THE LAWYER WINS, THE INACTIVE MAN LOSES, AND A VET ON A SEVEN-GAME STREAK IS NOW THE MOST DANGEROUS FORCE IN A LEAGUE WHERE DANGER IS PURELY THEORETICAL

I had three weeks. Three.

Three weeks where my editor didn't call. Three weeks where I didn't have to type the words "Knockemstiff" or "Huanca" or "Fugging" into a professional publication that pays me actual American dollars to produce content for actual American readers. Three weeks where I watched real basketball, ate real food, slept real sleep, and started to feel, for the first time since approximately April, like a man with a functioning soul.

I was at a dinner party last night. An actual dinner party. With actual humans. Someone asked me what I'd been working on and I said "nothing, really, just resting," and I meant it, and the moment I said it I felt a phantom buzz in my pocket and I knew. I knew. I went to the bathroom and looked at my phone and there it was, an email from my editor with the subject line "Loving the WLB content, time for another one!!!" — three exclamation points this time, which is how editors escalate when you've been ignoring them — and I threw up in my mouth a little, right there in a guest bathroom, next to a hand towel that said "Live, Laugh, Love" in cursive script.

I came back to the table. Someone asked if I was okay. I said yes. I was not okay. I am not okay. I have been pulled back in, like Michael Corleone, like Al Pacino, like every man who thought he'd built a life outside the family and found out the family does not believe in retirement.

I went to worldleaguebaseball.org. I checked the standings. I made a noise that my wife later described as "a kettle giving up." Let's do this.

THE STANDINGS HAVE BEEN REORGANIZED BY THE UNIVERSE INTO A SHAPE THAT SUGGESTS MORAL ORDER

I want everyone to sit down. Find a chair. Brace yourselves against something solid. Because what I'm about to tell you is going to require structural support.

Jeff Burris is in first place.

The Rick Astleys, owned by an in-house pharmaceutical attorney whose business cards read "Chief Legal Officer" the way other people's read "fearless explorer of the human spirit," are 61-27 and alone atop the World League of Baseball. He has the best winning percentage. He has the best run differential at +233 — two hundred and thirty-three — which is the kind of number that suggests the simulation itself has filed a complaint with HR. The Rick Astleys have allowed 315 runs all season, which is the fewest in the league by a comfortable margin, and they've scored 548, which is second only to the Slap Daddies, and I'll get to that abomination in a moment.

Jeff Burris won. The man who lost at Pictionary in high school — repeatedly, consistently, with the same look of focused concentration he presumably brings to every contract review — has constructed the most balanced, most relentlessly competent baseball roster in the simulation. The man who could not draw an elephant in 1989 has drawn up a championship contender in 2026. I don't know what to do with this information. Pictionary is a lie. Drawing is a lie. Everything I thought I knew about the predictive power of high school humiliation has been overturned by a pharmaceutical lawyer with a 65 magic number and a constantly buzzing roster transaction log.

The Iron Knob Explosions are in second place. Read that again. The team that was leading the league for the entire month of June, the team I last covered as a portrait of Zen-master non-intervention, the team owned by a man who hadn't made a roster move since the cherry blossoms bloomed — that team is in second place. Andrew Harris, CEO of a not-for-profit Children's Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, who insists on spelling it with the British "-re," has finally been overtaken. And the most beautiful, the most cosmically appropriate part of this story is that he still hasn't done anything about it. He has not made a single transaction. His roster is the same one he set in March. His response to falling out of first place was, near as I can tell, to direct another Children's Theatre production and not look at his phone. The man calls himself "Spectacular Failure" on the league website, and he just turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy in real time, and he didn't even watch it happen.

I want to acknowledge something here, because the memory is starting to come back to me: Andrew Harris is, in addition to being a Children's Theatre CEO, an actual black belt. In an actual martial art. The man can presumably kick a hole through a piece of plywood. And his strategic response to losing first place in a baseball simulation is to do absolutely nothing. The discipline of the martial artist. The patience of the dramaturge. The roster management style of a man who has decided that intervention is for the weak. Andrew Harris has not "tanked" the season — he has meditated through it, and he's still in second place, which suggests that either he is a genius or the rest of the league is profoundly bad at this, and I am no longer in any position to assign weight to those options.

BRETT HOULBERG IS NOW THE MOST FRIGHTENING MAN IN THE SIMULATION

The Knockemstiff Slap Daddies are on a seven-game winning streak. Seven. They are 8-2 in their last ten and 58-34 overall and they are five games back of first place and rising like a Halloween dough joke I'm not going to make because I have some dignity left, although less every week.

