I think all baseball games should end this way

MLB could end all tied baseball games with a SWING-OFF, not just the ones that don't matter. PLUS, justice for the Derby Kid who robbed a dinger, and double bagels at Wimbledon.

I was in Chicago last weekend, which is really dangerous. You visit Chicago in July and immediately think “oh wow, I should move to Chicago.” But I have also been to Chicago in the other months, and I know that Summer Chicago is an illusion meant to trick you.

The 2025 MLB All-Star Game ended in a historic SWING-OFF, with Kyle Schwarber winning the event for the National League with three home runs on three batting practice pitches:

Essentially, a Home Run Derby to determine the All-Star Game winner.

It has long been my stated opinion that we’ve got it all backwards: A baseball season should feature 162 Home Run Derbies and then one day in the middle when the best Home Run Derby guys get together and play a single game of baseball. Unfortunately, we’re kinda pot-committed to the whole “baseball” thing and can’t really flip all the baseball infrastructure we’ve built for a pro Home Run Derby league.

The SWING-OFF was a big hit (baseball term). It was thrilling to watch, the players were standing outside of the dugouts screaming, and the nation once again got to see how bad Aaron Boone is at managing baseball.

Part of the excitement was due to the novelty and low stakes of the event …

… but I couldn’t help thinking why don’t all tied baseball games end this way?

• The SWING-OFF was specifically negotiated into the most recent MLB CBA to break ties in All-Star Games. The idea was to prevent a repeat of the 2002 ASG tie, which many baseball fans treated like a national tragedy on par with the Kennedy assassination, but also to prevent sending exhibition games deep into extra innings, which is clearly foolish knowing what we know about pitchers’ arms.

• Fun fact, I stayed for the entire 15-inning ASG at Yankee Stadium in 2008. The tickets were my high school graduation present, I wasn’t gonna leave early! Most people did, though.

• In the last decade, the NFL, NHL, and MLB have all tweaked their rules to shorten overtime periods during the regular season. Players want games to end faster because they know it’s bad for their bodies to play 1.5 games in a single night. Owners know they make money from playing more games rather than longer games, so it’s an easy concession in CBA negotiations.

• Baseball should have the most incentive to make overtimes as quick as possible, because pitching more is especially bad for pitchers’ arms, and because there are one hundred and sixty-two games in a season. Each game is worth 0.61 percent of a team’s season. Just get the games over! It’s not that big a deal who wins or loses!

• Instead, baseball historically has the longest overtime periods, with games sometimes lasting twice as long as a standard game.

• MLB’s innovation—the ghost runner rule—sucks, and everybody hates it. It manages to feel gimmicky without eliminating the possibility for endless games. The ghost runner rule has shortened the length of extra innings, but we still occasionally get 14-inning marathons. It also appears to give a slight, but real, advantage to the away team, which is a pretty bad outcome for a rule.

• The SWING-OFF lets the best players determine tie games by doing one of the most entertaining things in baseball. That’s a pretty good outcome for a rule.

• Besides, we could see an assistant coach get a 7-figure salary just for being really good at tossing BP, which is an ideal outcome for a rule.

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Justice for the Derby Kid

During the Home Run Derby on Monday night, large swing haver Oneil Cruz hit a baseball 513 feet, and large butt haver Cal Raleigh won the competition after a Statcast projection determined he hit a ball one inch longer than another player’s home run.

But the play of the night was made by one of the dozens—hundreds?—of children filling the outfield. A Derby Kid robbed a Junior Caminero home run in the championship matchup with Raleigh:

• It’s the greatest matchup in sports. At the plate, the strongest and most powerful hitters in MLB, repeatedly hitting baseballs as hard as they possibly can. In the field, hundreds of literal children, with questionable motor skills and fragile skulls. What could go wrong?

• I don’t know where the Derby Kids come from. (Reddit suggests that in past, some were MLB Pitch Hit & Run contest winners, but that doesn’t appear to be the case in 2025.)

• I also don’t know whether any of the Derby Kids have ever caught a fly ball, either in the contest or in their entire lives. Most non-homers fall harmlessly to the ground somewhere in the vicinity of about a dozen Derby Kids who misjudged the ball.

• In 2023, a Derby Kid ate a 115.8 mph rocket off the bat of Vlad Guerrero Jr. (Don’t worry, the kid was OK.)

• There are two types of people reading this newsletter right now: The ones who didn’t click that link, and the ones who wanted to watch a video of a Derby Kid getting drilled in the face by a line drive.

• I won’t tell anybody if you’re in Category B. It’s our little secret.

• The premise of a Derby Kid snagging a home run was so improbable that it was the climactic moment of a terrible straight-to-DVD movie starring Dean Cain and Matthew Lillard called “Home Run Showdown,” in which a kid on the field at the famous Home Run Showdown (no copyright infringement) steals a home run hit by Gary Sheffield, and his incarcerated dad sees it on TV. (Don’t worry, I clipped the video so it starts right when Sheff swings away, you don’t have to watch the whole bad movie.)

