Still Baseball

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:40 Saturday morning, before I’d had coffee, before I’d let the dog out, to inform me that the New York Yankees had hit nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers using bats that, in his words, ‘look like somebody fed a Louisville Slugger through a pencil sharpener and then changed their mind halfway through.’ I told him I’d call him back. I needed to see this for myself.

What I saw, on the highlight loop my grandson cued up on the iPad while I held my reading glasses six inches from the screen, was a baseball bat that was not a baseball bat. The fat part was in the wrong place. The barrel bulged out around where a human being would actually make contact and then tapered toward the end like a bowling pin somebody had taken a belt sander to. They are calling it a torpedo bat. It was designed, I am informed, by an MIT-trained physicist who used to work in the Yankees’ analytics department, which is a sentence that should not exist in a column about the sport of Babe Ruth and Stan Musial but here we are.

Coach DiMaggio, who coached me at Bridgeport East in 1962 and would walk into the dugout every March with a single ash bat and announce ‘the bat is the bat, gentlemen,’ has been dead for nineteen years. I am grateful for this. I do not think his heart could have withstood the phrase ‘optimized mass distribution.’ I do not think mine can either, and I’m only halfway through my second cup.

The defenders of this thing, and there are plenty of them, mostly under the age of thirty-five and mostly employed by something called a ‘content vertical,’ will tell you the bat is legal. They will tell you it’s been quietly used since last season. They will point to the rulebook, which apparently specifies a maximum diameter and length but does not, in its 1880s wisdom, anticipate that a man with a doctorate would one day be paid six figures to redistribute the wood. Fine. It’s legal. Cocaine was legal too at one point. That didn’t make it baseball.

Petey Corrigan hit .312 over three seasons at Bridgeport State College with a Louisville Slugger he’d cracked in legion ball and re-glued with wood epoxy and a roll of athletic tape his mother bought at the CVS. Petey could not have told you the moment of inertia of a baseball bat if you’d held his shoelaces for ransom. Petey could hit a curveball into the gap in left-center on a Tuesday afternoon in April with the wind coming off the river. I am not saying Petey was better than Anthony Volpe. I am saying Petey was playing baseball, and I am no longer sure what Anthony Volpe is playing.

This is, I should mention, the same league that in the last four years has installed a pitch clock, a ghost runner on second base in extra innings, a limit on how many times a pitcher can throw to first, and a pilot program for an automated strike zone that they are calling, with a straight face, the ‘ABS challenge system.’ Every spring they invent a new way to make the sport feel slightly more like Mario Kart, and every spring some thirty-one-year-old in a quarter-zip writes a column about how the changes are good for ‘pace of action’ and ‘fan engagement metrics.’ I would like to engage that fellow in a parking lot.

Here is the part I hate admitting, and Ray is going to clip this paragraph and send it back to me. The kid who hit three of those home runs, Volpe, the shortstop — he can play. He’s got hands. He’s got a swing. He’d have hit Bob Gibson, on his good days, in some county, in some year. The torpedo bat didn’t make him good. The torpedo bat just made the ball travel four extra feet, which in Yankee Stadium, with that short porch in right, is the difference between a long out and a SportsCenter loop. The kid is not the problem. The Pringles can is the problem.

The league office has not slept properly since 2014. They are convinced that if they don’t keep tinkering, the children will all leave and watch a man play Fortnite instead, which they have apparently decided is a serious threat and not just a thing children do for forty minutes between dinner and homework. So we get torpedo bats. Next year we will get something worse. I have made my peace with this in the way a man makes peace with the fact that his knees are going to hurt every time it rains until he dies.

Ray’s coming over at four to watch the Mets and the Astros. He says he’s bringing a regular bat to hold during the broadcast, just to remind himself what one looks like. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

Clayborn County Insurance Adjuster Spent 11 Hours on Bracket Spreadsheet, Eliminated Saturday by a School He’d Been Calling ‘St. John’s Methodist’ Under the Impression It Was a Regional Hospital

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Insurance Adjuster Spent 11 Hours on Bracket Spreadsheet, Eliminated Saturday by a School He’d Been Calling ‘St. John’s Methodist’ Under the Impression It Was a Regional Hospital

CLAYBORN, IA — Doug Wenstrom, 52, a senior adjuster at Clayborn County Mutual who spent the better part of eleven hours last Sunday building what he described as “a real instrument” of bracket prediction, was mathematically eliminated from the office pool Saturday afternoon by a team he had been referring to all week as “St. John’s Methodist,” under the firm impression it was a regional hospital somewhere outside Indianapolis.

