So I started a Substack and kicked it off with a bang through a piece cowritten with sports data journalist Isaac Schade.

Here’s how it begins:

The Mets have never loyally served Brooklyn as a team and that’s particularly poignant with the Dodgers beating the Yankees this World Series. Nor will the Mets ever serve Brooklyn. They serve Long Island and Queens. Though Brooklyn boasts a land mass almost double Chicago’s and a population equal to Chicago’s —  a city, by the way, with two teams — Brooklyn hasn’t had a team since Los Angeles stole the Dodgers. You start to wonder: could the Dodgers have been worth more simply by staying home? At peace with their true fans? 

Could the Brooklyn Dodgers have been worth more money than the Los Angeles Dodgers?

Certainly it’s a question that would interest the likes of Nate Silver, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lenny Rachitsky, Doomberg, Adam Tooze and others of their ilk for various reasons. It’s an odd cross-section kind of question.

So before one argues this is ancient, irrelevant history, it was at a recent Yankees game talking with a lifelong New Yorker that one of the authors realized how devastating losing the Dodgers truly remains in the living memories of those who grew up here in NYC. This particular New Yorker said losing the Dodgers was the hardest part of a tumultuous childhood: it was a fundamental betrayal of his town. Even Forbes has reported on this in the 21st Century.

It’s deep in there. Deeper, at least for this person, than the betrayals of his very own religious and educational institutions. Deeper than family hurts. Deeper than getting screwed out of business deals and getting the rug pulled out from under him by a foundation who had given a grant with strings attached.

Someone had stolen his childhood home team. Whodunnit?

Read the rest here.