Welcome Back to “I’m Curious!”

There are so many things I got to work on in the past week that I feel are worth sharing with you, so let’s get right to it!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s actually just how quiet the sports scene is right now.

The sports world is just screaming for a main character at the moment.

Sports is usually at its best with one. Sports television usually milks one for all they’ve got as soon as they find one.

LeBron James, Tim Tebow, the Dallas Cowboys—whichever player or team draws eyeballs gets exponentially more coverage than anybody else. If the network has the rights to that league, good luck to anyone else.

Connor McDavid does things nobody has done since Wayne Gretzky? Yeah, the main-character-driven sports world wonders, what does that mean for LeBron’s legacy?

Shohei Ohtani hits and pitches? In that case why hasn’t Jerry Jones signed him yet? 

If this newsletter has one purpose, it might be to tell you that there’s so much more to sports, and even so many more main characters, than the ones anointed by television coverage.

New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge might have been quietly on pace to come close to his American League record of 62 home runs in a season but with 36 games left and Judge needing 19 home runs to break his own record, that’s looking unlikely.

The biggest NFL headlines are arguably about who isn’t playing in preseason games rather than who is. Even last year’s main character Travis Kelce hasn’t drawn as much attention with Taylor Swift on tour rather than at Chiefs games.

NBA and NHL free agencies have largely dried up and summer leagues like the WNBA and NWSL are slowly coming back from their summer breaks. Even European soccer leagues have little to offer as they are just starting their seasons.

Over in the WNBA, Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark did her best to get things moving. In her two games back from the break, she has averaged 26 points and 9.5 assists per game, enough to set the WNBA rookie record for most assists in a season. She has 12 games to go, by the way.

And she got a pretty ridiculous technical foul for briefly letting her emotions get the best of her.

For what it’s worth, that’s absolutely a technical foul by the letter of the law, but the rules are dumb.

But for as much attention as she’s gotten in the last year and a half, neither she nor anybody else is commanding the public’s collective attention at the moment. 

You know it’s dry when ESPN is resorting to filling up its airtime with hours of wall-to-wall coverage of the Little League World Series.

September cannot come fast enough.

My Reporting

I did a ton of reporting work this week!

Let’s start with the non-sports stories and get less serious as we go.

First, on Wednesday, America Tonight played host to an incredibly thoughtful discussion on a super-overlooked question: how do we make sure people in abusive relationships can vote and make their own choices at the ballot box?

It is a question that counselors working with people in abusive relationships actually get a lot but where they can remind people that, while your voter registration may be publicly accessible, who you vote for, isn’t.

Domestic violence trainer Melissa Scaia joined us to highlight the challenges people face in navigating politics with their abusive partners.

On Friday, I was able to help make something significantly lighter: a look into what’s known as “fall creep.” Starbucks is rolling out the pumpkin spice latte, their fall favorite, on Thursday. Other places, like Krispy Kreme and 7-Eleven, already have started rolling out their pumpkin spice-flavored products.

It’s something that can bring in hundreds of millions of dollars for national chains, and even for seasonal businesses like Spirit Halloween.

We brought in Lisa Miller, an award-winning advertising exec, and looked at how everything from the holiday calendar to public love for seasonal products give businesses incentives to roll all these products out nice and early. 

DC is being blessed with some top-tier footy this month, so I’ve taken advantage of some morning events to ramp up the soccer coverage.

The women’s team for English club Arsenal are in DC for two matches—an exhibition match with local team Washington Spirit this past Sunday, and a second exhibition vs. fellow English club Chelsea this coming Sunday.

That latter match will come in a doubleheader as the Spirit return to regular season play against Kansas City Current in a showdown between two of the top three teams in the NWSL standings.

I covered trainings for both the Spirit and Arsenal ahead of their friendly match on Sunday and got to learn a bit more about the two sides.

The Spirit’s new signing, English defender Esme Morgan, moved to the US last month after being lured away from English team Manchester City. She has the skills to play a few different positions but which one will she play? Her guess might be as good as yours!

