Welcome to another week of Get Your Phil, the newsletter that can now boast of passing the two dozen subscriber mark. There are now dozens of you! Dozens!

I attended the inaugural World Baseball Classic back in 2006, watching the U.S. flame out in the second round of pool play in Anaheim. I sat in on two games — Mexico vs. South Korea and U.S. vs. South Korea — and since this was back when I insisted on keeping score at every game I attended, that meant mastering the intricacies of Korean names, which were fairly light on variety in this contest. If this U.S./Korea box score is anything to go by, the Korean starting lineup featured four Lees and two Kims; in the sixth inning, Ji Han Song made way for yet another Kim. This was my Sandy Koufax Throws a Perfect Game of keeping score. (The trick? Use initials — Bum Ho Lee becomes Lee, BH in your scorecard while Seung Yeop Lee becomes Lee, SY.)

What I remember most about those 2006 games — other than neat scorekeeping tricks — was the atmosphere. If you are going to invite teams to play games in the greater Southern California area, Mexico and South Korean are two good ones to choose, as both can claim extensive fan bases among the folks who've made a home in the Golden State. If it wasn't Korean fans bashing ThunderStix together — ThunderStix are banned at this year's installment, according to the linked PDF — it was the Mexican contigent banging drums and starting very enjoyable "Me-Hee-Co" chants. I even bought myself a Team Mexico T-Shirt, even though it was red and wearing anything red makes my face look like a burst blood vessel.

Even though a good time was had by all — well, not the sadsack Team USA that particular year — I haven't returned to subsequent World Baseball Classics, not even when the contest was held a short ferry ride from my house in 2013. I don't mind that the WBC exists, and sure, it's fun to aspire to having a FIFA World Cup-esque event for baseball, minus soccer’s rampant corruption. But given the time of year the event takes place and the restrictions put on pitcher use, it's hard to for me to view the WBC as anything other than a glorified exhibition, even if it is one with an amped up fanbase.

Mind you, mine is not a majority opinion, and I know many wonderful people, both in the real world and online, who are thrilled whenever a World Baseball Classic rolls around. You see the walk-off celebrations, and you can't help but smile. You watch Team Italy celebrate home runs by drinking an espresso and Team Great Britain donning palace guard hats, and you marvel that baseball is — for this tournament, at least — able to unclench its rear end for a moment. Maybe the WBC matters, maybe it doesn't — and to a lot of people, it very clearly does — but when everyone involved seems to be having a good time, what’s the harm in having such a tournament, friendly or otherwise?

Still, I think the World Baseball Classic needs to shed itself of its Spring Training identity. It simply doesn't do for a competition when Tarik Skubal, who has won the American League Cy Young Award two years running, only pitches in one game — a pool game against Great Britain that you or I could have started to no great impact on the outcome. Similarly, Paul Skenes will appear just twice, and not in the final, lest the WBC interfere with his preparation for the season.

So we have a situtation where fans take this event seriously. Players take it seriously — at least these who hail from countries outside of the U.S. But the folks running Major League Baseball teams most certainly do not, as they expect all those WBC participants to be in good working order once the season gets underway at the end of this month. And that explains all the restrictions on who and who can't participate.

I have a solution, and it simply means rejiggering the baseball calendar every three or four years when there's a WBC on tap.

Pool play can remain a part of spring training. It works well this time of year, getting people excited about the upcoming season. And really, as I alluded to when talking about Tarik Skubal mowing down hapless Brits, it's not like everyone needs to be in tip-top shape for the most worthy teams to advance.

But elimination games and the championship? Move that to midseason, maybe around the All-Star break. Just stop MLB play for a week to have your quarterfinals, semis and finals, ideally at whatever venue would host the All-Star Game that year. As for the All-Star Game, it's put on hold that season. WBC takes precedence.

There'd be issues to work around. MLB teams would still resist having their players expending energy in anything other than league games, but at least pitchers would have enough reps under their belts to throw more than a few cursory innings. You'd need to get sign off by other leagues around the world to suspend their competitions for that week or so, particularly in places like Japan, South Korea and Mexico. (Somehow, I think the Italian baseball league would be OK with the hiatus.) The WBC might still play second or third fiddle to the pennant race and World Series under the Philip Michaels Plan to Elevate Baseball Tournaments, but it would certainly show that Major League Baseball is taking its own event more seriously.

The Oscars take place this coming Sunday, and sadly, I'm in no position to wow you with my predictive skills since as of this writing, I have seen approximately 1.5 of the movies up for major awards. The 0.5 is The Secret Agent, which I am watching in bits and bobs, the way that directors intend for people to watch their movies. Don't let my terrible viewing practices dissuade you — The Secret Agent is very good, at least thus far, and barring a third act where the actors turn to the camera and express their grievances with me, the viewer, I figure it's going to stay that way.

As for the other nominees, what can I say? I don't get to the theater very much, and catch things when I can on streaming. I'll probably watch F1 this week, as my wife is out of town and has no interest in watching that picture, but the fact that it's a best picture nominee says more about the motion picture academy's lax standards than it does the quality of that movie. I don't really care for horror, so that explain the lack of screen time for pictures like Sinners and Frankenstein. I don't need to spend my free time grappling with complex father-child relationships, thanks, so Sentimental Value is right out. And Hamnet is about a dead child? HARD PASS.

