Will Leitch

@williamfleitch.bsky.social

10134 Followers 397 Following

Author, LLOYD MCNEIL'S LAST RIDE, HOW LUCKY, THE TIME HAS COME. Contributing Editor, New York. Columnist, The Washington Post & The Athletic. Writer, MLB. Critic, Grierson & Leitch. Founder, Deadspin. Illini. Mattoonian. https://williamfleitch.substack.com

The cover of the paperback version of LLOYD MCNEIL'S LAST RIDE.
The Bill and Ted song that saves the world, obviously.
Disappointment focuses the mind, sure, but disappointment also makes those moments of pure joy, when they do come, when you do get what you want, mean more. You won because of choices you made, not because you whined and complained and lobbied until you finally got your way. Disappointment is an investment in the future. It should then perhaps not be surprising, in an age of aggrievement, in an age of the demonization of those whom you believe most easy to dominate, in an age of forever obsessing solely over how one feels right now, that the future is the least of anyone’s concerns.
There are two types of people in the world: People who are late all the time, and everyone else, the rest of us, constantly scrambling around trying to make up for how rude they are. Late people try to act as if their chronic lateness is some sort of charming personality quirk, like having a goofy laugh, or a dimple. But what a late person really is is someone who constantly lets you know that they don’t value your time—that they believe themselves more important than you. Always being late is not a fact of being. It is a decision you consistently make not to consider the lives of the people in your life. It is claim of dominion over others. It is some rude shit.
Richard Russo's praising Will Leitch's novel LLOYD MCNEIL'S LAST RIDE.
Jerry Seinfeld sitting next to Diddy at the 1999 NBA Eastern Conference Finals.
This is a promo for the book "Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride," written by Will Leitch, which comes out May 20. It also features a blurb from Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction: "'Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride'” left me gutted, my heart broken. And then it somehow mended that shattered heart, made it beat more buoyantly than ever. We need books like this and writers like Will Leitch now more than ever."
Trout has always played in that liminal space between constantly praised and underseen that only baseball can provide. His all-around brilliance has been captured best by advanced analytics, and statheads were his earliest champions; his WAR numbers dwarfed the rest of baseball’s immediately, and he became, in a way, a hipster cause for advanced analytics. But, oddly, the constant praise among smart fans led to a backlash among more casual fans who don’t care about ZiPS or PECOTA and, instead, wondered why the supposed best player in baseball always played for lousy teams. I have always been amazed by how many people, unsolicited, have told me over the last decade that Trout was “overrated,” even though the numbers clearly showed the opposite. Trout was so comparatively obscure compared with his ability that it’s hard to imagine anyone describing the conversation about him as “hype-filled.” But those fans weren’t really saying Trout was overrated. They were saying they didn’t like the stats that best reflected his genius. To ignore Trout was to ignore those stats — something many old-school baseball fans very much wanted to do.
What’s fascinating about these players, as well as most of the players projected to be selected in the first round, is that they all have all thrived specifically because they’re playing college basketball — and being paid to do so. Flagg is your traditional one-and-done freshman who not so long ago might have bypassed college basketball entirely. Jakucionis, in the past, would have stayed in Europe, unknown to the average U.S. fan until his name was called on draft night, were it not for the “Name, Image, and Likeness” money with which Illinois lured him to America to play on prime-time network television and in front of NBA scouts. Wolf, for that matter, is a transfer who toiled in (successful) obscurity at Yale for two seasons before Michigan offered him NIL money to transfer to Ann Arbor, where he has shown his ability to handle the larger spotlight so well that he has gone from Ivy League curio to first-round pick.
Praise for LLOYD MCNEIL’S LAST RIDE "Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride” broke my heart. And then it somehow mended that shattered heart, made it beat more buoyantly than before. We need books like this and writers like Will Leitch now more than ever.” – Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and the North Bath Trilogy of Fool novels