Casual Diehard

All that stuff from yesterday about the Mets in April in Milwaukee? Same deal after they got pounded again, 9-0, last night. Let’s not dwell on that. Instead, let us focus on the meme of the day.

Sorry to Kenny Lofton, this is Ken time only.

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The Mets took a good, old-fashioned pounding on Monday afternoon, giving up 10 runs to the Brewers after having allowed only eight runs in the first four games of the season, combined, while taking three out of four in Miami. What’s worse, they disappointed Chrystal and Colleen, who made the trip to Cream City to see that mess.

Maybe the Mets felt weird being in Wisconsin. After all, I’ve said on multiple podcasts now that Milwaukee feels like a later-in-the-year trip for the boys in orange and blue.

Turns out, that’s right. It’s been a long time since the Mets were in Milwaukee in April. Here’s when they’ve gone over the last several years.

2022: September

2021: September

2020: No trip

2019: May

2018: May

2017: May

2016: June

2015: June

2014: July

2013: July

2012: September

2011: June

2010: May

2009: June/July

2008: September

2007: July/August

2006: May

2005: May

2004: August

2003: May

2002: August

2001: April

It’s been 22 years since the Mets were in Milwaukee this early in the year, and even longer since they actually won a game in Milwaukee in the first month of the baseball calendar. The 2001 Mets, on their first trip to Miller Park, lost 6-4, 7-2, and 12-8 to what wound up being a 94-loss Brewers team.

The Mets’ last win in Milwaukee in April was at County Stadium, on April 12, 1998, as Turk Wendell coughed up a lead for Brian Bohanon, and wound up vulturing the win thanks to John Olerud’s tiebreaking two-run homer in the seventh inning.

All time, the Mets are now 2-9 in Milwaukee in April, with both wins coming during that 1998 series. The other win was the day before the last one, with Rey Ordoñez driving in Butch Huskey with the winning run on a ninth-inning single after Bob Wickman intentionally walked Matt Franco.

The Mets lost the opener of that series, which at the time continued a nearly 35-year losing streak in Milwaukee during April. The Mets had one previous trip there so early, the second series of the 1963 season… and got swept in four games by the Braves, including a walk-off two-run homer by Lee Maye off Tracy Stallard in the finale that helped set the tone for the Mets’ decades of misery on whatever rare occasions they have to go to cheese country in April.

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Let’s not talk about the Mets’ fifth game of the season, although if you want to, the Willets Pen Discord is always open. Instead, let’s look forward to the Mets’ eighth game of the season, scheduled for this Thursday afternoon in Flushing — the home opener.

Specifically, let’s turn our minds to our stomachs, and the delights that await when we return to the ballpark. To that end, we welcome to the pod Newsday’s Laura Albanese, the city’s foremost authority on stadium cuisine. Plus, We Can Pod It Out co-host Roger Cormier makes his Willets Pod (OG) debut.

I’ll still be starting with a hot dog and a beer, as always, and particularly can’t wait for Thursday because it’ll also be our first Pod At The Park recording of the new season!

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Editor’s note: Our sports rabbit holes return tomorrow. Wrestlemania lived up to all the expectations after reading Bill Hanstock’s preview, unless you were expecting Cody Rhodes to win the main event last night. Personally, I was, until the run-ins began. That’s when it became clear that WWE was going to “finish the story,” just not Cody’s. This was Sami Zayn’s Wrestlemania, and if you look at it from that perspective, it rules. It was still a disappointing finish, having Cody get screwed over by a guy who already had been ejected, in what was the greatest showcase of his entire career and the culmination of a long road out of and back to WWE. But, you know, that’s hard times, brother.

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Editor’s note: Cheese and Onions rules.

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Opening Day was delightful. We’re exhausted. Ride off into the sunset of the weekend with this one…

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It’s Opening Day! No room in the brain for anything else. Let’s go!

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This is an extremely long episode, but also some of the most fun I’ve had on an episode, and also some of the most nervous I’ve been doing an episode.

I could go on and on, but the show notes are going to be complicated enough already. Long covid sucks. Depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. A whole lot outside of my own body sucks, too, and dealing with it all in concert really and truly sucks. I walk a lot, because I haven’t been running for a real long while now, and I listen to a bunch of music and podcasts, like a normal person in the City of Mind Your Business.

I think a lot about the concept of Pixar’s Inside Out, a cast of voices in your brain representing your emotions. It kind of builds on my favorite science film from school (it was an old film then, and still goes pretty hard), Hemo The Magnificent, which includes a team working around the body, including a funny little guy with a mustache as the executive functioning in the brain. Moderate love as well to Osmosis Jones, as well, a movie I’m not sure holds up as well and don’t really plan to find out, but had its time and place and was one of the better rainy-day movies during my summer at Harlem RBI.

