Edition No. 40 | November 3, 2023

Hey,

A couple of notes on this newsletter and business.

1. We have a new landing page. It’s awesome. It was built by Jason Page and Jeff Smith, both of whom are part of the Normal Sport team. If you have friends who you want to read this newsletter, that’s the place to send them. Also, they applied the same design to this newsletter, which should look a bit fresher today.

2. We actually decided to call our business and our brand Normal Sport. I know I have alluded recently to a rebrand and rename, but in the end we landed on what we already have. There is a long and arduous story behind that decision, which I will share at some point in the near future, but for now I’m extremely excited about the choice.

3. Normal Sport 3 is almost done (excerpt below)!

4. We have a November sponsor!

Frame Coffee is giving away multiple free 12-month coffee subscriptions to our readers. To be eligible to win, leave a comment on this tweet and refer at least three new people to the newsletter in the month of November.

We’ll keep track of how many folks you referred so you don’t have to. I’m doubtful that thousands of people will all refer at least three others (though that would be great!) so if you do hit the three-person benchmark, your odds of winning great free coffee for 12 months are going to be pretty good.

More on Frame: “Our mantra is to be a human-centered coffee business born out of a desire to increase access to specialty coffee. We’ve lived in coffee-producing countries, working on coffee farms. We’ve been buyers and sellers. We’ve been roasters. And we enjoy few things more than sitting down with a good cup of coffee.

“Our mission is simple: We want to connect you to coffee that is sourced with purpose, roasted with intentionality and offered to you for a price that you can enjoy regularly.”

Ed. note: It also just tastes amazing. I’ve been drinking it for about a month now, and it is tremendous.

You can earn free shipping and simplify your morning routine with a Frame Coffee subscription today.

Onto the news.

One Thing I Loved

For the last month, my household has been greatly enjoying the MLB Playoffs. We set up a projector and screen outside for the kids, who have been rooting for the Rangers and against the Astros throughout.

A confession: I have not really followed professional baseball since I stopped playing in the mid-2000s. I found it to be somewhat slow and always arduous to labor through 162 games and then the postseason. But when I took my kids to a Rangers-Angels game earlier this year, I was astonished by what the pitch clock and pace-of-play rules have done to the experience. This comes through on TV a little bit but is even more prominent in person.

One thing to keep in mind here is that the MLB pitch clock is fairly punitive. If the pitcher takes more than 15 seconds between pitches with nobody on base (20 with runners on base), a ball is automatically assessed to the count. No warnings, no nothing. Just the punishment.

Anyway, during Game 5, FOX broadcaster Joe Davis said something about the pitch clock that I had not considered. He spoke about how it forces pitchers to deal with their emotions and the momentum at hand in the moment and does not allow them to gather their thoughts and take a timeout of sorts. This is awesome because it forces discomfort, which almost always leads to drama no matter the outcome.

I don’t believe this was the intention of implementing the rule, but it is an amazing side benefit of having done so.

I have thought about this off and on over the last few months but finally went all in on the take during Game 5. I am convinced that golf needs this.

Major championship golf needs it. PGA Tour golf really needs it. The effect of a truly penal pace of play system in golf would be tremendous.

Andy Johnson of Fried Egg Golf has talked for a long time about how decision making is a skill, and the best golfers are almost always the best decision makers. For example, I believe of all the gifts Tiger contains, decision making is the most underrated. He almost always made the right call no matter the situation.

This is more difficult than it seems because, well, think about the emotions you were trying to control the last time you were 9 over and trying to decide whether to go for it or lay up on the 15th at your local muni.

Now extrapolate that to tour golf.

I put the take out there on Twitter, and Michael Kim (who is thoughtful and measured) responded with this.

As Michael implied, implementation here would be difficult, but there does seem to be a sense from everyone involved of, Well, it’s difficult so I don’t know let’s just maintain the status quo!

The problem on the Tour is not necessarily with the rule (allegedly, players have 60 seconds to hit a shot) but rather with the enforcement of it. All of it has just always seemed like a soft “you should kinda try to adhere to this” rather than baseball’s “we’re going to add a ball to the count if you don’t.”

This of course is the difference between a player-run organization and a non-player-run one. Do you think players want to do anything that creates more discomfort? Are players incentivized to think about you the fan or themselves, the player? A reminder, MLB players voted unanimously against the pitch clock.

In golf, I would say this mostly plays out on and around the greens. I have visions of Cantlay taking 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes to evaluate and hit a 32-foot chip. How about Scottie Scheffler with this 3-5 minute chip at the PGA Championship? I mean, what are we doing? It is exhausting for fans in attendance and infuriating for those watching on television.

