About three weeks ago, I wrapped principal photography on my second feature, “American Chestnut.” I’ve been meaning to keep a production diary of sorts, but with the film now in post-production, and in the most boring phase to an outsider before a rough cut is finished, I wanted to loop back to earlier in the process and do a brief reflection on the writing aspect. In the meantime, though, here’s a handful of stills:

I’ve never had much difficulty finishing the first draft of a script. I find the process of writing a good script to be agonizing and tedious, but I find the act of completing a first draft in the 95-135ish page range to be somewhat of a breeze, one that might only take about a month if all goes well. My friends who know this about me will sometimes seek me out for guidance when they’re in the middle of their own first drafts and looking to get beyond initial roadblocks.

“What should you do when Act 1 doesn’t line up with Act 2?” they’ll ask, or, “What if you have a good opening, a good ending, but you’re stuck on figuring out the middle?”

I’ve realized I never have a helpful answer to these sorts of questions. Usually I’ll reply with some sort of tired (but true) screenwriting grindset platitude, and tell them to just keep going, that they’ll figure it out eventually. That if they just get something on the page, they can figure out how to fix it later.

The truth is my actual solutions for these issues probably wouldn’t be of any help to them in the first place, because every time I slam into a wall while writing a script, I always do the same thing: I just ask Drew.

I met Drew Lang in 2017 on my first day on the job at a post-production house in New York, where we were both Runners making fifteen dollars an hour. Our job was to get coffee for ad agency clients, and to shuttle hard drives around the city to mix houses, color houses, and production shops. Five minutes after we met, he asked me where I was from, what my life was like, what I liked to do, and all I could think was “What is this guy’s fuckin problem?”

Flash forward 9 years later from that moment, and in that timespan, he and I have had two failed podcasts, two failed attempts at producing an animated pilot about our jobs (I’m sure a third is on the way some day), shot two music videos, produced two features, and compiled a decently hefty portfolio of comedy scripts that bear both our names on the title page.

More important than any of that, though, Drew is my very best friend1

In all candor, most of these projects — completed or otherwise — sprouted organically from hanging out and having nothing else to do. We don’t have any set writing processes, working hours, schedules, or routines. When we wrote American Chestnut, I’d write five pages, email them, he’d write a couple, he’d call me, we’d talk about it, and if I was stuck, the phone call would usually lead to a breakthrough, almost always while we were talking about something completely different from the script. When lines of dialogue weren’t funny, he’d tell me they sucked. When a scene seemed pointless, he’d tell me to cut it. He ultimately put the kibosh on about forty total pages of scenes that I later realized were indeed trash.

Even as I’m writing this, I feel as though I’m failing to provide any concrete advice or peel back the curtain about how to finish a script, because writing is not something that needs to fit a rubric, no matter what the screenwriting books tell you to do. All it needs to be is a typed-up version of a story you’re telling your friend.

And regardless of method, I’m proud Drew and I have released one movie and put a second in the can together. I’m proud we have an existing bag of scripts we can reach into for the next time we want to make something. But in a lot of ways, what I’m most proud of is the stuff that’ll never see the light of day. The podcast episodes we’ll never release, the pilot scripts we’ll never produce. It’s like we’ve managed, without even trying, to cobble together an archive of what it was like to be friends with each other over the course of a decade.

In all sincerity, I think the only way to ever finish any large scale creative project is to actively have fun with it. There are easier things to do with your life than make art that five people will care about, so if it isn’t fun, why are you bothering? Being a tortured artist in solitude is a good way to never get anything done. But if you joke around with your friends? If you talk through it and work out the kinks together to the point that the hardest parts of the process no longer feel like work? You’ve probably got a fighting chance.

And maybe that’s the writing advice I was meant to give all along. Stop slamming your head against your laptop and call up your best friend. Grab a notebook on a Sunday afternoon and meet them at the worst diner you can think of. Extra points if you see a mouse before your food comes out. Kick around any ideas you’ve had in the past few weeks. Make each other laugh. Say the dumbest thing that pops into your head. Scribble it down. When you get home, read it all back. If it’s usable, put it in the script. If it’s not, save it anyway. As a writer it’s worthless, but as a friend and as a person just going about your daily life, that’s the good stuff. Those are memories, pal.

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Isn’t that why we tell stories in the first place?

In the summer of 2022, while rewriting a draft of a baseball script that had been in the works since the pandemic summer, my writing partner Drew Lang and I decided to spend a weekend at my hometown ballpark filming test footage and B-Roll to show to financiers.

When we got there, we realized almost immediately how fun it would be to call our friend, actor Billy Brannigan, lav him up, and set him loose on unsuspecting patrons in-character as Willie Cotter, the protagonist of the film we had then been calling Cotter Unwound, but would soon begin calling American Chestnut. We shot this footage entirely without a script on hand and without any plan as to what we were doing. No narrative arc in mind, no beginnings, no endings, only real conversations that Billy (as Willie) was having with real people.

By the end of the weekend, we’d walked away with a hidden-camera character study1, and an entirely new vision of the script. In earlier drafts, Willie Cotter was a misanthrope. Angry, disconnected from others, bitter over his failures. A baseball washout who failed to make waves in Japan, returned home to the states with his tail between his legs, and took his shortcomings out on others. But after cutting together the footage, we learned he was just lonely. Sweet, sad, and in need of a friend.