Anyway, I think of dealing with mental health as something like dealing with some form of bad guys who come in and start making a ruckus. That’s why the headphones are important, because they can provide at least a little escape from when it gets so bad that you can hear it in your head – that you hear nothing but that.

I’ve been listening to Ryan Nanni and the rest of Shutdown Fullcast for years, and it hit me that this was a different kind of thing not only than doing a regular episode, or one with another podcaster I listen to. Shutdown Fullcast is, as stated in its own introductory words each week, the Internet’s Only College Football Podcast. Which was the inspiration for 13 episodes of the Not A Football Podcast strain of Willets Pod. As was their show itself, which runs the gamut from being prime builders of 21st century college football fandom lore to Glenallen Hill’s fear of spiders, and a dude who rode a jetski across the Irish Sea.

Really, I prepared for this show, nervous as all heck (you can tell, because I prepared for this show) and that afternoon listened to last week’s Fullcast, and heard my faves talking about weird baseball injuries? And saying nice things about the sport? It messed me up like Hill messed up Steve Woodard, because this was already gonna be a long episode due to the content of our game… but, it was fine. Because of course Ryan didn’t accept the invitation to come on the show so that he could come tell me to my face what a schmuck I am, and expose the truth of that matter to the world, at long last.

After that Nashville winter meetings where I’d driven to Huntsville to see rockets, I still vividly remember sitting on the floor of the airport and doing a whole thread about feeling like I didn’t belong, and ticking off folks who I thought did each of the things that I might be moderately good at – way better than me. But that’s also a lousy way to think about things. In the actual industry, there’s a sense of “trying to get ahead,” which, even if it wasn’t what I was after, is pervasive. I don’t want to compete with Shutdown Fullcast or anyone else with this. We’re going to do stuff that makes us happy, and this episode — with opening day tomorrow, let’s call this the official year one finale — made me happy for two hours. I hope it does for you, too, and I’m so excited for the year ahead, and all the fun we’re going to have together. —J

So, this episode’s premise is a college realignment draft, spinning off from a project that I started at the beginning of last season, and sparked into “let’s do this now” by Shutdown Fullcast spending multiple offseason episodes showing how difficult it is to squeeze all these schools together and still preserve rivalries and traditions that make the sport so rich. (Spoiler: really, really difficult.)

My idea was for 19 conferences, with seven teams each, and the alignment determined not in a Hyatt ballroom somewhere, but on the field. The team with the most wins over the past X number of years (I think I made it 20 for the purposes of this exercise, but can’t find the list I used) starts by making its own league.

How do they do it? Let’s use the example of the school that had the first pick on my board, an Ohio state university.

Ohio State brings along the two teams it has played against the most: Michigan and Illinois. Each of those schools then gets to “bring a friend,” its most-played opponent still available. That’s Minnesota and Northwestern, respectively. Then close it out with two more picks from Ohio State: in their case, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Filling out the entirety of FBS required adding a couple of schools to FBS to get to the multiple of seven. Best of luck to them in this world. Here is what your 2022 college football conferences would’ve looked like under this selection algorithm:

* Ohio State, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, Indiana, Wisconsin

* Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Kansas, Baylor, Kansas State, Missouri

* Boise State, Fresno State, Nevada, San José State, UNLV, Utah State, Hawai’i

* Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, LSU, Kentucky

* Georgia, Auburn, Georgia Tech, Florida, Duke, South Carolina, Clemson

* Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Cal, Stanford, UCLA

* USC, Notre Dame, Arizona, Navy, Arizona State, Utah, Colorado

* TCU, SMU, Texas A&M, Rice, Arkansas, Texas Tech, Houston

* Virginia Tech, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Pitt, N.C. State, Miami (Florida)

* Florida State, Wake Forest, Maryland, Boston College, Penn State, Memphis, Southern Miss

* BYU, Wyoming, Colorado State, New Mexico, Air Force, UTEP, San Diego State

* Cincinnati, Miami (Ohio), Louisville, Kent State, Tulsa, East Carolina, Temple

* Iowa, Purdue, Iowa State, Michigan State, Nebraska, Northern Illinois, Ball State

* Toledo, Bowling Green, Western Michigan, Ohio, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Marshall

* Central Florida, South Florida, Tulane, Connecticut, Army, Akron, Florida International

* Louisiana Tech, Arkansas State, North Texas, Louisiana-Monroe, New Mexico State, UAB, UTSA

* Troy, South Alabama, Florida Atlantic, Louisiana, Middle Tennessee State, Georgia Southern, Appalachian State

* Syracuse, Rutgers, Buffalo, Massachusetts, James Madison, Old Dominion, Liberty

* Western Kentucky, Jacksonville State, Sam Houston State, Georgia State, Texas State, Coastal Carolina, Charlotte

The conferences would change over time, reflecting contemporary powers in the game while staying true to college football history by emphasizing rivals on the schedule.