One of the things that has made soccer so appealing to me is finally understanding the tactics that make the game work. For most of my life, I only looked at it as “everybody runs after the ball.”

Learning about the dizzying array of approaches to things like where players position themselves, how quickly to move the ball, when to push, has made me appreciate the game so much more. I was watching it like it was checkers when I should have watched it like it was chess.

Midfielder Andi Sullivan kinda hit on it in the back half of her answer above. If the whole team is moving as a unit and gets close to the goal, a defensive midfielder like Sullivan would have to make the choice of when to start moving the ball toward the net and who to pass to.

For reference, she would be the red number 6 in the diagram below. When the team is in the final third (closer to the goal than the blue line I drew), she would have to choose where and when the ball moves.

Two days later, I caught Arsenal’s training, where we had a pair of folks to talk with.

First was the team’s star striker Alessia Russo. Her 12 goals led the team last season and put her fourth in the English league.

And while she’s English, she played collegiately in the U.S. at the University of North Carolina.

Russo echoed the idea of there being a ton of different strategies, styles and tactics in our conversation. To her, it’s something she’s appreciated in playing teams from across the world in club competitions and at the World Cup.

Related to this, there’s a nice reporting and conversational lesson to be drawn here. Don’t be afraid to play dumb.

Soccer, just like any other sport, often shrouds its methods in a combination of mystery and insider mumbo-jumbo. It makes perfect sense to a diehard but to someone new to the game it can be confusing. Terms can have varying, sometimes even contradicting, meanings depending on context.

Arsenal’s manager Jonas Eidevall mentioned that they play a game that involves possession and holding onto the ball a lot. He said that a team like the Spirit, who love to wait for an error and then pounce on a counter-attack, poses a question to a team like Arsenal about how to respond.

I’ll be honest, I got it in principle but I had no earthly idea how you make it work. So I asked what does it look like to play the kind of game he wants to play.

He gave a pretty straightforward answer (basically “don’t mess up”) but by asking that, our conversation kind of broke through the fancy tactical terms and into a very simple and more understandable answer.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is be dumb!

And Arsenal ended up nabbing the win over the Spirit 2-1. Alessia Russo did end up scoring both of Arsenal’s goals, including this insane flick.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

More Like “Danny Pennies” – Quarterback is such a tough position for NFL teams to invest in. There are a handful of elite players and then the market falls off. 10-15 more guys are not elite but competent and then the bottom falls out entirely. When you have 32 teams and only about 20 viable quarterbacks, the price of a QB goes way, waaaaaaay up. Supply and demand.

That led the New York Giants to pay an eye-watering $160 million for four years of quarterback Daniel Jones before the 2023 season.

With every passing day, that deal is looking like an increasingly bad idea.

Jones had one neck injury before signing the contract, only to injure it again last season before tearing his ACL in his knee.

And while Jones had one good season, ranking 6^th in total quarterback rating in 2022, he’s topped 3,000 passing yards and 15 passing touchdowns just once in his five-year career, doing so as a rookie in 2019.

This year? Oof. In his first game action since his injury, “Danny Dimes” threw two interceptions in a preseason matchup against the Texans, including one returned for a touchdown.

The Giants do have an out, however, since they can escape the Jones contract at a fraction of the total cost after the end of this season.

At the same time, the alternative is a crapshoot.

The New York Jets have been hoping to draft a franchise quarterback for a while. In 2009, they traded up for USC’s Mark Sanchez. He lucked into two conference championship appearances thanks to an elite Jets defense but quickly flamed out. 

In 2018, same story as they trade up for another USC QB, Sam Darnold. He struggled to find his footing and left after three seasons, but not before ESPN gifted us this all-time graphic.

In 2021, it had to work. The Jets were so bad they didn’t need to trade up this time and picked Zach Wilson second overall out of BYU. Three years and lots of inconsistency later, the Jets showed Wilson the door this past offseason, trading him to the Denver Broncos and pinning all of their hopes on 40-year-old ayahuasca consumer and former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vice presidential short-lister Aaron Rodgers. (Did I mention being a Jets fan is pain?)