We passed this sizzle around to a few people. One of them connected us to an EP who was looking to get out of the Tubi Horror game and put money toward what he described as “Five Easy Pieces type movies.” A little funny, a little sad. Awesome, we said. Perfect fit. He verbally offered $100k. Our preliminary budget showed we probably needed $300k to do it right, but we could make it work, and could always raise more later. We started casting, we put feelers out to name-actors who might want to attach. We started securing locations and permissions from the real life baseball teams.

Then the EP’s Tubi checks came in. Folks, I don’t know what they’re doing over in the world of AVOD, but the man’s tune changed the second he saw how profitable microbudget horror could be for him. He called my cell. “You don’t have a horror script instead, do you? It’s just so… guaranteed. Like. Horror fans will watch anything.”

No, no I didn’t. I mean. Drew and I have long had a Frankenstein script in our portfolio, but tonally it’s basically Midnight Run or Broadway Danny Rose, or maybe even Shrek, and it was always more of a spec to be used for OWAs anyway. Calling it horror would be a stretch.

When I said I didn’t have any horror scripts in my pocket, he asked if I could make American Chestnut for more like $40k instead. I looked at the budget, sighed, and I said no, no I can’t. Not the way I’d want to at least.

Years slipped by. Other projects false-started and true-halted. Someone Drew and I were fourth-degree connected to would read one of our scripts, get excited, disappear. I banged my head against a wall trying to come up with a different movie I could make for practically nothing. I wrote an animated children’s feature about a stuffed animal lost in Prospect Park and wondered if I could make it with puppeteers and no permits. In the end, all while we’d kept circling other things we cared less about, we kept looping back to Willie Cotter and American Chestnut.

As time went on, Drew and I realized that we’d begun to talk about Willie Cotter as though he were a real person, like we’d Ruby Sparks’d him into existence. The name for us became a signifier for loveable dirtbag behavior — for drinking and watching Entourage reruns at 8am on a Tuesday, or keeping the percocet from your wisdom teeth removal just in case. And he belonged to a story about home, a story about failure, a story about feeling alone, wanting little else than to be loved, and self-destructing just to receive love when it’s absent. All topics I’d become an unwilling expert on as I finished out my twenties. It was the most personal thing he and I had ever written together, the most nostalgic, and, when we finally rewrote it once more to consolidate locations and narrow the scope a bit, it was the most doable. So we said fuck it. With a crack team of producers, we sprung into prep, put our heads down and worked with what we had to see the thing through shoot.

In the end, to get through principal photography, we raised… a little over $40k in financing. A 2026 $40k, which won’t go as far as the 2023 $40k would have, but I like to think I’m approaching it with three more years of friendship with Willie Cotter under my belt. Three more years of developing the story, three more years of hoarding details about home. Three more years of my closest collaborators believing in the story and wanting to devote their time to it.

When all is said and done, it’ll have taken seven years from conception to final render. I’ll do my best to tell you how it goes until then.

The Moment, Charli xcx’s self-interrogating alternate history of her brat album rollout, comes as a refreshingly honest and raw satire of the music industry, one in which ego and corporate demands run rampant and flatten any semblance of artistic vision in-progress. It is a grainy, handheld, seizure-inducing vision of a dizzying present moment, in which celebrity and art are defined by an unrelenting onslaught of digital images.

It’s funny then, that the contemporary film it seems to be most in-conversation with is Noah Baumbach’s George Clooney metacommentary, Jay Kelly, a calm, quiet and golden-hued reflection on an art life ill-lived. Both films feature protagonists struggling to cope with the dissolution of their true selves in exchange for their celebrity, and both are pushed along by anxious ensemble casts of managers, publicists, and agents all fighting to keep the ship afloat. But putting Jay Kelly and The Moment side-by-side presents a stark generational divide between Jay Kelly and Charli’s1 ideas of what it means to be a celebrity in the first place.

Where this is most apparent is in the depictions of their teams. Jay Kelly’s managers and publicists serve him. What he says, goes. He’s under no obligation to attend his career retrospective in Tuscany, and he waffles on the upcoming role he’s booked because he questions whether he wants to continue acting at all. His refusal to take part in either doesn’t affect him. It doesn’t affect his role in culture, or his stature in the eyes of history, it only affects his handlers who need to feed their families and don’t want to work overtime hours in the service of an indecisive man-child.

Contrast this with The Moment. From her introduction, Charli is a piece of cargo to be dropped off, from airport lounge to penthouse balcony, to rehearsal warehouse, to poolside chair. She is the commodity who is rarely given a say in matters that pertain to her. Her label foists a tyrannical, medium talent documentarian (Alexander Skarsgård)2 onto her without asking if he fits into the vision for her tour (he doesn’t), her manager shuttles her to sponsored events she isn’t aware of until arrival, and she is left out of all discussions regarding her immediate travel schedule. She will fly to Ibiza, post to Instagram about the hotel partnership, and she’ll like it.

They are each beyond the hope of an ordinary life, but Jay Kelly is a symbol and Charli is doomed to brandhood. Jay will never be his manager Ron’s (Adam Sandler)3 personal friend, but only because Jay is not someone who is capable of reciprocating love. When Jay goes missing in the hours before the tribute, Ron only resolves to leave for home because he’s decided family is more important than fading celebrities. But Charli’s manager, Tim (Jamie Demetriou), never seeks friendship in the first place. He’s a babysitter to a pop diva, and is willing to throw her under the bus the moment her personal failures threaten his own career. He doesn’t bother to check in with his client for over a week after she goes missing, and even after realizing it is only concerned with the PR optics. What if she’s dead? Who retains the footage rights? Can we do an Amy Winehouse thing? She doesn’t even need to be alive to promote the record. In some ways, the film posits, it’d be much easier for the label if she were dead.