Wenstrom’s spreadsheet, printed double-sided and presented to colleagues in a three-ring binder labeled MARCH ’25 — DO NOT MOVE, weighted fourteen separate variables, including average free-throw percentage in domed venues, coach hairline, mascot “intimidation index,” and a column simply titled SPIRITUAL FEEL, which he declined to explain. He had picked Auburn to win it all on the strength of what he called “a hunch supported by data.”

“Doug walked over to my desk Monday and used the phrase ‘efficient frontier,'” said Marlene Vetch, who handles homeowner claims and who picked her bracket Wednesday morning during a phone call with her mother. Vetch is currently in second place. “I asked him if he wanted coffee and he said he was already ‘caffeinated for a reason.'”

The pool, which carries a $20 buy-in and a hand-lettered trophy that has lived on top of the photocopier since 2017, is now led by Sue Albrecht in accounts receivable, who selected her teams based on a system she described, without embarrassment, as “whichever town sounded like somewhere I’d want to eat lunch.” Mrs. Peterson, who is not employed at Clayborn County Mutual but submitted a bracket anyway because her grandson works in IT, finished her picks in roughly four minutes by selecting every team whose primary color matched a curtain in her kitchen, and is currently tied for fourth.

Wenstrom’s elimination occurred at approximately 4:18 p.m. Saturday, when the school he had penciled into his Final Four — a mid-major he repeatedly assured colleagues had “a really clean rotation” — lost by nineteen to an opponent Wenstrom believed, until Friday, was a Lutheran seminary. Informed of his error by a coworker showing him the team’s Wikipedia page on a phone, Wenstrom reportedly nodded once and returned to his desk, where he was later observed eating a granola bar with the wrapper still partially on.

“I had it modeled,” Wenstrom said Saturday evening at the Hen House Diner, where he was eating alone at the counter. “I had it modeled three different ways. I had a Monte Carlo on it.” Asked what a Monte Carlo was, he said he wasn’t entirely sure but had read about it on a Reddit thread devoted to fantasy hockey.

Hen House waitress Janelle Ortiz, refilling his coffee, observed that Mr. Wenstrom had been talking about the spreadsheet “since the second week of February” and that several regulars had begun timing their visits to avoid the booth where he kept the binder open. “He showed me the SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday,” Ortiz said. “I do not get paid enough to look at a SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday.”

County Recorder Bill Hauer, asked for comment on the broader phenomenon of Clayborn County office pools, said it was “a great American tradition that proves, year after year, that the people who care the most know the least,” then immediately asked the reporter not to print that, then said it was fine to print but to attribute it to “a county official.” His own bracket was eliminated Thursday.

Wenstrom, for his part, has already begun a preliminary spreadsheet for the 2026 tournament. He told colleagues Sunday morning that this year’s loss had given him “a lot of really useful data,” and that he intends to add a fifteenth variable, the nature of which he is still working out.

I Turned On the Women’s Sweet 16 Out of Spite Last Night and Watched the Best Basketball I’ve Seen All March

Duke Holloway
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I Turned On the Women’s Sweet 16 Out of Spite Last Night and Watched the Best Basketball I’ve Seen All March

I will tell you exactly how this happened, because I want it on the record that I did not plan it. Men’s game went to commercial — some app I have never downloaded was selling me a parlay on a sport I was already watching — and I hit the wrong button on the clicker because Denise had moved the clicker, and what came up was the women’s Sweet 16 in Birmingham, and before I could correct the situation a guard threw a backdoor bounce pass that her teammate caught in stride and laid in off the glass, and I just sat there.

I am sixty-seven years old. I have not seen a clean backdoor cut on national television since George H.W. Bush was running for reelection.

What I watched, over the next three hours, was a basketball game. I want to be clear about that, because I think the word has lost some meaning. There were five passes before a shot. There were screens that the screener actually held still for. There was a help-side rotation. At one point a player set a flare screen, and I had to pause the television and explain to myself that I had just seen a flare screen, in 2025, on a Friday night, on ESPN, in the year of our Lord.

Coach DiMaggio used to tell us, every practice, that basketball is a passing game played by people who would rather shoot. He’d line us up on the baseline and make us complete seven passes before a layup, and if you took a dribble in between, you ran. He died in ’04 and missed all of this, and I think about that sometimes — what he’d make of a sport where a kid can dribble forty-one times and call it offense.