I need to remind everyone — and myself — what Brett Houlberg is. Brett is a veterinarian who sold his practice to a Private Equity firm. He took the money. He cashed the check. He presumably sent some of it to his financial advisor and put the rest somewhere reasonable. And then — and this is the part that continues to break me every time I revisit it — he kept working there. Brett Houlberg goes to a building every day that he used to own and now does not own, takes instructions from people younger than his exam tables, and probably has a meeting once a quarter with a regional director named Tanner who asks him to "lean in" on upselling dental cleanings. Brett's office, which used to be Brett's, is now a Brett-themed conference room.

And while all of this is happening to him in real life, his simulated baseball team is going on a seven-game winning streak.

The Slap Daddies lead the WLB in runs scored at 568, runs per game at 6.2, team batting average at .299, slugging percentage at .506, OPS at .864, and total runs created at 602.2. Brett Houlberg's offense is essentially a wood chipper with a roster. They've hit 146 home runs, the most in the league. They have a .910 OPS against left-handed pitching, which is the kind of number that gets you indicted in some jurisdictions. And — and I want to be clear about this, because it is meaningful — they also have the worst fielding percentage among all six human-managed teams at .975, with 81 errors, which is the most of any team in the league including the two unmanaged computer teams.

Brett Houlberg's team out-hits everyone and out-bumbles everyone. They score a lot and they boot a lot. They are exactly what you would expect a baseball team owned by a veterinarian to be: prolific, enthusiastic, occasionally unable to find their own glove. The dog is still bringing in the dead bird, Brett. The dog is just bringing in more dead birds now.

I want to also remind everyone — and I cannot believe my memory keeps serving up new layers on this man — that Brett Houlberg is the commissioner of the World League of Baseball. He owns one of the six teams. He also runs the league. He is simultaneously a competitor and the referee, which is the kind of governance structure that the IOC would describe as "concerning" and that the SEC would describe as "actionable." Brett Houlberg, DVM, runs the league he is currently a half-game behind a Children's Theatre CEO in. He is also the man who once — and Andrew Harris has confirmed this — uploaded the stats for the player on Andrew Harris's roster named Andrew Harris incorrectly. The commissioner mishandled the data of a player who shares a name with one of his fellow owners. There is a Andrew Harris in this simulation, on the Iron Knob Explosions, whose statistics have been the subject of an internal data integrity review handled by the man who owns the Knockemstiff Slap Daddies. This is not how Major League Baseball is structured. This is not how any league is structured. This is how Brett Houlberg runs things, and I throw up in my mouth a little every time I think about it.

Also — and I'm going to say this once and then move on — Brett the Vet 3D prints Dungeons & Dragons figurines. He co-hosts an Airbnb with someone named Chad. The Slap Daddies are on a seven-game winning streak. These four facts exist simultaneously in the same human being. I have no further questions.

GARTH GRAHAM CONTINUES TO COLLAPSE WHILE READING SCANS OF HIS OWN COLLAPSE

The Fugging Honey Badgers are 48-40, thirteen games out of first place, 3-7 in their last ten, and on a two-game losing streak. Garth Graham, the radiologist who is also "Chief of Staff" at a hospital in Loudon, Tennessee — and I want to point out that "Chief of Staff" at a hospital in Loudon, Tennessee (population: a number that rounds to zero) is functionally the same job as "Chief Of Staff" at any small organization, which is to say it means "the guy who gets the email about the printer being broken" — has watched his team go from first place in May to fifth place in July like a man watching his own MRI in real time and realizing the mass is bigger than he initially read it.

The Honey Badgers' team ERA is 4.66, which is the worst of any human-managed team and not appreciably better than what the Pittsburgh Pirates managed in the early 1950s. They've blown six saves in 51 opportunities, which sounds great until you realize they have 51 save opportunities, which means their starters keep handing tight leads to their relievers, which means the entire team is structured around late-inning anxiety. Garth Graham's bullpen is a structural commitment to high blood pressure. He's basically prescribed himself a stress test every game.

I want to revisit something the memory keeps surfacing about Garth, because it deserves a moment of recognition. In high school, Garth Graham was the lead in Kiss Me Kate and The Sound of Music. The lead. He sang. He projected. He held notes. He hit marks. He stood on a stage in Tennessee and committed, fully, to musical theater, and now he reads scans in a dark room and his baseball team can't hold a one-run lead in the eighth inning. There is a poem in this somewhere. I refuse to write it.

