Five Unc Takes For My 40s

I turned 41 years old last weekend, an occasion punctuated by time spent around family and friends. A shift has occurred in my standing within my extended family in my fourth decade of life; my place as the youngest member of my generation no longer makes me young by default, with nieces and nephews by the bushel navigating their teenage and early college years. By definition, I've been their uncle since the early aughts, but my move towards the exit of entertainment's key demographic has made me unc.

The good news on that front is that it's a role I am more than ready to play. I moved out of Toronto half a decade ago. A suburban-dwelling, back-in-my-day-opining, "this is the kind of player your uncle tells you he hates"-hating loudmouth who refuses to open the website you know is objectively correct is a role I've spent so much time rallying against that I now realize I am the actor who has learned all the co-stars' lines by osmosis. In that spirit, I feel free to release the most Unc takes I have at my disposal, a freedom I relish now that I'm no longer a creator in any sports space.

Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.

Baseball Discussion Is Mostly Ruined

If you can't talk about a player or the games without opening a website, you don't actually have anything to say. I am on the other side of the analytic bell curve now. I was there for the analytics wars, I was there for the advanced stat battles, and I can safely say I have no interest in hearing from someone whose entire opinion is a sorted leaderboard and who treats the rankings within as sacrosanct.

Listen, that doesn't mean I'm suddenly a Luddite philistine siding with whatever former player is begging for engagement by saying Analytics = Bad, but I am saying I find any dunk on someone that consists of a screenshot of a Statcast page to be the most uninteresting thing I have ever seen.

Who should win the Gold Glove? Let's all just agree on which metric we're going to sort by.

Who should win Silver Slugger? Sort wRC+.

Who should win Cy Young? Sort FIP.

Who should win MVP? Sort fWAR.

I can put my philosophical shift into terms that the crowd I appear to be rallying against can accept, hopefully: I am in favour of descriptive, not predictive. I don't really care who WOULD be the best were all factors equal. I don't care who SHOULD be the best if luck didn't play a role. Unequal factors and luck and random chance are the whole point of watching. What DID happen? Who WAS the best? That's the thing I am interested in. The difference between who is the better player and who had the better year.

Rapid Fire Stuff I Think Rocks

Great Baserunning
Throwing To The Right Base
Balls In Play
Infield Range
Innings Pitched

Too Many Damn Jerseys And Uniforms

Holy shit there are too many jerseys. Like... Good Lord. Nobody could possibly care about the jerseys this much. And what's worse? Most of you KNOW that the wave of non-stop jersey releases is to sell them to you. As if the cost of attending or having all the services to watch or just buying a hat weren't astronomical, you can now get seven different styles of jersey for your team that they'll wear a single-digit number of times, and you'll have no idea if you're commemorating a time for the team that you'll want to remember or not.

Turning a game on and having legitimately no way of identifying the teams involved without seeing a scoreboard because neither is wearing the actual team colours assigned to them should be criminal.

And the rankings and the content and the "OK, here are my favs from the list" from grown adults, holy hell. Here's a really easy test for you: If your birth year starts with 19, shut up about the jerseys.

Too Many Athletes In Media

I can't believe a single one of you watches or listens to podcasts with athletes on them. Fucking awful. You know what, fellas? You made 99% of media's entire lifetime salary in a week, over and over again. Maybe just fucking retire and pass the rock.

Maybe you're thinking of one or two exceptions right now where one of the richest and most famous people you can think of has "some funny stories" from their playing days, and I will tell you with zero hesitation I would snap my fingers and silence that person for the rest of my life if it meant the entire athlete media industry disappeared.

I call this colloquially the Michael Strahan effect, where for the life of me I cannot understand how Michael Strahan has so many different things he does on television. FOX NFL Sunday analyst? Sure, that's in the wheelhouse. You want to stay around the game, I get it. Good Morning America? Live! With Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan? Hosting the $100,000 Pyramid? What are we doing??? He made SEVENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS in the NFL. Maybe someone else can get a shot at being famous for a few minutes?

And so it is with media, especially podcasts. Yeah, a colour commentator or a desk analyst is a perfectly fine after-career gig. Stay connected, give back and educate. If you have some big insight into the game you feel the need to share in the guise of helping youth, maybe volunteer to coach a team where you live. What in the world does Josh Donaldson need a podcast for? Whoever delivered a Shure SM7B to Kevin Pillar's house needs to understand the damage they've done to the world.

To be clear, this goes beyond athletes and is a problem with the state of content creation in general, I feel. If you're already famous as an actor or a musician or an athlete, just enjoy the fact that you've already got one of the jobs that people dream of but could not possibly achieve without also sinking your greedy, horrendous teeth into the one space where people were able to make their own little livings for like three years before you all came along.

It's Too Easy To Make The Playoffs

For the life of me, it was borderline criminal that it took until the very last week of the season for the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays to have their season officially ended. A bit of an aberration season in the American League, you could argue? Probably, but boy was I glad to avoid a week's worth of talk-radio-fuelled "Hey, they made the playoffs, could you actually consider the season a success?"

It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to lean more towards feeling like someone who deserved to get in didn’t make it than letting in a team that never really had a shot. I’m dangerously close to saying “nobody wants to work anymore,” but there is something happening in basically all sports—baseball, college football, the NBA Play-In Tournament, the NFL—where giving every team that had any kind of winning streak at any point in the season a shot at claiming the championship feels completely wrong to me.

The Regular Season Is Still Good, Though

You'd think maybe these two points back to back are at odds with each other, but they aren't, simply by the grace of me saying so.

The regular season is—even though you can well-actually me here—the whole point. Yes, in a very specific sense, winning the trophy at the end is "the point," but most fans of most teams won't feel that basically ever. Championships aren't distributed evenly, and even if they were, you'd be going 30+ years between seeing them. If you timed your life right and lived well, you might see four.

The point of the regular season, and the point of the games themselves, is to watch and enjoy them. Playoff games are usually more cruel and mentally taxing than anything, and the journey you go on with your team for several months every year—legitimately, the friends we made along the way—is the real function.

Yes, you'll (probably) have one or two or a handful of moments where streamers fall and champagne pops and you say, "This made all the years and losses worth it," but the reality is that the Tuesday night game against a non-rival team with your B squad scoring runs from the 7-8-9 spots in the lineup is what actually makes it worth it.