Because that is what the men’s tournament has been, friends. I have watched every round. I have watched ball-screen, dribble dribble dribble, step-back three, miss, run back. I have watched grown men in shooting sleeves stare at the rim from twenty-six feet like they were trying to remember its name. The other night a kid took a contested heave with eighteen seconds on the shot clock and the announcer said “that’s just his shot,” and I thought, no, son, that is the absence of a shot.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at halftime. Ray coaches eighth-grade girls now in a town outside Erie because his wife made him retire and he lasted nine days. He said, “You watching this?” I said I was watching it. He said, “They’re running stuff.” I said I had noticed they were running stuff. He said, “My eighth graders run stuff. Nobody runs stuff anymore in the men’s game. They just hand it to the best guy and stand around like they’re waiting for the bus.” Then he hung up because his wife was making him take out the recycling.

I want to say something here that is going to upset some of the men I know. I am not converting. I am not buying a jersey. I am not learning new names against my will. But there is a kid I coach against at the Y on Saturdays — Petey Corrigan’s grandson, plays for one of those travel programs that has its own logo — and the kid only knows two moves, and they’re both him. He puts his head down, he goes left, he flips it up. That’s it. He’s twelve. Watching the women’s tournament I had the cold realization that Petey’s grandson plays exactly like the players I’ve been watching in March, and the players I’ve been watching in March make eight figures, and somewhere between Petey’s grandson and the Final Four nobody bothered to teach any of them to pass to the open man.

Coach DiMaggio would’ve loved the South Carolina team. He would’ve hated the broadcast — too many graphics, too much yelling about “moments” — but he would’ve watched the basketball and he would’ve nodded once, which from him was a parade.

I’m watching the men’s Elite Eight tonight. I’m not a saint. But if it goes to commercial, and Denise has moved the clicker again, I’m not promising anything.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

The Sweet 16 Tips Off Tonight and My Grandson Asked Me What ‘SGP’ Meant Before He Asked Who Was Playing

Duke Holloway
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The Sweet 16 Tips Off Tonight and My Grandson Asked Me What ‘SGP’ Meant Before He Asked Who Was Playing

My grandson Ethan came over Wednesday after school, sat down on my couch, opened his phone, and asked me if I had a take on the SGP for the late Friday game. He is eleven years old. I asked him what SGP stood for. He looked at me the way I used to look at Coach DiMaggio when Coach DiMaggio asked me what a microwave was.

SGP, it turns out, means same-game parlay. It means you bet on six things to happen in one basketball game and if all six of them happen you win forty-three dollars and if five of them happen you win a coupon for a free hot dog at a convenience store that does not exist in our state. Ethan explained this to me with the patience of a man explaining a will to a senile uncle. I told him to go play outside. He told me it was raining. I told him that didn’t used to matter.

The Sweet 16 starts tonight. Eight basketball games over two evenings. There was a time in this country when that sentence was the whole pitch. You did not need to add anything to it. You said “Sweet 16 starts tonight” and a grown man canceled a dentist appointment. Now the sentence comes pre-loaded with seventeen ancillary products, and somewhere underneath all of them, if you dig, there is supposedly some basketball.

I watched four minutes of the pregame show on Wednesday for the play-in. I am not making this number up. In four minutes I heard the word “parlay” five times, the word “props” three times, the phrase “live look-in at our betting desk” twice, and the name of one actual basketball player exactly once, and only because he had pulled a hamstring and they wanted to update the spread. There was a guy in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen of odds. I have seen friendlier hostage videos.

Ray Kowalczyk called me about it. Ray watches every minute of the tournament because Ray is a sick man and we love him for it. Ray said the sideline reporter on the late game Sunday went up to a kid who had just hit a game-winning three with two seconds left and asked him, and I want you to read this slowly, “Did you know you also cashed the over?” The kid is nineteen. He had just made the biggest shot of his life. The first adult who spoke to him afterward congratulated him on a gambling outcome. Ray said the kid handled it well. Ray said this with the weariness of a man whose entire weekend has been a slow march into a Caesars Sportsbook commercial.