There's also the story — and I'm sourcing this from my notes, which are increasingly the only thing keeping this column tethered to reality — of the time Garth, in high school, snuck out to visit a girl. He made it there. He successfully completed the sneaking-out portion of the operation. He spent time with the girl. And then, on the way home, his car stalled, and he was stranded until morning, presumably sleeping in the driver's seat with the door slightly ajar for ventilation, contemplating his life choices, while his parents woke up to discover his bed was empty and his Honda Civic was not in the driveway. This story is essentially Garth's baseball season in miniature: a confident departure, a successful first half, total mechanical failure on the back end, stranded in the middle of nowhere wondering how he got here. The Honey Badgers are 3-7 in their last ten. The car has stalled. It is 4 AM. The girl is asleep. The radiologist is alone with his thoughts.

THE WANKERS ARE NOT DEAD, THE SPACESHIP HAS STABILIZED

Chris Broyles's Huanca Wankers are 51-40, 7-3 in their last ten, and on a small win streak. The man who wrote Can't Stop the Spaceship, a business parable about navigating change in the age of AI, whose Core Pathways Model is meant to "turn uncertainty into opportunity," has guided his team back from the five-game losing streak that nearly capsized them in early June. The spaceship is, technically, still moving. It is moving at approximately the pace of a Volkswagen Jetta on a long highway, but it is moving.

Here is what makes the Wankers genuinely fascinating from a statistical standpoint, and I cannot believe I am about to use the phrase "statistically fascinating" about a team called the Huanca Wankers, but here we are: Chris Broyles's pitching staff has issued 50 intentional walks this season. Fifty. The next-closest team in the league is Oak Ridge, the computer team that nobody manages, at 11. The closest human-managed team is the Iron Knob Explosions at 8. The Huanca Wankers are intentionally walking batters at a rate six times the league norm. Chris Broyles, the man whose website at b-degree.com promises "persuasive media for high-stakes moments," has built a pitching staff whose primary tactic is refusing to engage. The high-stakes moment arrives, and the strategy is "don't pitch to him." The Core Pathways Model says to turn resistance into momentum. Chris Broyles says, "Or, alternatively, we could just walk him and pitch to the next guy." Is this baseball? Is this strategy? Is this what they teach in the master class? I don't know. I do know that the simulated David Cone is somewhere, presumably, throwing four pitches outside the strike zone with the resigned expression of a Hall of Famer who did not sign up for this.

I also want to revisit, briefly, the story of how Chris Broyles got caught sneaking out of a Krystals — yes, Krystals, the regional Southern fast food chain that serves what are essentially White Castle sliders for people who don't trust the Northeast — by his father, who promptly drove him home. The detail that lives in my head rent-free is that Andrew Harris, his eventual Milk Carton Babies bandmate, was also there, and kept eating. Chris Broyles got removed by his father mid-meal, and Andrew Harris, possibly chewing, possibly mid-chew, watched it happen and then continued his Krystals experience. The Andrew Harris approach to crisis — observe, do not intervene, continue eating — has been remarkably consistent over the last four decades. He did not save Chris from his father, and he is not saving his Iron Knob Explosions from second place. Some men are simply built to chew through the moment.

THE NICARAGUA CREPE WRAPPERS REMAIN, AGAINST ALL THEOLOGY, A REAL TEAM

Chris Carpenter, Discipleship Pastor at a church in Tennessee, is now 47-40 and 6-4 in his last ten. The Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers are 13.5 games out of first place, which sounds bad until you remember the team is named the Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers, at which point 13.5 games out of first place is, frankly, a miracle worth a sermon series.

I want to point out a statistical anomaly that the simulation has produced on Chris Carpenter's behalf, because it is too perfect to ignore: the Crepe Wrappers have hit 74 home runs this season. Seventy-four. That's the fewest in the league among human-managed teams by a sizable margin. The next-closest team is the Iron Knob Explosions at 87, and beyond that the totals climb into the 100s and 140s. Pastor Carpenter has constructed a baseball team that does not believe in the home run. It believes in the single. It believes in advancing the runner. It believes in moving the line, eight inches at a time, like a man preparing a Discipleship class on perseverance. The Crepe Wrappers have a team slugging percentage of .402 — also the worst among humans — and they're somehow 47-40. They are winning through righteousness alone. The offense is essentially a small-group bible study that occasionally produces a run.