Baumbach presents an increasingly bygone vision of celebrity. One in which a certain amount of fame and permanent status as an icon is rewarded with the privilege of being able to hide from the public eye. To be able to stop chasing attention and to have the press attempt and sometimes fail to chase you. There is no respite from fame in The Moment, however. A Kelly-like degree of fame in Charli’s world leaves one with no choice but to submit to the will of capital and to the endless cycles of promotion. It is one’s duty to join forces with the credit card for queer people.

Both films end with a montage of the protagonists’ work. In Jay’s case, the meta of it all climaxes in an Oscars-like recap of the real Clooney’s oeuvre4, framing his life on screen as a substitute for the real life he failed to have. His final breaking of the fourth wall, in which he asks if he can go again, can be interpreted as accepting that the real man dissolved long ago. He is only what is up on the screen. But there’s an artfulness to a life like that. It is his own work. His own creative choices, roles selected, characters studied, all adding up to a complete career — an honest to god body of work. Charli’s montage on the other hand is dystopian, flyover hogwash caked in Amazon logos and pull-quotes from Penske publications. Her own music is absent in favor of “Bittersweet Symphony.” Her “cunt” supers have been reduced to the more palatable “Bitc#” and her wardrobe made PG enough for mainstream advertising channels. She is restricted from living the art she sought to create, doomed to hand it over to a vast network of approval committees, because the current mode of celebrity means throwing yourself on the gears of the content mill.

When there’s a living billboard in everyone’s pocket, the line between awards circuits, album cycles, and the grunt work of the art done between them vanishes. Sure, George Clooney will poke his head out of his mansion in Lake Como every so often to do corny shit like pretend he makes good tequila or to tell a sitting president to bow out of an election, but he’ll never pick a handful of movies in the Criterion closet.5 He’ll never eat hot wings with a bald robot, or eat fried chicken with a sarcastic British woman.

Charli doesn’t have that option. It’s not her fault. She was just born too late. In order to keep the train rolling, she’s gonna have to partner with the stevia soda. She’s gonna have to do the subway take. Because she has to. Because art with any form of institutional backing has ceased to pretend it’s anything other than a vessel to sell you shit, and in order to sell you shit, brat summer needs to go on forever. It has to. The system depends on it.

It was nearly sunset, and the NPR anchor gave me pause.

“A woman is in stable condition after she fell through the ice at Bolton Lake on Christmas Day,” he said. “Connecticut officials advise anyone spending time on icy bodies of water to exercise caution, and only go out when the ice is at least four inches thick.”

I shut off my car radio and looked out onto a local pond, which was about a five minute drive from my parents’ house. From a distance it seemed safe enough. Solid. Consistent. Golden streaks of light dappled through the treeline and reflected off the layer of fresh, powdery snow that sat on top of the water. I wanted to throw on my skates and rip out toward the center. But I had reason to be hesitant.

The first time I ever went ice skating I returned home with six stitches in my chin.

I was eight years old, and confident that I would be as graceful as the hockey players I watched nightly on television. I recall skating out onto the ice at a local rink with my sister, and within the first thirty seconds deciding I was a natural—and as a natural, it was only fitting that I’d be able to pull off a whooshing, snow-spraying hockey stop at center ice. But as I twisted my feet, the blades on my rental skates caught an edge, I tumbled forward, and the point of my chin smacked square on the ice.

I glided back to the boards, mittens stained with blood and tears, and any lingering dreams I might have had of playing left-wing for the Hartford Wolf Pack died. A different type of kid might have rushed back out to the ice the next day, but I wouldn’t lace the skates back up until about twenty years later. I’d decided ice skating was a sort of Rosebud for me. Something left unfinished, something I’d be thinking about on my deathbed if I didn’t exorcise it once and for all. So I caved to the past. I bought a pair of skates, and for four months straight, taught myself to skate at Prospect Park.

At first there was a lot of board-clutching. A lot of hands on knees to maintain stability, a lot of quivering ankles. Over time, though, it became an addiction. My stride smoothed out. My posture loosened. In time, gliding felt as natural as walking. Those winter nights at the rink soon faded to playing roller hockey with friends on basketball blacktops in the spring, joining pickup groups in the summer, and finding a rec league team when winter came back around. It seemed like I’d gotten the weight off my back. That I’d sidestepped those long term regrets.

But there was still something gnawing at me. Something left undone. It was the Peanuts fantasy. That idyllic notion of skating on a pond in the dead of winter. On thick, black ice, where pillows of snow blanket the banks of the water, where barren maples and lush evergreens crowd overhead. It was the thought of playing hockey the way it was born. Skating the way it was intended. I wanted to skate somewhere without locker rooms. Without top 40 hits on the sound system, without birthday parties and hot cocoa sheds. The only thing standing in my way was a melting climate.

In my preliminary research, I learned that even on the rare occasions that the ice is thick enough in Brooklyn, it’s illegal for the average person to skate on it. My parents’ house, a few hours north in a woodsy patch of Connecticut, seemed the obvious solution. Surely it’d get cold enough. Surely I’d drive by a pond or two at Christmastime and find groups of kids playing hockey, the way I remember they did, twenty years back. For the two winters that followed, I found myself periodically checking an obscure Facebook group called “CT Ice Fishing Report,” where men in Oakley sunglasses and steel-toed Timberlands regularly post ice thicknesses across bodies of water in New England. What I found most often were groups of people bemoaning the state of things. Ice that was too thin. Ice that only cropped up much later in the season. Ice that vanished as soon as it arrived. Multiple Christmases, New Years, and Valentine’s Days passed by in which I turned to the Ice Fishing Report, only to see another goateed dad writing the grim words, “Not enough yet. Check back soon.”