Now look. I am not above admitting that the basketball, when you can find it, is good. The basketball is mostly the same as it always was, which is twenty kids running very hard at each other for forty minutes because they want it more than the other twenty kids. I watched a kid from a school I’d never heard of go for thirty-one points the other night and bow his head during the timeout because his coach was yelling at him about a defensive rotation, and I thought, well, there it is, that’s the thing, that’s still the thing, they have not figured out how to monetize that one specific thing yet, give them a year.

My old neighbor Petey Corrigan came over last night to watch the late game with me. Petey is seventy-six and his eyes aren’t great anymore so he sits about four feet from the screen with a notepad and writes down each player’s name as they check in. He does this every game. He has done it since 1971. At one point CBS cut to a graphic showing the live odds on the next made free throw and Petey turned to me and said, “Duke, what does it mean that the free throw is minus one-eighty?” and I told him it meant we were finished, the country was finished, get your affairs in order. Petey wrote that down too. He thought I was being literal.

The games tip at seven. I will watch them. I will mute the pregame and the halftime and any segment with a man in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen. I will write down the names of the kids myself, in pen, on a legal pad, the way Coach DiMaggio taught me, because somebody has to. Denise is bringing a casserole. She says it’s from a podcast.

Utah Bans Pride Flags From Schools and Government Buildings, Dispatches Inspector to Seize Second-Grader’s Crayon Rainbow

Nash Grayson
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Utah Bans Pride Flags From Schools and Government Buildings, Dispatches Inspector to Seize Second-Grader’s Crayon Rainbow

SALT LAKE CITY, UT — Just hours after Utah became the first state in the nation to ban LGBTQ Pride flags from public schools and government buildings, state compliance officer Dell Brockman was reportedly already inside Maple Grove Elementary, gently prying a Crayola rendering of an arched, multicolored sky out of the laminated cubby of a second-grader who said she’d drawn it for her mom.

The new law, which Gov. Spencer Cox allowed to become law without signature in a gesture observers described as ‘the legislative equivalent of leaving a $20 on the dresser and slipping out the side door,’ bars the display of any unauthorized flag in classrooms or on government property, with violations triggering a $500 fine per day per flag.

‘This isn’t about anyone’s identity. This is about keeping politics out of public spaces,’ said state Rep. Trevor Lee, standing six feet from a wall on which the Utah state flag, the U.S. flag, the POW/MIA flag, a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banner, and a framed portrait of Ronald Reagan signing something were all currently visible. ‘Children should be able to walk into a school and see only neutral, apolitical imagery, like the Ten Commandments, which we are also working on.’

Under the bill’s broad definitions, sources confirmed, banned displays now include rainbow lanyards, rainbow stickers, rainbow erasers, the Pixar logo, a poster for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, any prism left near a sunny window, and one elementary school’s long-running ‘Reading Is Magic’ bulletin board, which a Davis County compliance memo flagged as ‘gay in effect, if not in stated intent.’

The Beehive State, which derives its nickname from a swarming insect colony organized around a single matriarch and famous for producing something sweet, will continue to permit the Confederate battle flag in classroom history displays, the Gadsden flag in faculty parking lots, and one Pleasant Grove high school’s homemade banner reading ‘GO COUGS BEAT THE GAYS,’ which administrators clarified refers to the rival mascot of Brighton High and is therefore protected speech.

‘My daughter asked me what was wrong with her picture, and I genuinely could not come up with a sentence,’ said Murray resident Anna Halverson, whose seven-year-old’s drawing was confiscated Wednesday and entered into evidence. ‘The inspector took it in a manila folder. He said it would be returned at the conclusion of the investigation. He would not tell me what the investigation was.’

Reached for comment, Cox emphasized that the legislation ‘isn’t really my preferred approach’ and that he had ‘serious concerns,’ before clarifying that those concerns had been registered by allowing the bill to become law in total silence from a windowless office in which, witnesses noted, every wall remained scrupulously, patriotically bare.

At press time, Brockman had moved on to his next stop, where he was carefully measuring the angle of light passing through a stained-glass window at the Salt Lake County Library to determine whether the resulting spectrum on the carpet constituted a display, an accident, or, as he muttered into his clipboard, ‘a pretty clear-cut case of God breaking the law.’

The Athletics Open Their Season Tomorrow at a Triple-A Park in Sacramento and the League Office Has Decided This Is Fine

Duke Holloway
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The Athletics Open Their Season Tomorrow at a Triple-A Park in Sacramento and the League Office Has Decided This Is Fine

Tomorrow afternoon a Major League Baseball team will take the field at a 14,000-seat ballpark in West Sacramento that until last September was hosting a Single-A affiliate and a between-innings race featuring a man dressed as a tomato. The team is called the Athletics. Not the Sacramento Athletics. Not the Oakland Athletics. Just Athletics, the way a man whose wife has left him introduces himself at a wedding.