Which leaves us with Marty Supreme as the only best picture nominee I've seen from start to finish as of this writing. Based on that rigorous research, I declare it the year's best film, with a 100% likelihood of error.

Actually, I found Marty Supreme a pretty good watch, if not exactly a relaxing way to spend 150 minutes or so of your life. I always appreciate movies that take a really off-putting character and make you actually care about what happens to them — Raging Bull is the best example of this genre — and no one is more off-putting than Marty Mauser. Through the course of Marty Supreme, he commits adultery, steals, betrays friendships, witnesses straight-up murder and self-sabotages at every turn — and you sit there thinking, "Man, I really hope it works out for this guy."

That's to the credit of Timothée Chalamet, the star of Marty Supreme, and really the primary reason to see the movie. He's apparently the front-runner for the best actor award and also the subject of last week's Worst Person on the Internet uproar over some comments about other art forms that didn't go over too well.

You know what, kid? All the ballet and opera people out there didn't feel particularly respected, as it turns out.

Look, you don't need me to join the pile-on that those are pretty dimwitted comments, even if you impose the We're Not Putting Him in Movies for His Critical Thinking Skills tariff. I will note that every Oscar season there seems to be some tempest-in-teapot moment like this, such as last year when best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón took some well-deserved heat for lousy social media posts about... well, everything.

Ultimately, Chalamet has only himself to blame for saying dumb things in public, but I can't help but feel that some publicist for a rival movie or studio might be fanning the flames on this particular controversy. If someone digs up a clip of Michael B. Jordan wearing an American Ballet Theatre sweatshirt or speaking passionately about Wagner's Ring Cycle, we'll know something's up.

I'm a long-time reader of Awful Announcing, a website focused on news and commentary for sports media. So it's a bit of a thrill for me to land my own Awful Announcing byline last week for a piece I did on Apple TV's F1 coverage. Basically, I wrote about how Apple tweaks its approach to sports streaming much as it fine-tunes products like the iPhone and Apple Watch, and we're likely to see that happen again with F1. I also speculate a little bit on whether Apple will ever land more mainstream sports to go with the soccer, auto racing and baseball it currently offers. (And yes, in terms of TV coverage, baseball is pretty niche on a national level, as most fans prefer watching local broadcasts.)

But enough of me giving the milk away for free. Go read the full article so I can keep convincing people to let me write for them.

Hard as it is to believe, other people write things, too, and some of them are even worth reading!

If it didn't come through in the opening bit about the WBC, I find myself going through a thorny patch with baseball, once the love of my sporting life. The frostiness was triggered by the Athletics' slow-motion departure from Oakland, leaving me without a rooting interest. Add the current favored style of play — big lumps of manmeat taking uppercut swings at baseballs with the hopes of launching them fence-ward as a steady parade of middling relievers handles the brunt of the pitching duties — is not aesthetically interesting to me. Baseball picked a poor time to be less fun to watch in terms of my ongoing fandom.

Last fall's World Series was pretty engaging, though, and I'm inching ever closer to finding a new team to root for, so I'm trying my best to get hyped up for the upcoming season. It seemed like a good time as any to read Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter I hold in pretty high regard.

Why We Love Baseball isn't going to reinvent the world of baseball literature, but that's not really the point. Rather, Posnanski is looking to spin some yarns about the grand old game, like a guy sitting next to you in the bleachers, trading memories about teams and players gone by. These are oft-told tales — Game 6 of the 1975 World Series gets its chapter, as does Babe Ruth calling his shot — but they're told reasonably well. It's a fine read, it really is.

And yet, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed the deeper I got into the book.

John Hodgman, the actor, podcast and one-time literary agent, has often remarked that books aren't always rigorously fact-checked. I used to think that he was exaggerating, but Why We Love Baseball may be Exhibit A in proving that allegation. Across 363 pages, I counted seven errors — not errors that required me to head to the nearest copy of Baseball Encyclopedia or spend an afternoon in an internet rabbit hole to suss out inaccuracies, but just things that made me say, "Well, that's wrong." Players misidentified as teammates, names flipped around — that sort of thing.

Here's an example from a chapter extolling the wonders of Ichiro Suzuki:

Most people — including whoever edited Why We Love Baseball apparently — would see nothing wrong with that passage. But if you were an A's fan 'round about 2001, you probably came way from that excerpt with one question: Who the hell is Ramón Ramirez? The answer is, that he's Ramón Hernandez, so at least the first name is correct. A .500 batting average would be magnificent in baseball.

It probably shouldn't matter that Posnanski misidentifies the batter, as it's just a stray detail in a story about what a wonder it was to watch Ichiro Suzuki play baseball. In the great scheme of things, it's no big deal. And yet, it still feels that way. If something like that is wrong, you think, what about the stuff I can't check? It makes the whole enterprise feel cheap and sloppy — I wish it didn't, but it does.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Back next time, hopefully with a lot less sports.