I should also note here, because the memory keeps reminding me, that Chris Carpenter once swore loudly in front of Coach Burris during a church-league basketball practice in high school. Let me set the scene. The six men who now run the WLB all played on a church-league basketball team coached by Jeff Burris's father. A man of authority. A community leader. A coach. And Chris Carpenter, the future minister, the future Discipleship Pastor, the man who would one day spend his professional life modeling Christ-like behavior for small groups, injured himself in practice and loudly profaned in front of his best friend's dad. The future minister broke containment first. The future pharmaceutical lawyer's father had to process it in real time. Somewhere there is a moment, just after Chris's swear and just before Coach Burris's response, that defined the trajectory of the next four decades for both men, and I would pay significant money to see security footage of it that does not exist.

JEFF BURRIS, THE FIRST-PLACE LAWYER, AND THE NUMBER THAT HAUNTS HIM

I need to come back to Jeff Burris, because there is one statistic I have not properly addressed and it is the most important statistic in the World League of Baseball, and frankly the most important statistic in any sporting organization, simulated or otherwise.

The Rick Astleys have committed 43 errors this season. That is the fewest in the league. Their fielding percentage of .987 is the best in the league. Jeff Burris's team does not give the game away. They do not make the mental error. They do not throw the ball into the dugout. They do not lose the runner on the comebacker. Jeff Burris, the man who could not draw a recognizable elephant in high school, has built a baseball team whose primary characteristic is precision. There is no symbolism here. There is only symbolism here. Pictionary was, all along, a measure of fine motor coordination, not strategic thinking. Jeff Burris had the strategic mind. He just couldn't render it on paper. Given a roster instead of a sketchpad, given numerical decisions instead of visual ones, the man becomes a Tolstoy of pharmaceutical contract review and a Branch Rickey of imaginary outfield depth. I threw up in my mouth a little when I realized this. It was the last of the bile. I am running on water.

There's also this: Jeff Burris was in two high school musicals with Garth Graham, and he sang in one number. One. Out of presumably many. Now, the casual reader might assume that Jeff Burris negotiated his way out of the other songs — leveraging his pre-attorney instincts to limit his vocal exposure, securing a better deal for himself, getting the workload reduced to a manageable cameo. But that is not what happened. What happened, near as I can determine, is that the music director of these productions listened to Jeff Burris sing during rehearsal and made an executive decision that one number was the maximum the audience could absorb without legal action. The music director protected the audience. The music director protected the production. The music director protected the legacy of musical theater in suburban Tennessee. Jeff Burris was reduced to one number not by his own negotiation but by the sober judgment of a professional who had heard him sing. The lawyer did not advocate his way out of the work. The work advocated him out of itself. And now he is in first place in the WLB, because the universe has a sense of humor about which talents it allocates to which men. Jeff Burris cannot draw and cannot sing. He can, however, win at simulated baseball. Two out of three are taken care of. The third one is the most important one anyway. He's earned this.

THE STATISTICAL CURIOSITY CABINET, BECAUSE I AM CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED TO INCLUDE NUMBERS

Before I close this disaster, a few items from the WLB's collection of statistical anomalies that the team at worldleaguebaseball.org has helpfully publicized for the dozens — and I mean dozens — of people following this thing.

The Iron Knob Explosions have stolen 126 bases this season, the most in the league. They have also been caught stealing 57 times, which is also the most in the league by a comfortable margin. The next-closest team in caught stealings is the Wankers and the Huanca Wankers at 40. Andrew Harris's team is running constantly and getting thrown out constantly. The stolen base success rate is 68.8%, which is just barely above the break-even point that any sabermetrician will tell you justifies the attempt. They run because they can. They get thrown out because they shouldn't have. They keep doing it because the manager hasn't logged in to tell them to stop. The Iron Knob Explosions are running on instinct, dying on instinct, and finishing in second place on instinct. There is a thesis statement here about the limits of artificial intelligence and the merits of letting things ride. I am not going to write it.

The Knockemstiff Slap Daddies have a team batting average of .299 — the highest in the league, and let me remind you what this means. Brett Houlberg, after a long day of explaining to a regional director why the new "premium dental package" pricing is hurting client retention, comes home to his 3D printer, prints a halfling rogue, and then watches his simulated baseball team hit nearly .300 as a group. The team OPS is .864. They are the most productive offense in the simulation and they are five games back of first place because their pitching ERA is 4.25, which is acceptable, and their fielding percentage is .975, which is the worst among humans. They score, they get scored on, they boot some grounders, they cash a Private Equity check, they 3D print a goblin, they go to bed.

