Hooray, it's a sports-heavy edition of the newsletter! Or, depending on your point of view — boo, sports.

Look, I try to mix it up a bit, but you gotta go where the spirit moves you, and this is what's on my mind this week. If it's any consolation, the sports stuff is only tangentially about sports, and mostly me complaining about a book I read. That part's cool, right?

If you were to ask me what's been the best atmosphere at any game I've attended, I would have no shortage of contenders. I've seen A's walk-off wins in the playoffs — no, really, I swear it happened — and a combined no-hitter at a random Astros game. I was at the Cal game where Marshawn Lynch commandeered a golf cart to celebrate a last-second Bears win. I've even been present for an oft-circulated baseball blooper.

And yet, any list of electric sporting events I've been to would have to include the Portland Thorns matches at Providence Park.

I've been to a Thorns playoff match, and that was certainly a great day out, but honestly, any game there will do. My first Providence Park visit was in 2016 for a run-of-the-mill regular season match against Seattle. Most of the big-name stars were MIA, as they were competing for their various national teams at the Rio Olympics. And yet, about 18,000 people crammed the stadium near to capacity.

Go to enough sporting events — your NBA games, your baseball tilts, especially anything involving football — and the mood can feel pretty aggro. Your average fan is a pretty angry fellow, ready to mix it up verbally or otherwise with anyone foolish enough to wear the opposing team's gear. I'm a pretty even-keeled fellow when it comes to these sorts of things, and my typical stance at Cal football games is to sit in the stands with my arms folded, waiting for some disaster to unfold. And for the most part, Cal never fails to disappoint when it comes to being disappointing.

Thorn games — and indeed, women's soccer on the whole — are markedly more joyful. You get chanting and singing from the kick-off to the final whistle. The chants are fairly positive — there is one exception, in which Portland fans make their feelings about Seattle vividly clear — and the vibes are immaculate. 

If you haven't given an NWSL match a try, I heartily recommend it and wish I could attend more Bay FC matches down in San Jose. (I went to a Thorns-Bay FC tilt about two years ago, using nothing but public transportation to get from Point A to Point B. Including transit time and the match itself, it took me seven hours to get from door to door — proof once again that anything happening in Santa Clara County may as well be taking place on Saturn, as far as I'm concerned.)

I bring all this up, because women's professional soccer finds itself in a tricky position right now. As Jeff Kassouf notes for ESPN, the NWSL is trying to walk the line between expanding its fan base and retaining the corps of diehards that have been supporting the league for years. 

This is not a unique position for women's sports specifically — the WNBA has been enjoying its own boom, complete with its own set of growing pains — nor is it specific to sports. Indie bands start playing larger venues. Your favorite local spot where you used to be able to walk and drop down at a table gets some glowing write-ups, and suddenly there's a three-hour wait in line. Things grow in popularity, but lose a little bit of that indescribable, intimate quality that made them so appealing in the first place.

I've rolled my eyes at some of the NWSL missteps, like its ill-considered energy drink partnership. Trying to find matches on the ever-shifting roster of broadcast channels can be a bit of a bother, too. But I've long since aged past the "Oh, so you're a fan, eh? Name your five favorite Marta dives" phase. The quality of play in the NWSL remains high, the matchgoing experience is still top drawer, and the league's efforts to increase the number of teams hasn't yet veered into the pyramid scheme-like farce that is MLS expansion. The more, the merrier, I say. Let the obscene chants about Seattle echo through the crowd.

A few newsletters ago when I talked about attending an Oakland Roots game, I mentioned that I was reading Goodbye, Oakland, which looks at how all of Oakland's major sports teams departed in rapid succession. I said it wasn't shaping up to be a very good book, and I'm afraid the situation didn't improve in the latter chapters. Goodbye, Oakland turned out to be one of the worst books I've read in some time.

It didn't have to be that way, as the topic — how and why a major American city goes from hosting NBA, NFL and MLB franchises to none at all in the span of a few years — is rich with possibilities, from looking at the economics of professional sports in the U.S. to exploring what cities prioritize and choose to fund. The definitive book on Oakland's sports scene would give a brief history on how each of the teams landed in the city, why they began looking elsewhere, and what ultimately caused them to pull up stakes. You'd also want the book to explore if anything could have — or even should have — been done to prevent the Warriors, Raiders, and Athletics from going elsewhere.

Alas, authors Dave Newhouse and Andy Dolich are not interested in that kind of book. Goodbye, Oakland is more of a polemic, which would have been forgivable if it were a well-written one. But even that's too high a bar for the book to clear.

