When I go on Spotify these days, I scroll past my favorite bands’ most popular songs, past their albums, past the mass-produced mood and genre playlists they’re featured in, past their tour dates and about pages and merch, to the little section called “Artist Playlists.”

Morning, it’s Zach. As I get older and more obsessive about a slimmer range of topics (or perhaps just less inclined to ride the social media express around the internet), I’ve found I crave introductions to influential classics by way of current favorites.

So lately, that has meant I go swimming through what MJ Lenderman chooses to share of his inspiration, what Waxahatchee uses for her house music, or what previously Bandwagon-ed singer Cameron Winter puts in his decidedly eclectic mix. Even better: I build my own lists based off interviews with a favorite such as The National’s Matt Berninger. Cherrypicked Bob Dylan deep cuts, crash courses on David Berman or The Smiths, whatever. It’s all more interesting for its traceable connection to something I already know and love.

These threads are fun to pull on for baseball players, too, even if it’s not quite as simple for them to let us into their brains. Some players, like Mookie Betts, occasionally go on podcasts and give interesting answers about how disparate athletes such as Manny Ramirez and Allen Iverson inspired their play, but mostly we’re left to spot the lineage ourselves.

No one has made me wonder about his influences more recently than rookie A’s shortstop Jacob Wilson, the perpetual motion machine who produces line drives at an astounding rate.

@mlbthis stance is wild 👀 #mlb #batting #hitting #wild

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Wilson, who has to be leading the AL Rookie of the Year race, has a .341 batting average, five homers, and a microscopic strikeout rate that drew the inevitable comparisons to Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan. He has struck out only 10 times in 193 plate appearances (and walked only 10 times, as well). He swings all the time, and hits the ball pretty much every time.

I see all that pre-pitch fidgeting and his play at shortstop and the No. 5 on his back, and I remember another shortstop with a batting champ skill set and energy to burn: Nomar Garciaparra, one of my first favorite players.

Wilson has said he has always hit like this, his swing trained under the tutelage of his dad, the former major league shortstop Jack Wilson. He has not mentioned Garciaparra, who completed four of his seven MVP vote-earning seasons before Wilson was born and he hadn’t heard of Carney Lansford, another heavily caffeinated hitter from even earlier years, when a Sacramento radio host asked. 

But this possibly erroneous connection nonetheless keeps me interested and rooting for Wilson to succeed, and it’s not the first time I’ve found the shadow of an old favorite inspiring a new one. If you see forebears shining through in current players, drop them in the comments, I’d love to follow those threads, too.

This is fun

On Thursday, at 1pm ET on Substack Live, I’m going to talk to Tim Healey as a sort of exit interview from the Mets beat. Tim has spent the past seven-plus years as the Mets beat reporter for Newsday. Now he’s shipping up to Boston to join The Boston Globe as a Red Sox beat writer. All baseball beats are unique and grueling and worthy subjects if you have the chance to ask someone about the role. But the Mets beat in recent years has been especially … eventful.

I have plenty of questions for Tim myself, but since he’s being so generous as to talk to us, please put some questions in the comments for him as well.

If you can’t make it live, we’ll send out the video and a transcript on Friday.

“I may be too old to establish another true fan relationship”: A’s fans grapple with whether or not to stay loyal to a team that didn’t

by Hannah Keyser

Maybe this is reflective of my own media algorithms, but I’m surprised there hasn’t been more coverage this baseball season of how the Oakland A’s are no longer. It’s the first MLB relocation of my adulthood and — on the scale of the sport if not, like, the world — it feels cataclysmic. The move itself has been horribly botched. The team is playing in an unserious minor league stadium after more than a decade of casting about for a new ballpark. They’ll be stuck in a purgatory of their own making for at least three seasons, unwilling to court a local crowd even though their glitzy future remains a little uncertain. There is so much I want to know about how, practically speaking, this is all playing out for the team itself. The players, the front office staff, the gameday personnel — what does it mean for their lives to be in limbo in this way?

But today, we’re focused on the people left behind: the fans.

You could say it’s like a breakup, I suppose, but crucially, it’s not just that the A’s continue to exist, like your ex. In many ways, they exist the same way that they always have from a fan perspective — as an entertainment product to be consumed on television, or radio, or in reading about many of the same characters you rooted for mere months ago. It’s like if the option existed to stay really, really good friends with your ex. Would you?

I wanted to know how A’s fans are genuinely navigating this conundrum: to stay a fan or sever ties. And so we asked them. I’m going to mostly get out of the way so you can read their thoughts.

The A’s departure was not a surprise. The Oakland Coliseum was decrepit, the lease was set to expire after 2024, and for a while ownership pursued possible locations for new stadiums in the area — and the public funding to subsidize that plan. In April 2023, the team signed an agreement to buy land in Las Vegas for a new ballpark and in November of that year, the other owners approved the move.

Kyle Madson: The last few seasons were rough because there was a feeling of helplessness knowing they were likely gone, but there was also a desire to go to as many games as possible to soak in the beauty and joy of baseball at the Oakland Coliseum.

Bob Shephard: The ineptness of the planning for a new stadium had been painfully obvious for years, as one scheme after another failed to progress, and a pattern developed where the A's would trade away young stars as they approached arbitration and free agency rather than pay them what they could command in the marketplace. By trading away Cespedes and Donaldson, and later Semien, Olson, Chapman, Murphy, Bassitt, Manaea, Montas, etc., Fisher blew up the team's chances of establishing a third dynasty. But the A's were still promising that they were "Rooted In Oakland," and the negotiations for a new stadium as part of a massive development project at the Howard Terminal site were still inching along. Then Fisher blew those up too and bolted for Las Vegas.

At that point my feelings toward John Fisher turned from disdain into loathing, and I hated the thought of giving him any more of my money.