I want to be clear about what’s happening, because I had to read it three times before I believed it. A franchise that has won nine World Series — nine — is going to play its 2025 home schedule in a ballpark whose left-field wall is sponsored by a regional credit union and whose press box, I am told by a friend who covers the Pacific Coast League, is reachable only by a metal staircase that gets hot enough in July to brand a notebook.

Coach DiMaggio used to say that the dignity of a thing was just the sum of the small choices nobody bothered to make. He was talking about the way our linemen wore their socks. But I thought of him this week when I read that the league had approved this arrangement on the grounds that the team is, quote, in transition. They are in transition the way a man falling off a roof is in transition.

The transition, of course, is to Las Vegas, where in 2028 the Athletics are supposed to move into a $1.75 billion stadium on the old Tropicana site that, as of last Tuesday, did not have a roof, walls, seats, plumbing, a confirmed financing package, or a groundbreaking that anyone outside the renderings has actually seen. Until then they are guests of the River Cats, which is a sentence that would have started a fistfight in 1974.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night. Ray is sixty-eight, lives outside Modesto, and has been an A’s fan since Reggie. He told me he drove out to Sutter Health Park last weekend just to look at it from the parking lot. He said the marquee out front said WELCOME ATHLETICS in those plastic letters they use at a Holiday Inn when the Rotary Club is meeting in the conference room. He said he sat in his truck for forty minutes. He said he didn’t go in.

The rest of the league, by the way, is rolling out the usual spring-cleaning indignities to keep us from focusing on the one in California. Pitch clock is now down to a number that exists only on stopwatches. Ghost runner remains in extras, which I will continue to call extra innings until they pry the second word out of my mouth. Some scoreboard somewhere will play a TikTok between innings of a team going for a no-hitter. The Yankees, after a hundred and twenty-two years, have decided that beards are now permissible, and we are supposed to treat this like the Berlin Wall came down.

Petey Corrigan, who you’ve heard me write about, still has his 1989 Series cap. The bill is the color of weak tea. He told me at the diner last week that he’s going to Sacramento on a Greyhound for the third weekend in April, by himself, to watch the team that doesn’t have a city play a game at a park that doesn’t have a major league team. I asked him why. He said because somebody ought to. I bought his coffee.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to soften, and I will, because this is still baseball and I still love it the way you love a brother who keeps making it worse. Tomorrow afternoon a kid making the league minimum is going to throw a 99-mile-an-hour fastball to a kid making the league minimum, and one of them is going to win that pitch and the other is going to lose it, and the credit union sign and the Tokyo series and the Las Vegas renderings and the man dressed as a tomato will all stop existing for about four seconds. That’s the trick of it. That’s why we keep showing up at the Holiday Inn.

Denise is making chili tomorrow for first pitch. She heard about a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder and something called “a glug” of coffee. I told her that sounded like a war crime. She told me to be quiet and find the channel.

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 With Specialized Agent Models, Including One Whose Entire Job Is Talking to the Other Agents

Lena Wexler
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Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 With Specialized Agent Models, Including One Whose Entire Job Is Talking to the Other Agents

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google on Tuesday rolled out Gemini 2.5, a flagship update introducing what the company is calling “specialized agent architecture,” a suite of purpose-built AI models that includes one agent dedicated to scheduling, one to research, one to coding, and at least one whose sole responsibility appears to be coordinating the other agents because they have apparently stopped speaking to each other.

In a launch keynote streamed from a glass-walled room with the acoustics of a high-end yogurt commercial, Google DeepMind executives demonstrated how Gemini 2.5’s agents can independently book a flight, draft a follow-up email, and rewrite the follow-up email after a second agent flagged it as “too curt for Q2.”

“What we’re really excited about is the orchestration layer,” said Anjali Pradhan, a Google product lead whose title fit on the badge only in eight-point type. “Previous models tried to do everything in one context window, which created friction. Now each agent has a defined role, and a separate agent ensures they collaborate, and a third agent monitors that collaboration for compliance, and a fourth summarizes the whole exchange into a paragraph the user can ignore.”

