THE PHARMACEUTICAL LAWYER IS RUNNING AWAY WITH IT, AND I'M RUNNING AWAY FROM MY OWN LIFE CHOICES

I want to tell you something about myself that I am not proud of, that I have not told my therapist, and that I will deny under oath if this column is ever introduced as evidence in a competency hearing.

I thought I was free.

I genuinely, sincerely, with every remaining fiber of whatever professional dignity I still possess, believed that Column Eight was the end. The final word. The last dance. I had written EIGHT columns about a simulated baseball league run by six men in their mid-fifties who went to high school together in Tennessee and decided that the most productive use of their remaining time on this planet was to manage imaginary baseball rosters with names that would get you permanently banned from a branding conference. Eight columns. More words about the Iron Knob Explosions than I have written about the Boston Celtics in three years. More emotional investment in the Knockemstiff Slap Daddies than I have given to any real sports franchise since the 2008 NBA Finals. I had given everything. The well was dry. The cup was empty. The man was done.

I took the summer off. Real summer. I went places where people talk about real things — mortgages, weather, whether the new season of whatever show is worth starting. Nobody mentioned the Huanca Wankers. Not once. Not a whisper. I sat on a porch somewhere and drank something cold and thought about Larry Bird and felt, for the first time since March, like a human being who had made defensible life choices.

And then, last Tuesday, my phone rang.

My editor. Three words. "The readers miss you."

I threw up in my mouth a little.

"The WLB content," she continued — and I could hear her smiling, the way dentists smile before they tell you something expensive — "has been our best-performing column series of the year. The engagement metrics are —"

I hung up. I sat in my kitchen for eleven minutes staring at a wall. Then I opened my laptop and typed worldleaguebaseball.org into the browser and watched the standings load and made a sound that my dog, who has heard me watch the Celtics blow fourth-quarter leads, had never heard before and does not want to hear again.

I threw up in my mouth a second time. Column Nine. We're doing this.

THE STANDINGS, WHICH NOW RESEMBLE A CLOSING ARGUMENT

I have been away for over a month. In human time, that's a summer vacation. In WLB time, that's apparently long enough for the entire competitive landscape to rearrange itself into a shape so clean, so narratively perfect, that I am now suspicious the simulation has hired a screenwriter.

Here's where we are.

The Rick Astleys are 78-31.

Seventy-eight wins. Thirty-one losses. A .716 winning percentage. A run differential of plus-301 — three hundred and one — which is not a baseball statistic, it is a war crime. Jeff Burris, Chief Legal Officer of a pharmaceutical company, the man who cannot draw, who was gently removed from singing duties in two consecutive high school musicals by a music director who had heard enough, who has lost at Pictionary more times than anyone should publicly admit, who once stood silently on a church gymnasium floor while a future minister discovered profanity in front of Jeff's own father — that man is seven games clear of the field and running away with the World League of Baseball like a man fleeing a deposition he doesn't want to give.

Seven games. When I left — when I escaped, when I crawled out through the sewer pipe like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank except instead of a poster of Rita Hayworth I was hiding behind a poster of my own self-respect — Jeff Burris was two games up. Two. A manageable lead. A contestable margin. The kind of gap that makes you say "the race is still interesting" with a straight face. I go away for five weeks and the man turns a two-game lead into a seven-game chasm. He went 17-4 while I wasn't looking. Seventeen and four. The pharmaceutical attorney reviewed the contract, found the loophole, and executed the buyout while the rest of the league was still on page three of the rider.

I threw up in my mouth a third time reading that run differential. Plus-301. The next closest human-managed team is the Slap Daddies at +159, which is basically half of Jeff's number. The Rick Astleys have scored 702 runs — seven hundred and two — and allowed 401. Jeff Burris is not winning the WLB. Jeff Burris is committing regulatory fraud against the WLB. He has turned a fake baseball league into a hostile takeover and the other five owners are standing around the conference table looking at each other wondering who left the door unlocked.

Eric Davis leads the league with 43 home runs and 124 RBIs because of course he does — the man Jeff Burris assigned to be his cleanup hitter is doing what cleanup hitters do, which is clean up, while Wade Boggs is hitting .330 and Scott Garrelts has a 2.63 ERA and Tim Raines is stealing bases like a man who knows the getaway car is already running. The whole roster is performing like an organism that has been briefed, prepared, and cross-examined in advance. Jeff Burris didn't build a baseball team. He built a legal brief with cleats.