Everyone knows the planet is melting. We’ve seen snowfall graphs trend downward over the course of the last decade. Since moving here, I’ve seen New York’s winter climate morph seemingly overnight from Januaries with routine blizzards, to Januaries littered with rainy, forty degree days. We’ve all been made to reckon with the unfathomable destruction and climate-induced disasters that warming has forced on the world, but it wasn’t until I spent years waiting for the opportunity to skate on unrefrigerated ice that I was able to recognize its effects on the mundane. That the natural world, even outside disaster, has begun to possess a strangeness. An uncanniness.

This past Christmas, however, the old Earth showed face for a moment. Bursts of arctic air were set to blow through the Northeast, and for a week straight, the highs in my parents’ part of the state would be in the teens, with the lows in the single digits. And after a few agonizing days of waiting, when the ice fishers continued writing, “Not enough,” a few posts began to sprinkle into the mix that read, “All safe. Good to go.”

Soon enough I found myself at a nearby pond at sunset, bundled up, listening to an NPR anchor describe a woman in stable condition after falling through the ice.

With my hands in my pockets, I walked out to the ice, staying close to the edge, approaching a drilled hole where an ice fisher had recently been. I punched my hand through a thin, frozen film on the hole’s surface and dipped my hand into the water. Right away I could see the ice was as thick as the length of my palm—roughly four inches. All safe. Good to go. I sprinted back to my car, slipped on my skates and carved my way out in a mad dash to the pond’s center. Crossing over, stopping on a dime. Spraying clouds of snow. Skating aimless figures of eight as fast as I could, throwing myself onto my stomach and gliding around the smooth translucent surface. I was breathless, frozen, sweaty, and my face had grown numb.

It was somehow better than I’d imagined. But for the time being it’ll have to remain a memory.

When I got back to New York I immediately started making plans to return to Connecticut. Another polar vortex was going to come through soon, and two weeks of temps below freezing would all but guarantee similar conditions to what I’d just skated on. As such, I drove north again in the middle of January with a friend in tow, promising the same experience I’d just had.

The weeks of subzero temperatures, I learned, didn’t matter. A front of thick, wet air had blown in on the Friday that we drove up and melted the ice overnight. When we arrived, a flock of geese bobbed in a gaping hole in the ponds’ center, and what little ice was still intact could barely handle the weight of my foot. I broke through the surface, aware it wasn’t worth trying, and soaked my shoe with water that was warmer than I would have anticipated.

We drove around for a while, looking for smaller bodies of water that might have survived the overnight melt, but it was useless. There was no black ice to be found. Only thin layers of slush, all of it spelling disaster.

Who knows, I thought. It could be years before I see another good freeze.

After skating the pond I thought at the very least that I’d transcended all my lingering regrets. I was wrong, I think. I think I still regret not getting back onto the ice when I was a kid. Not learning back when I could have enjoyed it. In the days when I’d sit in the back seat of my father’s station wagon and see kids in Bruins jerseys and pom toques passing pucks across black ice. When it was an expected sight in winter. When the world was a few degrees cooler on average. When the ponds still froze.

You’d think we’d all be happy. After all, this is a team that lost five games in a row to start the season. A team that was eleven games under .500 in June and 12.5 games outside of first place by the All-Star break. Surely every Mets fan is in bliss finding themselves tied in the NLCS against the Dodgers, a team whose shoelaces New York wouldn’t have been allowed to tie back in May. 

But no. Bliss is for Yankee fans. Bliss is for the baseball fan who doesn’t write about replacing religion with the Mets and those who haven’t had their hearts broken again and again, in increasingly agonizing fashion. 

Mets fandom is a collective of self-flagellating, neurotic hysteria, and I say this with all love in my heart. In the collective, disordered consciousness of Mets fans, no lead is safe and no deficit is surmountable. Every win is a gift and every loss is thought to be the beginning of history’s worst losing streak. A cursory glance at Twitter these past few weeks is all one needs to observe this phenomenon. The search term “Mets + heart attack” results in dozens of tweets about nearly fainting while watching the Mets in the past 24 hours alone:

One user’s post re-contextualizes a clip from The Departed in which Leonardo DiCaprio (now superimposed over Citi Field) claims, “I’m having panic attacks, last night I thought I was having a heart attack, I puked in a trash barrel on my way over here.”

This all said, make no mistake. These past few weeks—though they’ve sprouted more than their fair share of gray hair—have been some of the most fun baseball I’ve ever witnessed, and some of the most meaningful. The consensus around this cobbled together team is that there’s something “magic” about them. They’ve been called a “team of destiny.” I don’t believe in magic and I’m not convinced there’s such a thing as destiny, but I do believe in defying the odds, and I do believe in cherishing the improbable.

As the end draws near, however, and as a time approaches in which the Mets will either be crowned baseball’s champions or left to pick up the pieces in the offseason, I find I’m reminded of a 1977 essay by Bart Giamatti titled “The Green Fields of the Mind.” Giamatti traces the final day of the Boston Red Sox’s season that year, when their playoff hopes were dependent on the final game of the regular season. He contends that summer is never really over so long as there is baseball to follow—that a chill October rain feels like a warm sun in the presence of the game—but when it ends, one is forced to face the quiet and freezing winter ahead: 

Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.  