MLB Good and Bad: First, the good. MLB Players Weekend is back! In recent years, MLB has decided to address its years of refusing to promote its stars by allowing them to promote themselves. Early on, it involved allowing players to put nicknames of their choice on their jerseys. Realizing that was too fun, MLB got rid of that part of it.

Thankfully, MLB has allowed players to have some fun with their gear, which has led to some cool bats, including one designed to look like a pencil that several players used, and one inspired choice by Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to use a bat featuring a likeness of Backyard Baseball legend Pablo Sanchez. As you might expect, Witt’s used said bat to smash a 430-foot home run.

Not exactly the distance Pablo could get with the Aluminum Power power-up but not bad either.

Then there’s the bad. MLB is reportedly considering a six-inning minimum for starting pitchers. It has caveats, including permission to remove pitchers for injury, pitch count or runs allowed. But it’s still a terrible idea.

I love the idea of starters going a long way into the game. I would also love to see pitchers have to be smart with their pitching and I would hope pitchers can stay healthy.

But baseball is at its most fun when there are fewer limits and teams can get creative. Before the universal DH, pitchers batting allowed for interesting tactical moves like the double switch.

Even now as pitchers have shorter starts there’s room for innovation. Teams have sent relievers out to pitch first before bringing in the pitcher who would throw the most innings. Bullpens have to be better and deeper now than they used to be.

If anything, I would welcome MLB going in the opposite direction. Why try to force the issue when so many pitchers have already switched to throwing hard for a shorter duration? Instead of five guys who can pitch six innings and then eight others who can throw one or two innings, why not have eight or nine guys who can throw three or four innings at a high level?

Something Good I Ate

Maine is about lobster. Up and down the state’s long, jagged coastline, there are lobster pounds and lobster huts aplenty, selling lobster by the pound, lobster bisque, and lobster rolls.

One day in the mid-2010s, we were on one of our many, many annual family trips to Maine. We got tired of seafood and just needed anything else. We pulled over at a big wooden lodge-looking building, The sign was simple. It said: “The Steakhouse.”

We waited two hours for a table (apparently this is common.) We get called upstairs into a big, open wood-paneled dining room. Between the unassuming name, the rustic, wooden décor, and the dedication to meat, I was convinced this place was conceived by Ron Swanson. 

Under that high barn roof, we had some of the best steak of our lives. It was so good that we would come back every year. It’s open about half the year, for just a few hours a few days a week. But business is so good that year after year, they come back. And year after year, people fill the place every moment it’s open. 

By the time I brought Abby for her first visit in October of last year, I knew the trick was to get there 20-30 minutes before it opened up. About 50 people were ahead of us in line.

Mind you, it’s October already. It’s a Tuesday.

But here we were, literally a few hours after getting engaged, planning our day around this simply-named joint. 

Inside, we got The Steakhouse at its peak. Every course sizzled and sang. 

The free bread, warm and soft, just begged for you to fill up on it. 

My French onion soup sat there with a perfect layer of cheese coating the bowl, hiding a mix of broth, cheese, onion and bread that acts less as an appetizer and more as a warm hug for the soul.

Oh wait, we haven’t even gotten to the steak yet! I have never had a bad cut from this place. Gristle is a rarity. The outer layer is richly flavored from a well-loved and well-used grill, and the inside is always rich and juicy.

Mango chutney might not seem like a winning pairing with a steak, but look, what The Steakhouse says goes. It works like a charm.

They even gave us an accidental engagement day special. One of the orders that came out was wrong. And in the real-life equivalent of the Monopoly “bank error in your favor” card, they brought the right one, left the wrong one and comped it. So we worked our way through not one, not two but three delicious steaks. 

It meant a lot to me to introduce a place near and dear to me and my family to someone who I was officially welcoming into the rest of my life.

I’m sure we’ll be back someday soon and it’ll already be full. We have forever now, so it’s okay, we’ll wait.