Another problem is that there’s always a caveat. Well when it’s the final round of a major or the final hole of a regular event or when a player is trying to get a ruling or has a fried egg lie or when it’s windy or on Fridays.

No, it should just be that you have 45 seconds (or whatever) across the board. I don’t care if it’s the first round at Colonial or the final round at Augusta National. One caveat inevitably leads to 57 more.

Take the Max Homa shot on the finale at Marco Simone against Fitzpatrick. He actually played it pretty quickly, but imagine if he had 45 seconds from when he identified it to make a call, drop it and hit it. If you don’t do so, you get a shot added to your score. If you take another 45 seconds, you get another shot. Maybe you get two “timeouts” where you get an additional 45 seconds to make a call, but that’s it. That would be not only compelling and dramatic, but it would also make everything flow more quickly. Simply have a rule and enforce it.

This would enforce players to strategize more on the way to their ball. One note here is that players could walk more slowly to their ball, which is going to have to be penalized on a longer-term basis because a player could theoretically, by breaking time par on a hole, get his partner penalized, which could cause some real integrity issues. I do trust that the shame of not keeping up with your group in the moment will mostly solve for this.

Also, if you want to complain about how little time you have to get out of a bad situation, that’s part the consequence of putting yourself into that situation!

Just because Nathan Eovaldi has the bases loaded in the 8th inning of the most important game of his career doesn’t mean he should get extra time to throw the pitch. Don’t load the bases!

"If you're in the eighth inning of a World Series game, and somebody gets banged on a pitch-clock violation, that's not really what we're looking for," one anonymous player said.

I bet you’re not!

Man I’m fired up, and I’m not even totally sure why!

Golf is very soft when it comes to great players being in bad spots. Spieth at Birkdale comes to mind. Was it one of the great 20-minute stretches in major championship and Golf Twitter history? Yes. Would that exciting outcome have been similar if Spieth had only had 45 seconds plus a 45-second timeout to make a decision and get a number (imagine what this rule would do to Greller)? I think also yes!

I believe this would revolutionize pro golf. Truly, I do. In the same way that it doesn’t seem like a pitch clock should revolutionize pro baseball but it has. I also think players would hate it, which I understand, but my allegiance is to the product and making it better and not to their feelings.

But … who will adjudicate these rules? Well, the PGA Tour generates $1.5 billion in revenue every year so I’m sure there’s some room in there to care about the product. And that gets at the crux: The Tour (meaning the players and executives) cares about the product but I’m not sure they care enough about the product. It’s literally the only thing that matters. A lot of guys think they matter on an individual level, and the degree to which the overall product is more important than they are is almost comical.

I am being reductive and harsh here, but perhaps that is what is needed. The Tour has some real problems with its product, notably speed of play and television presentation. This would help with both of those. These are problems that have solutions, just not solutions that make the primary offenders very happy.

I could be wrong about how this would affect golf. I probably am. But a lot of people were wrong the other way about the pitch clock in baseball having a startling effect on the entertainment product the MLB is ultimately producing. Maybe it wouldn’t work the same for baseball, but man, I would like to see them at least try.

Normal Sport 3

Thought No. 129 from Normal Sport 3 comes from the PGA Championship …

The first few days at Oak Hill were fairly sleepy. Perhaps the weirdest and most entertaining thing that happened was Tom Kim looking like he was in charge of cleaning an oil spill in the Atlantic after emerging from a creek with mud up to his hips. I guess this gets at the primary reason we encounter so many Normal Sport moments in golf: Every other game, even if it is played outdoors, is in a controlled, usually fenced-in environment. Golf? [gestures at several forested acres of grass, dirt, mud, sand, water and feral animals] Good luck!

Crooked Golf Media

👉️ I enjoyed this on building a newsletter that people truly care about.

👉️ This pod in which Porath explains the Fried Egg vibe and business was really good. Porath never gives himself enough credit, but he’s very good at his job.

👉️ If you’re not reading Joseph LaMagna’s newsletter, you absolutely have to be. It’s the golf newsletter — among a pretty great list! — that I most look forward to reading when it comes out.

👉️ This from Jon Sherman hit me pretty hard. I feel it.

👉️ This on Alex Lieberman, who built Morning Brew, is really good and interesting.

How is This App Free?

This from Max amused me.

Haha, this is so perfect. Why’d they try to make SBF look like 2004 Andy Roddick?

This got me.

Business Idea

I realize this is a business for some folks, but taking old golf course designs like this of Pinehurst from the Society of Golf Course Historians and making them into posters and illustrations that we can buy is/would be very, very cool.

Normal Sport

This was a 200 MPH ball speed swing by the way. Possibly the longest pro in the world just getting after it in a Power Rangers costume. Very normal stuff.