ANDREW HARRIS AND THE SPECTACULAR FAILURE THAT IS NOW ACTUALLY, MEASURABLY SPECTACULAR

When I last wrote about Andrew Harris, the CEO of a not-for-profit Children's Theatre company in Louisville, Kentucky — a man who spells "Theatre" with the British "-re" as though the extra vowel arrangement somehow lends colonial gravitas to an organization that stages truncated versions of Annie for audiences of parents filming vertically on their phones — he was in second place, two games back, and the narrative was beautiful: the man who did nothing was almost winning. The Zen master. The martial arts black belt who meditated his way to contention. The human screensaver.

Andrew Harris is now seven games back.

Seven. The same Andrew Harris who has not made a single roster transaction since March. The same Andrew Harris who set his lineup before the season started, presumably between blocking rehearsals, and then closed the laptop and walked away like a man leaving a crockpot unattended because he trusts the recipe. The crockpot is still on. The recipe has not changed. But the kitchen is now filling with a faint, undeniable smell of something burning, and Andrew Harris is, near as anyone can determine, in another room entirely, directing a summer production of something, not logging in, not checking the standings, not adjusting a single slider on a roster that has gone 12-9 since I left.

I want to be very precise about what has happened here, because precision is what separates journalism from whatever this column has become: Andrew Harris's strategy of doing absolutely nothing worked for four months. It was the story of the season. The man who didn't log in. The absent genius. The team that ran itself. And now, as the season enters August, the strategy of doing nothing has produced the inevitable result of doing nothing, which is that things fall apart. The center cannot hold. The Children's Theatre CEO cannot hold a lead he never checked on in the first place.

And here is what makes it specifically, exquisitely Andrew Harris: the roster is still good. Rickey Henderson is hitting .291 with 76 stolen bases and an .854 OPS. Seventy-six stolen bases. Henderson is running wild out there like a man who knows his manager isn't watching and has decided to freelance. The pitching staff has four starters with 12 wins apiece — Hershiser (12-5, 3.09 ERA), Blyleven (12-3, 2.82), Brown (12-3, 3.08), and Maddux (12-3, 3.23) — which means Andrew Harris has the deepest, most consistently excellent rotation in the simulation and is seven games out of first. Four 12-game winners. On the same staff. Managed by a man who has not logged in since the first pitch of the season. The Iron Knob Explosions — a name that still, in Column Nine, sounds like what happens when a geological survey goes catastrophically wrong — have the pitching staff of a dynasty and the front-office engagement of a man who is busy painting a backdrop for a children's production of The Wizard of Oz.

This is the Children's Theatre production where the cast is extraordinary and the director has been in the parking lot on his phone since Act One. The kids are nailing their lines. The set is holding. But nobody has called a single lighting cue since March and the audience is starting to notice.

Andrew Harris is a certified black belt. He co-founded the Milk Carton Babies, a high school band whose actual product was blister-packed action figures with free locks of human hair. He is, by multiple accounts, a man of genuine talent and charisma who has decided that the most powerful thing you can do is nothing. And for a while, nothing worked. It was the most compelling argument for inaction since the invention of the hammock. But the Iron Knob Explosions are 71-38 and fading, and the "Spectacular Failure" label on the league website — which was cute in May, when he was in first — now reads less like ironic self-deprecation and more like a man who accidentally told the truth and doesn't know it yet.

BRETT HOULBERG, THE VETERINARIAN-COMMISSIONER WHOSE WINNING STREAK HAS BEEN EUTHANIZED

Oh, Brett.

When I left — and I want everyone to remember that I left in good faith, believing the world would be fine without my coverage of a fake baseball league — Brett Houlberg's Knockemstiff Slap Daddies were on a seven-game winning streak. Seven. They were 8-2 in their last ten. They were surging. They were dangerous. I described Brett Houlberg as "the most frightening man in the simulation" and I meant it, in the way you can mean something about a veterinarian who 3D prints Dungeons & Dragons figurines and co-hosts an Airbnb with a man named Chad.

The Slap Daddies are now 3-7 in their last ten and on a three-game losing streak.

The seven-game winning streak didn't just end. It was euthanized. Brett Houlberg, a licensed veterinarian, should recognize the procedure. You assess the patient. You consult with the family. You administer the solution. You send a card two weeks later. Brett's winning streak got the card.

The Slap Daddies are 70-42, nine and a half games out of first, and they have scored 686 runs — second only to the Astleys' 702, because Jeff Burris apparently could not allow Brett to lead even a single offensive category — because Brett's team has always been a batting cage with a mailing address. Kevin Mitchell has 42 home runs and 108 RBIs and an OPS that would get you a congressional hearing in certain jurisdictions. Bobby Bonilla — and I still cannot fully process that Bobby Bonilla, the man who is 63 in real life and still receiving annual checks from the Mets in the most beloved deferred-payment arrangement in sports history, is in this simulation — is hitting .364. Point three six four. The best batting average in the league. In a simulation. For a team owned by a veterinarian. Who is also the commissioner. Who also 3D prints halfling rogues after dinner.

