Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

A trip home this weekend allowed me to surprise my old friends from high school. We chat every week virtually but this week, the call became an in-person affair. 

One of my friends talked about the value of surprises and the importance of “good surprises.” That these days, there are a lot of bad surprises out there and that it’s worth appreciating when the surprise brings something good.

I don’t really have the words to describe the pain of hearing NHL star Johnny Gaudreau, 31, and his brother Matthew, 29, died in an accident with an alleged drunk driver the day before their sister’s wedding. But I know the news has hit the sports world with a pall and a shock. That shock and horror is just about the worst surprise imaginable.

Even though I’m not even 30 yet, I’ve lost far too many friends. Each one caused by a bad surprise—substance abuse, a freak accident, ALS.

Fresh off a good surprise visit, I surprised even myself. Stopping for food in Philadelphia on the way back home to the DC area, I checked if the Phillies were playing. They were, and had a game starting just under 30 minutes from when I looked at the schedule.

Sure, a baseball game isn’t too surprising but it’s not something I thought much about at 6:30 on Sunday. By 7:30, I was in the stadium watching a nationally-televised game.

There are enough bad surprises in the world. I hope you can give (and receive) some good surprises.

All right, let’s get to it.

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s Formula One being… exciting?

Individual Formula One races are exciting. As skeptical as you might be of a bunch of cars taking the same handful of corners over and over again being fun, there’s plenty of thrill in watching drivers live on the edge as they work to get every last bit of power from their intricate machines.

When it comes to the drivers’ championship, however, it has generally been very, very boring. Since 2015, the world championship has only come down to the last race twice, and only once have those drivers been from different teams. 

F1 is often subject to one team or driver dominating. In 2023, there were 22 races. Red Bull’s team won 21 of them. Their lead driver Max Verstappen won 19 of them, cruising to his third straight world championship.

At first, this year looked like more of the same. Verstappen won 7 of the first 10 grands prix. But in the last six races, Red Bull’s wings have melted away. Mercedes, McLaren and this past weekend, Ferrari, have found the top step of the podium in the meantime.

Ferrari pulled out a particularly emotional win this weekend, with the perpetually unlucky Charles Leclerc turning things around in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza and sharing an emotional podium ceremony with his Ferrari team and their fans at their home race.

Side note, I’ve watched F1 for more than fifteen years. Many podiums and many national anthems. The Italian anthem is the best one.

Verstappen still leads the drivers’ championship by a wide margin. But his patience has run thin as he has complained that his car is now, in his words, a “monster.”

His lead over McLaren’s Lando Norris would require Norris to win and Verstappen to score 0 points twice in a row just to allow Norris to jump Verstappen in the standings in the following race. (Yes, you read that right. Verstappen could sit out the next two races and still hold a lead.)

But with eight races to go and three sprint races that offer a smaller point haul, there are still plenty of opportunities for a driver to catch Verstappen.

And the constructors’ championship, measured by adding up the points of all drivers racing for a given team, is much closer. McLaren could jump Red Bull as soon as the next race, which will be held in Azerbaijan on September 15. In fact, in a nightmare scenario for Red Bull, Ferrari could also pass them and drop them as low as third.

Especially at the constructors’ level, there’s plenty to be excited about. And if one of the drivers deeper down the standings gets hot in the next few races, Verstappen might have a lot to worry about in his rearview mirror.

My Reporting

I wasn’t able to get out to any events as a reporter in the past week but there was still some good reporting worth sharing. 

Readers of Edition 8A may recognize the guest in this segment I produced last week. Nicole Holliday, professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, earned a shoutout for her TikToks explaining the ins and outs of the linguistics of some of the top American politicians. 

We brought her on our show last Tuesday and went candidate by candidate, having her assess both the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, as well as the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance. 

She did a good job putting political opinions aside to break down how each candidate speaks and what it says to voters. 

As somebody who has listened to way too many political speeches throughout the years, she put an academic spin on some of my loose thoughts (e.g. “why does Donald Trump say yuge?” or “if Tim Walz is Mr. Minnesota, then why doesn’t he have a particularly strong Minnesota accent?”)