Early benchmarks confirm Gemini 2.5 is the most capable model Google has ever shipped, scoring above competitors on reasoning, coding, and the increasingly important benchmark of “convincingly pretending to have read the attachment.” The company said the planning agent alone can break a complex task into as many as 240 subtasks, 239 of which are scheduling a meeting to discuss the first one.

Asked about energy usage, Google noted that Gemini 2.5 is “meaningfully more efficient per token” than its predecessor, a metric that becomes less reassuring once one learns the model is now generating roughly seventy times more tokens per query, most of them produced by agents asking each other to clarify earlier agents. A company sustainability report described the net environmental impact as “directionally encouraging,” a phrase the report’s authors used four times.

The launch arrives during a stretch in which every major tech company has pivoted to “agents” as the next inevitable computing paradigm, on the theory that consumers, having mastered typing things into a box, are now ready for a box that types things into other boxes on their behalf. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all expected to ship comparable agent suites within weeks, after which the agents will presumably begin negotiating with each other across platforms, generating a global volume of synthetic email that will require its own agent to triage.

Reaction among developers was cautiously enthusiastic. “It’s genuinely impressive,” said Marcus Thiele, a senior engineer at a mid-sized fintech who spent Tuesday afternoon watching a Gemini coding agent debug a problem caused by a Gemini deployment agent. “Although at some point I did notice I was just sitting there, and the agents were having a whole work life without me, and I started to wonder what the company was paying me for. Then an agent emailed to schedule a one-on-one about it.”

Google declined to specify the launch’s water and electricity footprint, citing competitive sensitivity, but a spokesperson confirmed the company remains “on track” to meet its 2030 net-zero targets, which were set in 2021, before anyone at Google had heard the word “agentic.” The same spokesperson clarified that the targets had not been revised, only “recontextualized.”

At press time, the orchestration agent had successfully delegated the writing of this article’s final sentence to four other agents, none of whom were responding.

Two Schools Fired Their Coaches Before the Charter Plane Landed and Both Press Releases Used the Word ‘Family’

Duke Holloway
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Two Schools Fired Their Coaches Before the Charter Plane Landed and Both Press Releases Used the Word ‘Family’

It’s 9:18 on Monday morning and I have already received three Google alerts about head coaches who have been graciously thanked for their service, wished the very best in their next chapter, and asked very politely to be out of the office by Wednesday. One of the press releases used the word family. The other one used the word family twice. The third one used the phrase mutual decision, which is the kind of thing two people say when only one of them is doing the deciding and the other one is finding out about it on a charter flight somewhere over Indianapolis.

The team lost on Saturday afternoon. The plane landed Saturday night. The athletic director’s statement went up Sunday at 11:47 p.m. — late enough that the local paper couldn’t get to it, early enough that the morning shows could lead with it. The whole thing is choreographed now. I half expect them to release a teaser trailer.

Coach DiMaggio coached us for 31 years and the only time he ever left the program was when he had a heart attack in the parking lot after a JV scrimmage in 1986. They named the field after him. They didn’t name a search firm after him. There was no hashtag. There was a casserole tour at his widow’s house that lasted into June. That was the contract: you coached the boys, the boys grew up, you got buried in the cemetery on Route 9. Mutual decision my foot.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:40 this morning, which is roughly when Ray calls me about anything that has wounded him, and he was wounded. His alma mater fired the guy who took them to two NITs and a Sweet 16, and the press release thanked him for being, and I am quoting Ray quoting the release, “a builder of men and a steward of the brand.” Ray said the word brand into the phone like it was a piece of food he was trying to dislodge. Ray played one year of small-college baseball forty years ago and now somebody is the steward of his brand. He is, understandably, going through it.

The athletic director who fired this man hired him four years ago at a press conference where he used the word marriage. I am not making that up. He stood at a podium with a school-colored tie and said this is a marriage. Now he is at a different podium with a different school-colored tie talking about a new direction and a national search, and there is a guy behind him from a search firm called something like Pinnacle Pursuit Partners whose entire business model is being on retainer the Friday before the first weekend of the tournament. He had the buyout language drafted by Thursday. The coach was up 11 at the half. Didn’t matter. Pinnacle Pursuit was already pursuing.