Each team would play six games in conference, one game against the previous year’s equivalent finisher from four other divisions (thank you, NFL scheduling matrix), and the option for one neutral-site game that they schedule themselves, the only nod here to Notre Dame.

It’s a shorter season, but a longer playoff, with each of the 19 conference champions getting an automatic bid, plus however many at-large teams you want to have filling out a preliminary round that narrows the field to 16 and proceeds as a bracket from there. To me, five at-larges and eight byes makes the most sense. The maximum amount of games that a team could play in a season would be 16 — if they played both the 11th regular-season game and the preliminary playoff round. More likely, a championship team would play 15 times, as Georgia did the last two seasons.

Will it ever happen? Of course not. But it was fun, just like these conferences that we came up with through our draft on the show. (Don’t read any further if you don’t want the spoiler!)

Southern

* Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Penn State, Troy, Tulane, Tennessee, Texas

* Georgia, Clemson, Florida, Coastal Carolina, Florida State, Virginia, Georgia Tech, N.C. State, Arkansas, Mississippi State

Midwestern

* Ohio State, Iowa, Purdue, Boise State, Miami (Florida), Nebraska, Kansas State, Duke, Pitt, Illinois

* Michigan, Michigan State, Appalachian State, Indiana, East Carolina, Wisconsin, Minnesota, West Virginia, Missouri, Virginia Tech

Western

* Oregon, Oregon State, Hawai’i, Washington State, Air Force, Stanford, Colorado State, UNLV, Vanderbilt, Northwestern

* USC, UCLA, Fresno State, Oklahoma, San José State, Texas A&M, Arizona, UAB, Washington, San Diego State

Major Independents

* Notre Dame, California, Maryland, Arizona State, Utah, Colorado, Arkansas State, Central Florida

Hope you enjoyed this even a fraction as much as I did, and can’t wait for opening day and the real start of our second year of Willets Pen. Thanks so much for being a part of year one!

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We’re about to embark on a full season of baseball, which will have plenty of statistical rabbit holes to go down, in addition to the basketball journey we resumed yesterday with Wilt Chamberlain. Plus, there’s a new Willets Pod “Heavy” coming this afternoon. Thanks for subscribing and listening, and enjoy!

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You know I can’t resist a good Wilt Chamberlain stat around here, and this one from Bomani Jones sent me scrambling to Stathead, so you know it’s a good one.

That’s pretty surprising, isn’t it? That the seventh-leading scorer in NBA history doesn’t hold any team’s points record? But that’s also been the case for a little under two years — it was April of 2021 when Steph Curry passed Chamberlain, who scored 17,783 points for the Dubs in five-and-a-half seasons.

Chamberlain played 429 games for the Warriors, while Curry has appeared in 876 so far with the only NBA team he’s ever been on.

Here’s the Warriors’ all-time list of per-game scoring, with a minimum of 100 games played:

Chamberlain (429 games) 41.5 ppg

Kevin Durant (208 games) 25.8

Rick Barry (642 games) 25.6

Curry (876 games and counting) 24.6

World B. Free (162 games) 23.4

So, you look at Chamberlain going from the Warriors back to Philadelphia with the 76ers in 1965, and his precipitous decline to… let’s take a look at the 76ers’ per list, where Hal Greer remains the all-time leading total scorer but “only” averaged 19.2 points per his 1,122 games (a total of 21,586), and still holds the record because those dummies traded Allen Iverson (19,931 points in 772 games)

Chamberlain (277 games) 27.62 ppg

Iverson (722 games) 27.61

Joel Embiid (389 games and counting): 27.2

Charles Barkley (610 games) 23.3

Julius Erving (836 games) 22.0

Chamberlain played his age 32-36 seasons for the Lakers, one of which was limited to 12 games — and he still led the NBA in rebounding each of his four healthy, if declining, seasons in Los Angeles (he only missed one other game the whole time). So, it’s not surprising that Chamberlain isn’t near the top of the Lakers’ all-time scoring list, and in fact he’s 24th with 5,985, a couple of spots above Nick Van Exel, who was pretty darn good in his five seasons with the Lakers.

On a per-game basis, Chamberlain had 17.66 with the Lakers, which puts him between Pau Gasol (17.73) and James Worthy (17.62), in 15th all-time for the franchise.

The Lakers’ list? That’s an interesting one, because the leader could very well play himself out of the top spot.

LeBron James (271 games and counting) 27.42 ppg

Elgin Baylor (846 games) 27.36

Shaquille O’Neal (514 games) 27.033

Jerry West (932 games) 27.030

Kobe Bryant (1,346 games) 25.0

O’Neal and West being separated by three-thousandths of a point per game over their careers in Los Angeles, spanning more than 1,400 games between them, is out of control.

Baseball season is coming, but we have a whole lot more basketball statistrata to work on here. Stay tuned!

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