Between some late script edits, some quick actions by our control room to get graphics and video up, and some tightening up of questions by our anchor for the evening Carolyn Bruck, we were able to deliver a segment that I referred to as clinical—in the content we gave you the viewer, in its production—everything did exactly what we needed to do and everything fit into the time allotted.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

Weird Flex(en) but Ok: Regular readers know I am on White Sox watch. Through Monday, Chicago’s American League baseball team is 31-108, good for a winning percentage of .223.

The South Siders are chasing two chances at being crowned the most historically awful team of them all. The 1962 New York Mets currently hold the crown for most losses in a season with 120, while the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics hold the lowest winning percentage since the AL/NL system was established in 1901, at .235.

The White Sox have 23 games left. They would need to play nearly .500 baseball to avoid freeing the ’62 Mets from their misery. And they would need 8 more wins (more than ten percentage points higher than their winning percentage this season) to avoid freeing the 1916 A’s.

It’s still not clear whether the White Sox will take both stinky crowns for their own. But in the meantime, they’re setting some weird records.

Take their starting pitcher Chris Flexen. The 30-year-old right-hander has seen some weird things in his career. In spring of 2020, he was one of the only Americans in the entire world playing professional baseball, as he had bounced out of MLB to the Korea Baseball Organization, which was able to play thanks to their country taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously.

A good season in Korea allowed him to jumpstart his MLB career, but now he’s stuck on possibly the worst team in the history of Major League Baseball.

“Flexen Day” is basically a guaranteed loss. In Monday’s game, the White Sox lost their 20^th straight game in which Flexen started the game on the mound. He earned the win in their May 8 game at Tampa Bay but has earned 11 losses and 9 no-decisions since then while pitching to a 5.73 ERA in 21 games (1 relief appearance.)

"I don't think a lot of them have been all that great, a couple of quality starts in there;” Flexen said after Monday’s loss. “But overall, my performance has been very disappointing on my end."

The previous record of 19 straight losses in one pitcher’s starts was set by the 1909 Washington Nationals and their pitcher Bob Groom.

A lot of it is down to circumstance. When you’ve pitched the most innings to date of any pitcher on a team this bad, you’ll be taking plenty of L’s. Of all pitchers with at least 70 innings pitched this season, a threshold that eliminates most full-time relievers, there are 15 pitchers with a higher ERA this season than Flexen’s season average of 5.29.

The White Sox have lost 11 straight, including all 10 on their latest homestand. They play Tuesday and Wednesday on the road against the Baltimore Orioles and overall, their next eight games are against teams with a winning record. Flexen’s next start is projected for Sunday at Fenway Park against the Boston Red Sox.

Iga Świątek chases perfection: Winning a major tennis tournament without losing a single set in any match along the way is a special kind of domination. Since 2015, it has happened just four times in the women’s game, and just three times in the men’s game. 

Polish star and world number 1 Iga Świątek (pronounced SCHVYAAN-tek, exactly like it’s spelled) is looking to do that on the women’s side of this year’s US Open.

Świątek’s streak nearly snapped before it got rolling as she had to go to a tiebreaker to win her second set 7-6 in her first-round match last week against Kamilla Rakhimova of Russia.

Since then, nobody has come especially close and Świątek made easy work of 16^th -seeded Liudmilla Samsonova, also of Russia, on Monday, winning in straight sets 6-4, 6-1 to advance to the quarterfinal round.

Świątek has won a major without dropping a set before, doing so to win the 2020 French Open. The challenge gets steeper as the bracket thins out, however. American Jessica Pegula will be eager to try to break through to the semifinals at a major for the first time when she faces Świątek on Wednesday.

And if Świątek wins out, there’s a possibility she’ll meet 2-seed Aryna Sabalenka. The Belarusian tennis star was the last player to win a major without dropping a set, doing so earlier this year at the Australian Open.

There’s a hope that over on the men’s side, Americans Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe could become the first American in the men’s US Open final since Andy Roddick in 2006 (Roddick is also the last American to win the tournament, which he did in 2003.)

But if it’s a Świątek-Sabalenka women’s final, that should be appointment viewing.

Making Fun of FSU: Florida State has been waiting for this to be the year for a while now. Ranked 19th in the 2018 preseason poll, they fell out of the top 25 for four years, finally returning in 2022 and working their way up to 11th in the final rankings. 