The buyout, by the way, is $14.7 million. They are paying a man $14.7 million to not coach their basketball team. Last week the same school sent me — and I am on their alumni list because I once wrote a flattering column about a kid from there in 1991 — an email asking if I would consider a recurring monthly gift of $19 to support the marching band’s travel fund. The marching band has to fundraise. The basketball coach gets a yacht for losing in the second round. I’m not bitter. I’m just keeping score, which is, I have been told, the entire point of sports.

And the new search, oh boy, the new search. They have a list. They had the list before they fired the guy. The list is the same six guys it always is — a mid-major coach who is about to take the job, an NBA assistant whose agent leaked it, a retread who got fired from a bigger job two years ago and has since grown a beard, an offensive-minded coach, a defensive-minded coach, and a guy named Bruce. There is always a Bruce. The Bruce never gets the job but his name keeps the boosters warm for 72 hours, which is its own kind of service.

Petey Corrigan, who was the AD at the high school for 22 years and ran the snack stand on Friday nights because nobody else would, used to say that you don’t fire a coach the Monday after a loss because Monday is when you find out who he is. He meant it as wisdom. Nobody listens to Petey. Petey is dead. The new ADs go to a conference in Phoenix where someone teaches them how to write a press release that uses the word family without making anyone laugh, and they come home and they fire the coach by sundown.

Denise is bringing chili over for the Sweet 16. She says it’s from a podcast. I told her I don’t want to know whose podcast. She said good, because the guy got fired Friday.

Went to Murphy’s to Watch the Round of 32 and Realized I Was the Only Person in the Bar Watching the Round of 32

Duke Holloway
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Went to Murphy’s to Watch the Round of 32 and Realized I Was the Only Person in the Bar Watching the Round of 32

I walked into Murphy’s around two o’clock Saturday with the simple, almost embarrassingly old-fashioned goal of watching a basketball game. There were six televisions. There were probably forty men. There was, by my unofficial count, one set of eyeballs aimed at any of the screens, and they were mine.

Everybody else was looking at a phone. Hunched over it like they were defusing something. Every fifteen seconds somebody at the bar would jerk upright and shout a sentence that meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t downloaded an app in the last six months. “Come on, McNeese over by four and a half.” “I need the under in Ole Miss for the cash-out.” “Baby, baby, baby, second-half three-pointers, give me daylight.” Grown men. With kids. With knees that don’t work.

Ray Kowalczyk was at the corner table holding a phone in each hand like he was landing a 727. He had a six-leg parlay across four games and one of the legs was a Drake player whose name he was pronouncing three different ways depending on whether the kid had the ball. Ray hasn’t watched a full forty minutes of college basketball since 2003, but he could tell you that this young man needed exactly one more assist and a made free throw to send Ray’s seventeen dollars into one hundred and forty-two. He explained this to me twice. I had not asked.

Coach DiMaggio used to make us watch tape on Sunday mornings before church. He’d run the projector himself and stop it on a single frame and say, “Boys, look at his feet. The feet tell you everything.” I thought about Coach DiMaggio at Murphy’s on Saturday because somewhere on one of the six televisions a kid from a school I’d never heard of had set the most beautifully patient down-screen I’d seen in a month, and the only person in the building who noticed was a retired football coach drinking a club soda. The feet told me everything. There was nobody to tell.

The kid behind the bar — couldn’t have been twenty-three, sleeves of tattoos that looked like a children’s encyclopedia — leaned over and asked if I wanted to “get on something.” He said it the way a Jehovah’s Witness asks if you’ve considered the literature. I told him I was just here for the game. He looked at me with what I can only describe as polite anthropological interest, the way you’d look at a man who showed up to a wedding with a fax machine.

Here is the part that broke me. The televisions themselves are now in on it. Down at the bottom of the screen, while actual human beings ran an actual offense, there was a little ticker informing me of the live odds, the spread movement, the player props, and something called a “SGP boost.” During free throws they cut to a graphic of a cartoon lion holding a parlay slip. I am not making this up. A cartoon lion. CBS used to put up a graphic that said HOOSIERS 42, PURDUE 38 and that was the entire conversation. Now the screen looks like the dashboard of a fighter jet being flown by a man who owes money.

Around three forty-five something genuinely incredible happened in one of the games — a kid threw in a runner from about twenty-six feet at the buzzer to send it to overtime — and Murphy’s did not react. Not a flinch. Two seconds later the same room exploded into a noise I will hear in my dreams, and it was because somebody named Tre had just gotten his fourth rebound, which apparently completed the back end of a same-game parlay involving a guy in Spokane and Ray’s brother-in-law in Toledo. They hugged. Two of them hugged. Over a fourth rebound by a man none of them could pick out of a lineup.

