This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $79.95
using your PayPal account or major credit card. This is the best time
to become a Newsletter subscriber -- playoff coverage has been where it
shines for 15 years!
--
Kerkering booted the ball, threw to the wrong base, then tried to hit Sandy Koufax on the fly. He did all this in the time it took you to read that sentence.
Ballplayers make mistakes, even silly ones, even ones that cost ballgames, turn wins into losses. They play 162 games, though, so there’s always tomorrow. That’s the whole culture of baseball, go get ‘em tomorrow. We do this every day. For Kerkering, though, as it was for that sunburned teenager in the summer of ’84, there is no tomorrow. That was the final play of the season, his stacked errors finishing off the 2025 Phillies, maybe even finishing off this era of Phillies baseball. He doesn’t get to go get ‘em tomorrow. He doesn’t get to go get ‘em for six months.