I return to this essay at the end of every baseball season, usually tearfully, and its hold on me has only grown in the fifteen years since I first read it. The weight of its observations—particularly that as one gets older, each summer possesses something of an autumn—bear down as I realize that there are only so many “next years” for my team to win it all. Only so many summers ahead, so many memories of center fielders leaping for a catch like a bird and so many cracks of the bat that burrow into your ears. 

Maybe that’s why watching this Mets team play feels like watching my own open heart surgery in real time. I don’t want it to end. I need to think something lasts forever, as Giamatti says. Win or lose, at some point they’ll shutter Citi Field until next season. They’ll cut the lights, they’ll tarp the field, and at some point a blanket of snow will cover the grass. The summer will pass. I’m sure of it. I’m just not ready to say goodbye.      

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According to Linus’ calculations in the 1966 television special Charlie Brown’s All Stars, Charlie Brown’s baseball team is the worst one in the history of the sport. They’ve lost nearly a thousand games, have a negative run differential in the hundreds, and rarely score more than three or four runs per outing. Much has been said over the years about Charlie Brown’s ineptitude as a manager, but what if we could isolate the diamonds in the rough? What if, in the spirit of fantasy baseball, we ignored Charlie Brown’s pitiful instincts for roster assembly and devised our own teams? Who among this band of precocious boys, gals, and beagles would be worth drafting and who would be worth little more than a dugout space heater? Let’s do a mock draft to find out.

For our purposes, let’s say this is a fantasy baseball league in which there are four teams consisting of four players per team—one infielder, one outfielder, one pitcher, and one bench slot. In terms of scoring, let’s say this league plays classic 4x4 rotisserie: Runs, Home Runs, RBIs, Stolen Bases; Wins, ERA, WHIP, and Strikeouts.

Using MLB-equivalent players as a base, we’ll later calculate a Z+ score and projected category points to determine which team would be most likely to take home the championship.   

So, without further ado, let’s start the draft clock:

Round 1, Pick 1 - Snoopy - IF/OF

The best option on the board and it’s not even close. On a team full of duds, Snoopy is the shining star in the bunch, having hit 713 career home runs, one shy of Babe Ruth’s record.

He hits for power, he steals bases, and he’s not afraid to bite a child in the name of stretching a double into a triple. This is hard-snout baseball at its finest. If you don’t believe me, ask why Peppermint Patty was willing to trade five players to Charlie Brown’s team in exchange for Snoopy—more than that, ask why Charlie Brown still felt he was getting the shit end of the stick in the trade.

MLB Equivalent: Ronald Acuna Jr.

Round 1, Pick 2 - Pig Pen - IF

According to the stat books, Pig Pen once hit .712 in a season. This alone might make one wonder why he isn’t first-overall material—after all, if he steps up to the plate with a few runners on the pond, you’re staring down a 70% chance of nabbing at least two RBIs. These are unheard of numbers worthy of any manager’s attention. My only hesitation is how rarely we see Pig Pen actually bat. Is this a large enough sample size? Did he have enough plate appearances to qualify as a league leader, or was he stuck on the IL with ringworm for half of the season? He’s the league’s best pure hitter, but the ever-present possibility of MRSA looms large. Proceed with optimistic caution.  

MLB Equivalent: Juan Soto

Round 1, Pick 3 - Peppermint Patty - IF/P

Peppermint Patty is the inverse of Charlie Brown—just as obsessed with baseball, but better in every way. She can pitch, she can hit, and as a manager she knows how to set a lineup and field a team. Anything Charlie Brown can’t do, Peppermint Patty can.

While playing as a substitute for Charlie Brown’s team, Peppermint Patty once hit five home runs in a single game (the team lost 37-5). This is a dynamic pickup who can play any position with no caveats. 

MLB Equivalent: Shohei Ohtani

Round 1, Pick 4 - Lucy - OF/P

Charlie Brown’s reports that Lucy is “the worst baseball player of all time” are highly exaggerated and mostly projection. She’s shown she can hit for power (she once creamed the ball to a chicken pox-stricken Schroeder in dead center field without making much of a fuss about it), and she’s shown she can pitch—albeit with the assistance of a foreign substance in the form of Snoopy’s saliva. Her major downfalls are her poor fielding abilities and her tendency to strikeout more often than most other players on the team. In fantasy, however, fielding stats aren’t tracked and her strikeout count feels no worse than Aaron Judge’s notoriously bad chase rate. She produces when it matters. Take the lone drawback for what it is.

MLB Equivalent: Aaron Judge

Round 2, Pick 1 - Linus - P

We’ve seen Linus pitch during Charlie Brown’s case of Little Leaguer’s Elbow as well as when Charlie Brown pulled himself on account of nerves after noticing the Little Red Haired Girl in the stands, and within that small sample size, Linus has been nothing short of dominant, often striking out the side in any given inning. Round 2 is the perfect time to start hoarding elite pitchers and Linus appears to be the best of the bunch. 

MLB Equivalent: Tyler Glasnow 

Round 2, Pick 2 - Shermy - DH, UT

Shermy has always been the Wonder Bread of the Peanuts universe. As far as personality goes, he’s bland, non-specific, not terribly funny, yet always present and always involved. When it comes to baseball, you’re looking at more of the same: a good, solid hitter who’s going to set your team up for success. At the end of Charlie Brown’s All Stars, Shermy flexes his mettle. The ball explodes off his bat, and if not for Charlie Brown completely botching a steal, Shermy might have looked like a hero. 

