oddball is back!
πππ Crack open a Zima because we're back, baybee!
For the uninitiated or those who simply forgot, Oddball was a Substack-based sports, trivia, and sports trivia newsletter created by the Kang and Kodos of sports trivia: Jonathan and Dave.
I'm the Dave half. Apparently I do this kind of thing in pictures now:
Oddball's first issue went live on April 3, 2019, just before the Toronto Raptors went on the miraculous playoff run that earned the franchise its first NBA championship and made every casual Raps fan borderline insufferable for three years. I was living in Montreal at the time. Jonathan was living in Toronto (and still is). We started Oddball because we were summarily dissatisfied with the state of sports trivia and because we wanted to do something together.
From that first issue:
Welcome to Oddball, a sports-interested newsletter written by Jonathan and Dave. As Trivial Pursuit was also the product of a Toronto-MontrΓ©al friendship, our expectations are high for this endeavour. And while we assume weβll strike out a lot, weβll definitely go yard a few times as well. Think Khris Davis, not Chris Davis.
πππ Fun fact: when we posted that, Khris Davis was coming off three consecutive 40+ HR seasons (42, 43, 48) and had hit 10 HR in Oakland's first 20 games. It really did look like he was going to make it four 40+ HR seasons in a row, but unfortunately Davis would go on to hit only 13 HR over the next 113 games, and, after the 2019 season ended, he would hit only 5 more HR (in 72 games). He officially retired in 2024 ββ and became an auto mechanic.
Anyway, not long after I moved back to Toronto in 2022, we put Oddball on hiatus because life was just too busy and our consistency was starting to slip. (This was mostly my fault. I was navigating a lot of change and wasn't doing it particularly well.) The plan was always to come back, but to do so with a better plan in re: what Oddball was and how Oddball was built. I also felt strongly about leaving Substack.
In late 2024 over piping hot congee, Jonathan and I had a long conversation about relaunching Oddball as both a blog and a newsletter. The blog would contain factoids, oddities, apocrypha, and maybe even the occasional longread. The newsletter would be similar to what we used to send out but longer and a bit more of a straight-up quiz thinger.
A few weeks after that I returned to the smallweb via micro.blog and started to feel parts of myself growing back the way cilia do after you quit smoking. I wanted to write again, so I did. Writing more made me want to write more. Doing more made me want to wait less ββ shout out/RIP to Mac Miller ββ and here we are.
Life is still very busy but the world is on fire and this timeline has gotten so objectively bad and surreal that rebooting our project seemed like an objectively good idea. So we're doing it.
We're even going to promote it this time around.
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Until next time, look both ways before you cross the street and, when possible, be the Ezequiel Carrera you wish to see in the world. (Oh, and hit that little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags please and thanks.)
β€οΈ j + d