• I want to be clear that I did not know the movie “Home Run Showdown” existed before doing research for this newsletter. I found one review of it by someone who seemed deeply upset they had to watch it: “none of the jokes in the film turned out to be funny, and even the baseball storyline was a little convoluted as well.”

• Monday night, we witnessed a miracle. Not only did a Derby Kid actually catch a ball hit by a player, he leapt up and snagged it over the wall. A legitimate robbery which would be the highlights of any MLB game …

• The Athletic caught up with the kid who caught the ball. He’s the 17-year old son of the Braves’ official scorer, and he said that he’s never made a play like that for his high school team—just on national TV, with millions of people watching.

• AND THE UMPS SAID IT DIDN’T COUNT!

• Apparently, the Home Run Derby has a rulebook saying any ball that would have cleared the fence is a home run. Show me the rulebook. I refuse to believe that MLB planned for a Derby Kid dinger robbery and I want to see the evidence.

• This is a travesty. If an MLB player can’t hit a home run far enough that a child can’t snag it in the field of play, it’s not a home run. I also think any dunks blocked by children during the NBA Slam Dunk Contest should not count.

• And it’s a betrayal of baseball tradition. The very first MLB Home Run Derby in 1985 featured a Derby Kid home run robbery when a local high schooler reached over the wall to snag a dinger by Cubs star Ryne Sandberg. At the time, the Derby was also a contest between the AL and NL, and the AL won by one homer thanks to the home run robbery.

• But most importantly, the ruling is an insult to all the Derby Kids who have risked their fragile little bones for baseball exhibition glory. What happened to the game I love?

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Bagels at Wimbledon

I don’t know why it’s more embarrassing to get blown out in a championship match than in the first round of a tournament, but it is. (Ask Patrick Mahomes!) The whole world watches you on your worst day, remembering that performance instead of the run that got you there.

Anyway, tough break for Amanda Anisimova, who lost the Wimbledon singles final 6-0, 6-0. I don’t know how ESPN found 22 minutes of highlights in a match that lasted less than one hour:

• The only other double bagel win in a Wimbledon singles final came in 1911, when Dorothea Lambert Chambers defeated Dora Boothby 6-0, 6-0. Lambert Chambers, a 7-time Wimbledon champ, literally wrote the book on tennis: Lawn Tennis for Ladies, which you can read in full here. In it, Lambert Chambers describes how to play tennis and what to wear, and proposes that tournaments provide a dedicated tea tent for competitors so they don’t have to wait in line for tea with everybody else during the tournament. “The woman of the present generation is calm, collected, and free from emotional outbursts,” wrote Lambert Chambers. “And I believe that invigorating outdoor exercise is the chief cause.”

• So yeah, it had been a while.

• The most recent double bagel in a Grand Slam final came at the 1998 French Open, when Steffi Graf completed what’s probably the most dominant tournament run in tennis history. She didn’t drop a single set in the tournament, and won seven of her 14 sets 6-0. The final was only 61 points—18 fewer than Swiatek-Anisimova. I really enjoyed Ryan Nanni’s breakdown of that “almost-perfect” final from 2019.

• There were exactly two double bagels in this year’s Wimbledon, and Anisimova played in both. She won her first round match 6-0, 6-0 against Yulia Putinseva, then lost the finals 6-0, 6-0 to Iga.

• I would like to see Iga Swiatek play Yulia Putinseva.

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Quick hits

• Our guy Shane van Gisbergen WON AGAIN at Sonoma.

  He’s now up to 3 wins in the NASCAR Cup Series this season, tied for the most of any driver, and he’s third in the playoff point standings, simply because nobody else knows how to drive on road courses. Here’s what I wrote about him last week:

• Aussie Grace Kim had an all-time finish to win the Evian Championship. She hit an eagle to force a playoff on 18, hit the ball into the water on the first playoff hole, holed out from her drop shot to force another playoff hole, then eagled to win her first major:

  (And by the way, the tournament is named that because it’s actually in Evian, France, not because of a water sponsorship.)

• MI New York won Major League Cricket after going 3-7 in the regular season, squeaking into the fourth and final playoff spot, and then knocking off #3, #2, and #1 in order to earn their second championship in the three-year old competition.

  MI New York stands for “Mumbai Indians New York,” since they’re owned by the same group that owns the Mumbai Indians. I guess it would be kinda weird to have a team named “Mumbai Indians New York.”

• Sweden’s Tove Alexandersson won her 22nd and 23rd Orienteering World Championships, the most of all time, to go along with her gold medals in ski orienteering, skyrunning, and ski mountaineering. This makes her the #1 person in the world to be with when you are lost the Alpine mountains, but arguably the worst person in the world to be with if the two of you are trying to escape a bear.