The first season of Out in Left

Lessons learned and what's next as the 2023 baseball season ends

Why I started Out in Left

A passage from Roger Angell’s analysis of the 1975 World Series was the immediate inspiration for Out in Left. It’s why I built my first piece around it. Angell, who worked for The New Yorker in some capacity for seventy-some years, showed through his essays how baseball reflects and embodies American life. In this way, politics are central to the story of sport.

The problem is, Angell is dead and so is long-form nonfiction writing as a mass consumer product. That’s especially true for sports writing. The New Yorker is still kicking and occasionally covers sports, but Sports Illustrated was reduced to an ad-infested corpse by private equity firms, ESPN killed off Grantland in 2015 (please excuse me, I’m still grieving), and even The New York Times recently disbanded its sports department. The paper’s $348 million profit last year apparently can’t support the thirty-five sports reporters and editors whose jobs were put in peril.

I don’t believe that people have lesser attention spans today and that we no longer have capacity for consuming long-form content. I do believe that there’s more distraction than ever—leave it to capitalism to spin the impacts of exploitative apps as personal pathologies—and that the traditional business models for long-form writing are broken. It’s encouraging, then, to see sports writers like Marc Stein, Molly Knight, and Joe Posnanski finding refuge on Substack, and the best corner of the internet might be author George Saunders’ Story Club. As they’ve always had, the people want and consume good writing.

These rationalizations are irrelevant when I simply love producing content in this style, and I am good at it. It’s what I grew up reading, and I miss it. It helps me better understand the world, and it relieves my anxiety. If there is going to be a next Roger Angell, then I’m going to make sure that I’m in the running for it.

Looking back at Out in Left this year

I serialize Out in Left because:

1. It differentiates content. Game recaps, news analyses, and roster intrigue are important, but there is plenty of that in the world across blogging networks, YouTube, social media, and podcasts. I have a full-time job outside of sports, so I couldn’t do that sort of coverage if I wanted to. Numbering my essays is intended to give them an episodic rather than a reactionary feel, which allows me to post less frequently.

2. Essays last longer. Recaps, analyses, and rumors become irrelevant quickly and as a historical artifact they are disorienting. Reread, say, years-old tweets and the characters, outcomes, dramas, and references often seem trivial, if not alien. Essays can still land years later. Angell’s assessment of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox is as relevant and moving today as it was fifty years ago. 

3. It’s a baseball metaphor. The numbering scheme mirrors baseball’s counting: balls, strikes, out, innings, etc. Like baseball games, my essays can feel interminable and can theoretically never end.

So how did it go in the first season? I gained subscribers after each post and the essays with better headlines and a clearer connection to place got more views—who’d of thought? My post on the history and impact of San Diego’s ballparks is my most-read. I also had better statistics when I linked to posts on Twitter/X.

At the same time, Twitter/X has become a fascist cesspool and I am not be actively using it, and I underestimated how difficult it is to build a readership outside of my personal network. None of my posts popped, so to speak, which made me realize the importance of frequent, consistent posting. I am going to experiment with a weekly format soon, but in any case I’ll keep plugging away. 

What’s next and call to action

Another insight I gained was that most of my views come from email subscribers or referrals. That makes you uniquely positioned to help Out in Left grow. I’ve drafted prompts that you can use when sharing it with people you know:

• For the sports fan in your life: “Since you cheer for the [insert sports team] and you only know pain, I think you’d love Out in Left. It was started by a guy who thinks way too much about baseball and politics and the concept doesn’t really make sense, but it’s unique and mostly sticks the landing. You should join me as a subscriber.”

• For the politics junkie in your life: “Since you’re a [Democrat/liberal/progressive] and you only know pain, I think you’d love Out in Left. I know you think sports are for troglodytes, but it’s a publication that combines leftist politics and baseball and it’s on a crusade to take sports back from MAGAs and billionaires. You should join me as a subscriber.”

• For the normal person in your life: “This is good. You should subscribe to it.”

My goal is for Out in Left to be the most-read free sports publication on Substack because:

1. It’d be a middle finger to the private equity firms and institutional investors that don’t tolerate long-form sports content. 

2. I want to build an audience for when my time in public service is one day finished so I can live as a writer.

But free does not mean worthless. I dedicate much of my free time to writing, and I try my best to not waste your time reading something of mine. That is what makes your referring Out in Left to five people important to me.

I am posting soon the first installment of a two-part series on how professional baseball in the United States should exist as an institution and how it should exist in our communities. I’ve worked on these ideas for almost a year and I hope that investment is rewarded with greater readership. 

Thank you, and Go Phillies.

- Brendan