MLB Equivalent: Freddie Freeman

Round 2, Pick 3 - Franklin - OF

In 1998’s It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown, Franklin is shown smacking a line drive to center that sparks a five-run rally. He’s also shown rapping in what might be one of the most unwatchable Peanuts sequences ever animated, but that’s beside the point.

In a strip from April 1969, Franklin’s team was on the wrong-end of a rare Charlie Brown victory when Franklin couldn’t field a team and was forced to forfeit. Charlie Brown considered this win a miracle. We can consider Franklin an elite outfielder with pop and speed.  

MLB Equivalent - Mookie Betts

Round 2, Pick 4 - Jose Peterson - IF

Peppermint Patty’s prodigy once hit .640 while living in New Mexico and .850 while living in North Dakota. You might ask yourself, if Jose Peterson puts up Pig Pen numbers, what is he doing down here in the late second round? Well… New Mexico? North Dakota? This kid moves to different states more often than he changes his underwear. If his family skips town you’ll be stuck replacing him with a player of far lower caliber. Teams 1, 2, and 3 already have their elite, high-average bats. This position is the perfect time for Team 4 to pick him up and take the risk.  

MLB Equivalent: Yordan Alvarez 

Round 3, Pick 1 - Schroeder - IF

If Schroeder ever dedicated himself to baseball, he’d likely be one hell of a catcher. As it stands, he’s far more concerned with Beethoven and playing piano etudes than constructing a good swing. He’s been shown to possess good power, but is prone to quitting the team on a moment’s notice. If he plays, he’ll produce. If there’s a symphony in town, you’ll be seeking a replacement. High risk, fair enough reward.

 MLB Equivalent: Willson Contreras

Round 3, Pick 2 - Charlie Brown - P

Time and time again, Charlie Brown has proven to be little more than a benchwarmer at best. He’s a complete liability with the glove, gets shelled so hard on the mound he gets his shirt blown off, and in one of the few instances in which he managed to get on base, he boofed a steal attempt while representing the tying runner in the bottom of the ninth. Bad instincts, bad batter’s eye, worse managerial IQ. To top it all off, he’s already had Tommy John surgery, so his pitiful pitching arm is already past peak. The best you can say about this kid is that he’s dedicated, often showing up to rainouts and complaining that no one else wants to play.

No one wants this kid—only issue? He’s the last pure pitcher on the draft board, and without a pitcher in the lineup, Team 2 has no choice but to take him.

MLB Equivalent: Patrick Corbin

Round 3, Pick 3 - Rerun - OF

Rerun is the ultimate Moneyball pick. The kid gets on base. On base means runs. Runs mean victory. In fact, Rerun is responsible for one of Charlie Brown’s few wins as his diminutive stature provided a strike zone so small that he was walked with the bases loaded. This is not a typical player, but if he gets on base and increases your run count, he’s a steal at this price. 

MLB Equivalent: Luis Arraez

Round 3, Pick 4 - Patty - OF

The non-mint variety of Patty bats behind Shermy in Charlie Brown’s All Stars and laces what appears to be a double in the gap. We don’t see Patty’s at-bats in the strip, so we’re left with a small sample size, but the scouting material we have shows a promising bat with plenty of upside. Since Team 2 has already selected Lucy and Jose Peterson, this pick rounds out a strong lineup.

MLB Equivalent: Lourdes Gurriel Jr. 

Round 4, Pick 1 - Thibault - IF

We don’t see Thibault in action except for when the little chump says girls can’t play baseball. This dude sucks and in real life would be dugout poison, but in fantasy only the stats matter. While we don’t have any concrete batting statistics for Thibault, we can look to the time when Peppermint Patty chastised Marcie for clobbering her second baseman. If Peppermint Patty is putting up with a bully like Thibault, the kid must be producing.

MLB Equivalent: Ketel Marte  

Round 4, Pick 2 - Joe Shlabotnik - UT

Joe Shlabotnik, Charlie Brown’s major league hero, should certainly be a better player than a bunch of overly cerebral children, right? Maybe. But in all his years in the bigs, he only ever got one hit and sobbed when Charlie Brown told him he was his favorite player. He’s washed up, past his meager prime, and who knows if he could even sock the ball out of a Little League infield. Consider this a bench slot with high upside if he can pull it together. 

MLB Equivalent: Kris Bryant

Round 4, Pick 3 - Woodstock - OF

This is a gamble. In a similar vein as Rerun, Woodstock is going to give the pitcher a miniscule strike zone and he’s probably going to get on base rather frequently (he’s often bowled over by the baseball, officially scored as a hit-by-pitch). Unlike Rerun, however, it’s difficult to trust Woodstock will make it to second base without being flattened. Take a chance, slot him into the bench, and monitor his numbers. 

MLB Equivalent: Tim Locastro

Round 4, Pick 4 - Marcie - UT

Throughout the strip’s run, Marcie begs Peppermint Patty to not have to play baseball. She is routinely ignored, however, often stuck in the outfield as a warm body and often used as trade bait whenever Peppermint Patty tries to strike a deal. She may not know how to hold a baseball bat, but she’s not going to do any damage to your team so long as your core roster stays healthy.