I sat there with my club soda and I thought, all right, fine, this is what it is now, the game is the soundtrack, the betting slip is the show. But then for about ten seconds in the second half a point guard from a 14 seed picked a press apart with a behind-the-back pass off a curl, and somewhere underneath the cartoon lion and the parlay screams and the TVs yelling at me about a SGP boost, there was still a basketball game being played by young men who are very, very good at it. Coach DiMaggio would have stopped the projector. The feet told you everything.

Denise is bringing chili over tonight for the late games. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to watch on the small set in the den with the sound on the broadcast and my phone face-down in the kitchen drawer where it belongs.

My Buddy Ray Just Became a ‘Founding Member’ of His Alma Mater’s NIL Collective and the Welcome Packet Came With a Quarter-Zip

Duke Holloway
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My Buddy Ray Just Became a ‘Founding Member’ of His Alma Mater’s NIL Collective and the Welcome Packet Came With a Quarter-Zip

Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday morning, which is a thing Ray does only when he has news, a death in the family, or a new grievance about his cable bill. This was option four, which I didn’t know existed.

Ray is now, and I am quoting the laminated card he was mailed, a ‘Founding Member’ of something called the Hoosier Vault Collective. It costs him $79 a month. He gets a quarter-zip, a window decal, a quarterly newsletter, and what the brochure calls ‘a seat at the table.’ I asked what table. He said he didn’t know yet but he was hoping it was the one with the buffet at the spring banquet.

For those of you blessed enough not to have a Ray in your life, an NIL collective is what happens when a booster club hires a graphic designer. It is a 501(c)(something) that exists to pay college athletes for the use of their name, image, and likeness, which is a fancy way of saying it pays them to play, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a booster club. We’ve made a full lap around the parking lot and ended up exactly where we started, only now there’s a logo and a podcast.

I asked Ray which Indiana athletes the Hoosier Vault is currently supporting. He paused for the kind of beat a guy takes when he’s about to make something up. Then he said, ‘All of them.’ I asked him to name three. He named two basketball players, both of whom transferred in January. The Vault, apparently, is not a subscription service that updates the roster in real time.

Coach DiMaggio’s idea of NIL, back when I was twenty-two and being paid $4,800 a year to coach a Pennsylvania high school football team into the ground, was slipping a kid a Sunoco gas card if his mother was working two shifts. He called it ‘helping out.’ Nobody mailed him a quarter-zip for it. Nobody made him a Founding Member. The transaction was that the kid got to school on time and didn’t tell anybody, and Coach got to keep doing the only thing he was qualified to do, which was yell at teenagers in a polyester shirt.

What gets me about the Vault, and the Forge, and the Crimson Collective, and the Bluegrass Reserve, and whichever one your school is leaning on you to join — and they are all named, I have noticed, like premium bourbons or off-brand cryptocurrencies — is the merch. Ray sent me a picture of his quarter-zip. It has a stitched logo that looks like a shield being struck by lightning over a wheat sheaf. I have seen actual Indiana athletic department gear that was less designed than this. The collective is outproducing the school.

My grandson Eli, who is fourteen and plays travel baseball for an organization that has its own Instagram strategist, came over Sunday and informed me his program is ‘in talks’ to launch what he called a ‘youth NIL pilot.’ I asked him what that meant. He said some of the kids would get small stipends if they hit certain Instagram follower thresholds. He said this the way I used to say I wanted to be a fireman. Calmly. Like it was a job. He is in the eighth grade, and the algorithm is now part of his swing.

And meanwhile the Sweet Sixteen kicks off tonight, and every kid out there is a millionaire, or thinks he is, or is about to be told he isn’t and should hit the portal. Petey Corrigan, the toughest pulling guard I ever coached, who pulled lake ice out of his pickup with bare hands in February of ’78, would have looked at a Founding Member quarter-zip and asked who he had to fight to get out of wearing it. Petey is now sixty-six and runs a hardware store in Altoona. Nobody has ever offered him a seat at any table.

Ray says the Vault is having a ‘members-only watch party’ at a Hilton ballroom outside Indianapolis tonight. He’s driving down with his cousin. There will be a cash bar, a step-and-repeat, and what the email promised is ‘a special video message from a current student-athlete.’ Ray is very excited. I told him to bring me back a window decal.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

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