But the Seminoles have a tendency to fall short in the most entertaining ways possible. Last season, they did everything they could to try to qualify for the College Football Playoff. They went 13-0 and won the ACC title but the committee left them out of last year’s 4-team affair.

Quarterback Jordan Travis broke his leg in a frivolous late-season matchup against FCS-tier North Alabama, ending his season and college career. By the committee’s assessment, it wasn’t the same FSU team. They weren’t worth including. 

Expectations were sky-high this year, with the Seminoles starting the season 10^th in the rankings and the Playoff expanding to 12 teams. In a “week zero” game in Ireland, they lost to Georgia Tech 24-21. And on Monday, they lost at home 28-13 to Boston College.

The program pinned its hopes on much-vaunted transfer DJ Uiagalelei thriving at quarterback.

Defenses have been thriving.

The 15-foot-tall imaginary receiver FSU must’ve signed without anyone seeing is also thriving.

Home fans at Doak Campbell Stadium were chanting “We Want Brock,” referring to Uiagalelei’s backup, redshirt freshman Brock Glenn.

FSU head coach Mike Norvell stuck with Uiagalelei. The 23-year-old fifth-year senior finished the game 21-42 with one touchdown and that one disastrous sidearm interception.

I can’t be too hard on the guy. He’s held a starting quarterback job in high-major college football for five years now. If he keeps playing like this, the dream of reaching the NFL may fade faster than he had hoped. Just a sad situation for a guy who has put in a ton of work.

On the bright side for ‘Noles fans, rival Florida got stomped in the Swamp, losing 41-17 at home to Miami. The Gators also made the unfortunate decision to seat potential recruits next to Miami’s tunnel, so as Hurricanes players ran off the field in joy, they shouted toward recruits, urging them to “come to ‘The U’” and “don’t go here.”

Florida and Florida State play in Tallahassee on November 30. By that point, the top state school program in Florida may be Florida International. At least they have Pitbull and Pitbull Stadium.

Dale.

Something Good I Ate

It’s been ten of these and I still haven’t used this section to acknowledge anything from my home state of New Jersey. A trip home confirmed that I need to change that.

Since I left, my family have become big Doordash users. One of their favorites is Taliercio’s Ultimate Gourmet in Middletown. Tucked deep into the back of a wide open strip mall that genuinely has nothing special in it otherwise. Nothing about Dollar Tree, Tiger Schulmann’s Karate (which I learned in writing this is apparently just a NY and Philly-area chain) or the longstanding House of Chong, which hasn’t updated its décor for decades, really screams “come visit this shopping center!”

Nevertheless, Taliercio’s quickly turns around an array of Italian favorites, including heroes with names that couldn’t be more Jersey Italian if they tried. Let’s do a quick breakdown.

We’ve got the heroes named for Yankee heroes—the Yogi Berra, the Donnie Baseball, the Mo.

The heroes with names that sound like Sopranos bit characters—the Mikey A, the Nicky D, the Duke, the Bobby Mick, the Big Mike, the Tony G.

And of course, the heroes named after real and fictional mobsters—the Luca Brasi, the Gambino, the Henry Hill, the Tony Montana, and my Saturday lunch, the Genovese.

The sandwich bearing the name of the oldest and largest major Italian-American crime family once spearheaded by famed gangster “Lucky” Luciano came with a fried chicken cutlet, smoked mozzarella, broccoli rabe, sundried tomatoes and balsamic glaze on a seeded sub roll, served cold.

Taking a bite and realizing it was cold was confusing at first but it actually serves as a hidden advantage. The smoked mozzarella holds and doesn’t melt. Texturally, the sandwich allows you to taste every ingredient instead of one big mushy lump that would form if it were heated.

I grew up in the area and it’s been twenty years since we moved down there. I have driven past it too many times to count. Now, finally, I’ve been able to enjoy what it has to offer.

Now I get why my family orders from there so much. My mom in particular loves their service, saying they consistently honor every request, substitution and the like.

Like many a good Jersey Italian sub shop, they know what they’re doing.

And if you thought the sandwiches had fun names, just wait ‘til you get to the paninis!