And yet: 3-7 in the last ten. The offense is there. The pitching is apparently not. The fielding remains, as it has been all season, an ongoing experiment in whether you can win baseball games while committing errors at a rate that suggests several of the infielders have been replaced by golden retrievers — which, given the owner, would explain a lot.

I need to reiterate — and I will never stop reiterating, because it is the most structurally insane governance arrangement in organized sports — that Brett Houlberg is both a team owner and the league commissioner. He runs the league he competes in. He enters the data. He has administrative access to the website. He once uploaded Andrew Harris's player statistics incorrectly. And now, while his own team crumbles, he is expected to maintain the competitive integrity of a league that he is actively losing in. This is like asking the defendant to also serve as the bailiff. It's like the SEC investigating itself. It's like — actually, it's like nothing, because no other sports league in history has been structured this way, because no other league was founded by six high school friends from Tennessee who collectively decided that conflict-of-interest policies were for people who take things too seriously.

Brett is still waiting on his Private Equity recap. Brett is still showing up to the veterinary practice he sold. Brett is still painting eyebrows on miniature fantasy warriors in a room that I assume smells like plastic resin and the quiet acceptance of a man whose competitive peak was five weeks ago. The dog brought in the dead bird, Brett. The dog is now bringing in fewer dead birds. The dog is on a losing streak.

GARTH GRAHAM AND THE RESURRECTION NOBODY SAW ON THE SCAN

I need everyone to stop what they're doing.

The Fugging Honey Badgers are 8-2 in their last ten.

Garth Graham — the radiologist, the Chief of Staff at a hospital in Loudon, Tennessee (a title that, in a town that size, means you are also the IT department, the HR department, and the person who replaces the toner cartridge), the man who once snuck out to visit a girl, made it to the girl's house, accomplished the mission, and then had his car stall on the way home leaving him stranded until morning — that man's baseball team is surging.

The Honey Badgers went 14-8 while I was gone. They were named Team of the Week. Their pitcher McCaskill was named Pitcher of the Week for throwing a complete-game shutout, which is the pitching equivalent of a clean scan after months of concerning imaging. They are on a three-game winning streak. They are 62-48 and 16.5 games out of first, which means they are not winning the pennant, but they are doing something arguably more impressive: they are proving that Garth Graham, the man whose team collapsed from first to fifth over the course of three weeks in May, the man who fielded two ineligible players and got investigated by the league office run by his own former church-league basketball teammate, the man whose high school car stalled on the back road home — that man can diagnose his own team's illness and prescribe a treatment that works.

This is what radiologists do. They look at images that other people can't read. They find anomalies. They identify what doesn't belong. Garth Graham looked at his 48-40 team, in fifth place, hemorrhaging games, leaking runs, with an ERA that would make a pitching coach weep, and he found the lesion. He treated it. The patient is responding. The Honey Badgers went from 3-7 in my last column to 8-2 now. The car stalled on the way home from the girl's house, but Garth Graham has called a tow truck, and the tow truck has arrived, and the tow truck is McCaskill throwing nine innings of shutout baseball.

The run differential is only +41, which is genuinely concerning for a team with 62 wins — it means they are winning a lot of close games, which means they are either very good in tight situations or very lucky, and a radiologist should know the difference between a good prognosis and a favorable scan angle. But the man who starred in Kiss Me Kate and The Sound of Music and refuses to disclose his role in Grease is, against all odds, climbing. He is not climbing toward first place. He is climbing toward respectability, which, for a man who was under league investigation two months ago, is its own kind of victory tour.

I threw up in my mouth a fourth time, because I realized I was genuinely happy for a man whose team is called the Fugging Honey Badgers. That's where my emotional life is now. This is what nine columns does to a person.

CHRIS BROYLES AND THE SPACESHIP THAT HAS ACHIEVED A STABLE BUT UNINSPIRING ORBIT

The Huanca Wankers are 61-48. Seventeen games out of first. They are 6-4 in their last ten and on a two-game winning streak, which is the competitive equivalent of a spaceship that has not crashed but has also not reached its destination and is currently circling the same asteroid for the fourth consecutive month while mission control argues about fuel ratios.

Chris Broyles, who turned 53 on Christmas Day — a detail I will never stop mentioning, because being born on Christmas means you have spent your entire life competing with the most famous birth in human history for cake and attention, and I think it explains everything about a man who names things "Huanca Wankers" and writes books about spaceships that cannot be stopped — is now based in Chicago. Chicago. The b-degree.com website, which I have visited more times than any self-respecting sportswriter should admit, now says "Based in Chicago. Working everywhere the stakes are high." Chris Broyles relocated his "persuasive media for high-stakes moments" operation to Chicago, a city whose sports teams have historically provided ample material for persuasive narratives about failure. The Cubs went 108 years without a title. The Bears haven't won a championship since 1985. Chris Broyles moved to the city that understands losing better than any other American metropolis and his Wankers are 17 games out. The spaceship has landed in O'Hare and is stuck on the tarmac waiting for a gate.