MLB Equivalent: Joey Wendle

THE TEAMS

Team 1: 

• Snoopy, OF

• Linus, P

• Schroeder, IF

• Thibault, BE
  

Team 2: 

• Pig Pen, IF

• Shermy, OF

• Charlie Brown, P

• Joe Shlabotnik, BE

Team 3: 

• Peppermint Patty, P

• Franklin, OF

• Rerun, IF

• Woodstock, BE

Team 4: 

• Lucy, P

• Jose Peterson, IF

• Patty, OF

• Marcie, BE

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which the teams are broken down and season standings are predicted…

“With boxing, it happens all at once,” Dan Okrent writes in his introduction to the essay anthology Reading the Fights, “It happened on a stray Friday night, when you saw two men inside the television set hammer away at each other… It made your eyes pop, your jaw fall open. You could not take your eyes off it. You wouldn’t know this for years, but it was sort of like watching strangers have sex—it was repellent, and it was irresistible.”

My own obsession with boxing ignited at some point in 2014—in almost the exact fashion Okrent describes—and for the three years that followed I’m not sure I missed a single televised fight. I don’t just mean the big ones, either. I was known to waste Saturday nights watching shit like Dierry Jean vs. Jerry Belmontes, or Danny O’Connor vs. Chris Gilbert. If you’re a boxing fan and have never heard of any of those people, I wouldn’t blame you. Only a hyper-fixated freak would have paid attention to these bouts, and at the time I was one of the insatiables. During this era I maintained a handwritten diary of every fight I’d ever watched which included my personal scorecards, I wrote and released two concept records about boxing, I nabbed a part-time staff writing gig for an online boxing magazine, and I published a blog in which I contextualized and traced narrative arcs of contemporary fighters’ careers, inspired by Pierce Egan’s nineteenth-century tome Boxiana, a sort of Lives of the Poets for fighters of centuries’ past. By all accounts, I was invested so deeply in this world that I was on the verge of making it my entire career.

Unfortunately I learned I couldn’t enjoy boxing without developing an urgent desire to get punched in the mouth. This boxing-manic era had the ill-fated timing to cross over with my life as a musician in the 2010s DIY scene. I was used to playing basement shows and planning events without anyone’s permission, and with access to a townhouse basement at the tail end of college, my friends and I decided to train and spar in our own homes.

The first instance of this was the most violent. Until this point, the extent of my boxing training had been hitting a heavy bag and watching youtube videos about fundamentals in my parents’ basement during intermittent teenage spurts, often fueled by a need to let off pent-up energy or lose weight. I’d never had any formal training, never been coached by anyone more experienced than myself, but had been fooled into the belief I could teach myself to box the same way I taught myself guitar or Photoshop.

My friend Dave was the first one who agreed to spar in the basement with me, but before we ever stared each other down in our makeshift concrete ring, I learned my first difficult lesson: ensure both combatants are aware of the stakes and the intended effort. In my mind, I thought using the word “spar” meant we had an understanding. When training for boxing, sparring’s intent is akin to playing tag with fists. It’s for figuring out your opponent’s habits, practicing your craft against someone who can hit back. It’s not for winning or losing, nor is it designed to lead to all out brawls. This, I came to learn, was not made clear. And so, that quiet January evening, with a thick winter snow blanketing the courtyard around our on-campus house, Dave and I wrapped and gloved our hands, slid mouth guards over our teeth, headgear over our faces, and led a small crowd into the basement so they could view what ultimately devolved into combat.

Someone observing from the cellar stairs kept the time. Three rounds, three minutes per round. When the bell rang off a nearby iPhone, Dave and I emerged from opposite sides of the basement, apprehensive. I recall pawing a jab or two, sending a lazy straight right hand his way, clipping his red foam headgear, and then—pow! A fusion of black and ultraviolet flashed in my vision, my neck snapped to the side and I stumbled around the basement as though I were aboard a steamship in stormy waters. I’d been hit, and hit hard. It was unlike anything I’d experienced. The impact didn’t inflict pain. Only a sharp thud, a moment of flashing blackness, and a ringing of the ears. My body entered panic mode and my heart began to pound.

“Pull ‘em back a little, bud, it’s sparring” I urged, trying to sound calm in front of a rapt audience. Perhaps the excitement had gotten the better of my opponent. Maybe I hadn’t properly explained what this was supposed to be. He nodded and we continued, but the force of his punches didn’t waver. Another one sailed in and clapped the left side of my jaw. My legs lost footing, my brain spun, and by that point, control over the situation had been lost. The adrenaline and hysteria consumed us both. We traded blows as if each one had slandered the other’s mother. Two hours before the fight, Dave shared dinner with a friend at a nearby Panera Bread. She took his picture before they left, telling him she wanted to keep a record of what his face looked like before someone else bashed it open. Looking into his eyes as he stalked me down in the basement, one would never have guessed that this same young man had only just finished eating soup from a bread bowl and listening to coffeeshop muzak. That same person had been reduced to a bloodthirsty boar. As he continued his assault, I did my best to remain patient. I noticed how open his guard was each time he rushed in with a right hook. Knowing I had to do something to keep him off of me, I exploited the pattern, thinking back on the youtube tutorials for uppercuts. Plant the foot. Twist the hips. Just as he began to throw another hook, I landed a clean, snapping shot square on the bridge of his nose. He backed up for a moment, holding his gloves aloft as if he were ready to push forward again, and a stream of blood gushed from his nose. At once, everyone in the basement came to their senses. We’d all seen enough.