The Honey Badgers have allowed 878 hits this season — the most in the league among human-managed teams. They are giving up 10.2 hits per nine innings. Garth Graham's pitching staff is essentially a series of batting practice volunteers. Meanwhile, the Wankers are striking out 707 batters, which is the second-most in the league and a full 180 strikeouts more than the third-place team. Chris Broyles's pitchers are getting outs through pure dominance when they're not just intentionally walking the inconvenient hitters. It's an entire philosophy of pitching. Domination or evasion. There is no middle ground at b-degree.com.

THE LOOK-AHEAD, WHICH I PROVIDE UNDER PROTEST

The race is now, somehow, genuinely meaningful. Jeff Burris is in first by two games over Andrew Harris and five over Brett Houlberg. The Slap Daddies are surging. The Astleys are coasting in a way that lawyers coast, which is to say with constant attention and zero outward signs of confidence. The Iron Knob Explosions are doing nothing about anything, which has been their strategy all year and remains, against all sense, viable.

The next ten days will test whether the Slap Daddies' seven-game winning streak is real or whether Todd Burns — yes, the same Todd Burns — is about to blow saves to multiple computer teams and undo everything. The Honey Badgers, at 13 games back, are functionally eliminated from the division race unless Garth Graham can pull off another medical miracle and read the bullpen scans more carefully. The Wankers are in a strange middle ground at 11.5 games out, too far to chase realistically but playing well enough to make people wonder. The Crepe Wrappers will continue to win baseball games through fundamental decency and the occasional sermon.

And Andrew Harris, who has done nothing all year, will continue to do nothing all year, while sitting in second place, while presumably directing a summer production of Annie that opens in a community theater that doesn't have proper air conditioning. The Iron Knob Explosions will live or die on the choices Andrew Harris made in March, which is genuinely the purest form of athletic competition I have ever witnessed. Most franchises are built. The Iron Knob Explosions were committed to. The commitment was binding. The commitment is still operational. The commitment is leaning against the second-place wall in the WLB standings, smoking a metaphorical cigarette, watching the rest of us scramble.

THE FINAL WORD, DELIVERED FROM SOMEWHERE INSIDE WHATEVER IS LEFT OF MY DIGNITY

Here is what I know after eight columns about the World League of Baseball.

A pharmaceutical attorney who can't draw is in first place. The man who ran an empty roster for four months is in second. A veterinarian who sold his practice and 3D prints fantasy figurines is on a seven-game winning streak and also running the league he is competing in. A Children's Theatre CEO who is a black belt and calls himself "Spectacular Failure" continues to do nothing while remaining competitive. A radiologist who was the lead in Kiss Me Kate is reading the scans of his own pitching staff's decline. A man who wrote a book about a spaceship that cannot be stopped is now intentionally walking everyone in sight. A Discipleship Pastor who once swore in front of his coach is winning baseball games without hitting home runs, on a roster called the Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers, which I refuse to spell out one more time even though I just did.

These are six men in their fifties who played church-league basketball together for Jeff Burris's father in Tennessee. They are now competing in a simulated baseball league against each other and against two computer-controlled teams that nobody manages. One of them runs the league while owning a team in it. One of them has not made a single roster move since the season started. One of them wrote a book. One of them was in Grease. Two of them were in Grease. The roles in Grease remain undisclosed, and I am going to be honest, I have started to suspect that the silence around those roles is doing more work than the actual roles would. I think they were trees. I think the production of Grease had trees somehow, and they were the trees, and they will go to their graves protecting this information.

The simulation keeps simulating. The website at worldleaguebaseball.org continues to update. Mel is somewhere, still working on his Hershiser argument. Dale the truck driver is in Indiana. Razor Shines is watching a sunset. Carla Streich is preparing a stats package for the next episode of Foul Territory with the steady professionalism of a woman who knows that none of this matters and has decided to be excellent about it anyway.

And I am here. Writing this. For the eighth time. While the rest of the sports world processes actual events involving actual humans with actual stakes, I am parsing the run differential of the Knockemstiff Slap Daddies and forming opinions about a Discipleship Pastor's small-ball strategy.

I'll see you next time. Assuming I am still capable of producing language by then. The signs are mixed.