In fairness to the authors, they're trying to write a story about a news event that's still unfolding. Goodbye, Oakland originally came out in 2023, when the fate of the Athletics was still up in the air. The paperback edition that I read came out two years later, and to the writers' credit, they updated what they could. But they also left in a lot of the interviews from the 2023 edition, which end up coming across as rather out-of-date and contradictory to the updated text.

Better organization might have helped. Rather than follow an orderly timeline, Goodbye, Oakland flits from topic to topic with no apparent connective tissue. The first chapter of the book is all about Al Davis, followed by a chapter recounting great moments in Oakland sports history, then a section on Charlie Finley, and right after that, a pair of Oakland city council members offering their unchallenged opinions about the state of things. You could land on the disabled list with that kind of whiplash. 

Some of what the book includes seems off-topic — a chapter on the late football coach John Beam certainly gives an overview about an interesting man, but a profile on the Laney College football coach doesn't feel that germane to why the professional-level Athletics, Raiders and Warriors are playing elsewhere. An entire chapter focuses on boxer Andre Ward for a reason the authors chose to keep private. (Ward's against Oakland losing its teams, for the record.)

Really, this reads like a collection of columns cobbled together in book form — not surprising since Newhouse has been a columnist since I was a small child. But the end result is a not very cohesive series of essays that are long on opinions, but short on facts or insight. What few nods to economics there are in the book are vastly outflanked by innumerable appeals to vibes.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs" does some pretty heavy lifting there. And the subsequent analogy falls apart when you consider that the Goodbye, Oakland authors are comparing actual building blocks of industry to sports franchises — which are nice additions to a city to be sure, but more of a cultural benefit than an economic one.

The good news, I guess, is that there's still a great book to be written about the history of the Oakland sports scene — because Goodbye, Oakland falls well short of the mark. 

That's far too many words about bad writing. Here's a few bullet points directing you to more interesting topics.

Promoting other people's writing before my own? Is that even allowed? Well, that's how we organized things this week. There are no rules anymore.

At any rate, in my never-ending commitment to converting every aspect of my life into content, my wife asked for and received wired earbuds on a recent gift-giving occasion. Why not the wireless earbuds that are currently in fashion? That's what I ended up exploring on behalf of Wirecutter, in which I make the case for wired earbuds over their wireless counterparts.

Meanwhile, what started as a pandemic-era project for me, Jason Snell and David J. Loehr to maintain some semblance of human contact while under quarantine now enters its sixth year of detailing each and every episode of the original run of Magnum, PI. The latest installment of the podcast merely teases our new batch of episodes, but count on a summer-long run as we work our way through the back catalogue.

Jason did the math and figured that it will take us two more seasons to cover all 162 Magnum, PI episodes. After that, I guess we scatter to the four winds — or start talking about Miami Vice. It could go either way.

When I flip on the TV at night, I don't always want to watch something involved and intricate. Sometimes, I just want something that will keep me relatively entertained without requiring me to break out a corkboard, some pushpins, and a spool of red string to keep track of all the plot devices and narrative mythology. Weirdly, my latest example of a show where I can tune in and tune out airs on PBS — an eight-episode reboot of The Count of Monte Cristo.

This is not to suggest that this PBS Masterpiece offering is a low-rent effort. It's a fairly elaborate production featuring an international cast and some jaw-dropping scenery with Malta standing in for the south of France. But as far as storylines go, things are pretty straightforward — Edmond Dantes is falsely accused and imprisoned for many years before escaping and relentlessly pursuing vengeance against the people who conspired to land him in prison. There's not a lot of nuance going on here.

("Phil," long-time readers might observe. "Between Count of Monte Cristo this week and Munich last week, you sure are watching a lot of shows that have revenge at the heart of their themes. Is there something you're trying to tell us?" No, not at all — so far as you know. <Stares broodily across the Mediterranean.>)

As I'm a bit outside of the intended age range for The Hunger Games, I was not familiar with Sam Claflin's work up until now, but he's suitably perturbed as the titular count, and the team of helpers he's assembled to carry out his plots is fun to watch. While mostly faithful to the book, the TV series does tighten up the second half of the story — it was fairly clear that Alexandre Dumas was being paid by the chapter back when people had nothing better to do than wait around for serial installments of a novel. It also helps that some of the more unsavory aspects of the book — the count hieing himself hither accompanied by the much younger lady friend he's freed from slavery to name one example — are rewritten to reflect the values of 21st century viewers. If you've got the PBS app and donate to your local station — and really, that's not a bad thing to do these days — The Count of Monte Cristo is well worth your time.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. To appropriate something I once saw online, when you seek revenge, be prepared to dig two graves. You'll need that upper body strength for all that revenge!