Upstairs, drenched in sweat and blood, Dave held his head aloft over the sink, speaking in muffled tones from behind a wad of paper towels, repeating the same thing over and over again:

“We gotta do this more often.”

Someone possessing better self-preservation instincts than I did would have said no—that this in fact was both the beginning and end of our trials as amateur basement boxers. But in that moment I was glad he was as thrilled as I was. Once we admitted to exhilaration, the club re-convened with a handful of additional members on a near weekly basis, each of us donning the gloves in varied permutations of sparring partners. We drew up unwritten bylaws after Dave’s and my opening gambit—rules were instated about how hard one could hit, which punches were allowed and which ones were prohibited. Exercise was emphasized above all else and sparring sessions would end immediately if someone took too big a hit. Since no one wanted to be the guy who bloodied someone’s nose and sent everyone packing for the night, everyone pulled their punches as best as they could.

After a while I became the de facto coach for this band of misfit boxers. I led us all in jump rope drills, shadowboxing routines, and caught punches on the training mitts. Although I can only assume I did little but instill awful fighting habits in whoever who passed through the basement, this work only aggravated my fixations. I spent entire weekends torrenting VHS bootlegs of classic fights from the 1930s through the 1970s, usually studying lightweights and welterweights like Benny Leonard and Roberto Duran—men whose size and shape resembled mine and my friends’. I sought the poetics of the body. I wanted to understand the brilliance beneath the brutality, the magic lying beneath the pivot of a foot or a wave of the fist, and would analyze these tapes frame by frame, keeping meticulous time-coded notes hoping to discover how each fighter dismantled his opponents. When I wasn’t leading drills or sparring sessions in the basement, I was forcing club members to sit with me in the living room to analyze tapes together, helping them incorporate skills through osmosis. I began to log videos of everyone’s sparring and corrected their mistakes after reviewing the footage. Over time I saw improvement among those in my roster. A heavyweight who had once been slow, easy for the middle and welterweights to pick apart, suddenly found himself lacking eager sparring partners because he’d developed a quick, piston-like jab. One of my frequent sparring partners whose height and weight mirrored my own began to understand the mechanics of footwork to such a degree that I could no longer keep him within striking distance. Noticing these developments, my mind flew off the handle at the possibilities. What if I took my proteges to a real boxing gym? What if I paired them off with legitimate fighters and what if we tried to make a run at some local amateur matches?

Even then I knew, however, that flights like these were a fool’s undertaking. Sure, we’d made decent strides scratching the surface of boxing’s basic principles, but at heart we were a bunch of eggheads whose tendencies to think, study, and analyze were incongruous with boxing, which I was coming to realize was a sport built on creative instinct. We could sit on a jab, but we couldn’t add in a looping right hand. We could pivot out of a corner, but couldn’t keep an opponent stuck against the ropes. Whenever I watched videos of our sparring sessions, I saw that we were stiff, clunky, leaden of foot. By comparison, even junior amateur boxers were fluid. They stood on the balls of their feet and danced around the ring in brutal, balletic flashes. Their bodies spoke a violent language whose grammar I did not know, would never learn, and would remain incapable of teaching. When graduation rolled around, the club fizzled out with little ceremony. We kicked around the idea of joining boxing gyms in New York for a while, and when I realized my first apartment in Brooklyn was spitting distance from a gym that has produced Golden Gloves champions, the idea of paying a monthly fee to get punched in the face tempted me for weeks. In the end, one day we all stopped talking about it, we stopped reminiscing on it, and the subject was never broached again.

When I think back on those nights and weekends spent with my friends, slapping each other senseless in a basement, I wrestle with two opposing viewpoints. In one sense, this short-lived club (though it remains the dumbest, most dangerous undertaking I’ve ever devised, one that could only have been thought up by a handful of twenty-year-old males who had yet to recognize their own mortality) was one of the most invigorating experiences of my young life. But in other ways I reflect on this phase with a deep embarrassment.

When I first entered the basement, I wanted to see how boxing’s engine worked. I wanted to learn uppercuts the way one learns to throw a curveball or sink a six-foot putt. Everything I absorbed down there, however, only seemed to push me away from boxing. Standing in front of another person whose sole aims are to hurt you is a terrifying proposition and for many fighters, the ring is their only avenue out of poverty. My friends and I had the privilege to let boxing escape our lives as if it were any other hobby—like pickup basketball or chess in the park—something we no longer had time for in our adult lives. I realize now we were tourists in a world not ours. As a boxing fan I had the opportunity to watch a generation of fighters rise up and wither away, and now every time I think about the basement, I consider how every fighter I’ve ever admired is still down there in a sense. Because most fighters never leave the basement. They’re born there, they struggle there, and they die there.

In a 1993 author’s note for a re-print of his book Shadow Box, George Plimpton describes a visit he paid to Muhammad Ali in 1984, who was then suffering from Parkinson’s—a direct, tragic result of his quarter-century long career in the ring. Plimpton writes:

After the visit I quit covering the fights for good, much less going to them for pleasure. Every time I saw Ali on television, usually sitting silently ringside at a championship bout, I was reminded that Oscar Wilde truly had it wrong: you don’t kill the thing you love (which is what he said), but rather what you love kills you.

It’s been three years since I’ve watched a professional bout and I can say with some confidence that streak won’t end any time soon. I don’t take a moral stance against the sport—I don’t believe in its abolition and I don’t look down upon those who love it. I loved it once, too. It just killed me in the end.