Howard Johnson has 32 home runs and a .978 OPS for the Wankers, which is a sentence I should not have to write in a professional context but here we are. David Cone is still pitching well, though not at the transcendent 1.72 level he had earlier in the season when the Core Pathways Model was pathing and the spaceship was at full thrust. The Wankers have a +94 run differential, which is solid, which is respectable, which is the kind of number that gets you a "good effort" in a year-end review but not the promotion.

Chris Broyles was co-founder of the Milk Carton Babies. Chris Broyles was frog-marched out of a Krystals at midnight by his own father while Andrew Harris stayed in the booth and kept eating sliders. Chris Broyles creates strategic visual communications for high-stakes moments and the highest-stakes moment of his WLB season has produced a .560 winning percentage that is neither embarrassing nor interesting. The spaceship cannot be stopped, but it can apparently be parked.

The book is still available on Amazon. The Core Pathways Model still promises to turn uncertainty into opportunity. The uncertainty is whether 61-48 means anything. The opportunity is for Chris Broyles to write a sequel called Can't Start the Spaceship, which is, if I'm being honest, a more accurate title at this point.

CHRIS CARPENTER AND THE MINISTRY OF SMALL-BALL

The Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers are 60-49. Eighteen games out of first. 4-6 in their last ten. On a two-game losing streak. Chris Carpenter, Discipleship Pastor at a church in Tennessee — a title that means he leads small groups, not the main congregation, in the same way that NAIA tennis at Lincoln Memorial University meant he competed in athletics, not the kind that ESPN covers — is 18 games behind a pharmaceutical attorney and slowly running out of parables.

Roger Clemens has 144 strikeouts for the Crepe Wrappers — second in the league only to Nolan Ryan's 165 — which means the Discipleship Pastor has one of the most dominant arms in the simulation and is still 18 games back. Kirby Puckett has 75 hits. Don Mattingly has 76. Harold Baines is getting on base at a clip that suggests the Lord is providing. The flock is present. The congregation is singing. The pitcher is dealing. And the team is 18 games back, which is the ecclesiastical equivalent of delivering your best sermon series of the year to a sanctuary that's three-quarters empty.

I am required by the bylaws of this column to remind everyone that Chris Carpenter once swore loudly in a church gymnasium during a basketball practice coached by Jeff Burris's father, while five future WLB owners stood on the court in their shorts and said nothing. The future minister. The church gym. The profanity. Coach Burris, processing in real time. Eight years later, Carpenter answered the call to ministry. Thirty-six years after that, he is managing a simulated baseball team called the Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers and losing two in a row to Chris Broyles's Huanca Wankers. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Some of those ways are a 4-6 stretch in a fake baseball league.

THE PART WHERE I RECKON WITH WHAT THIS SEASON MEANS

Here is what has happened over nine columns:

A pharmaceutical attorney who cannot draw and was diplomatically excused from singing in two high school musicals has built the most dominant team in the history of a league that has existed for one season. He did this by making more roster transactions than anyone else, by tinkering constantly, by treating a simulated baseball roster the way he treats a pharmaceutical contract — with suffocating attention to detail and a highlighter in each hand. Jeff Burris is 78-31 and his run differential is +301 and he is, by any metric, the best owner in the WLB, and nobody — least of all Jeff — seems to be enjoying it, because that is what being an in-house attorney does to you. You win everything. You get credit for nothing. You go home and you cannot draw an elephant.

A Children's Theatre CEO who has not logged in since March, who is a certified black belt, who co-founded a high school band whose actual product was action figures with free locks of human hair sealed in blister packs, who calls himself "Spectacular Failure" on the league website, is in second place despite having done nothing, and the fact that he is now seven games back instead of two is the universe's gentle reminder that you can coast on talent and vibes for a while but eventually someone who actually shows up to work is going to pass you. The Iron Knob Explosions are a metaphor for something, and that something is probably Andrew Harris's approach to most things: set it up, walk away, see what happens, get his black belt, make the action figures, spell Theatre with an -re, call yourself a Spectacular Failure with the confidence of a man who has decided that the word means something different when he says it.

A veterinarian who sold his practice to Private Equity and kept showing up for work, who 3D prints fantasy figurines, who co-hosts an Airbnb with a mysterious man named Chad, who serves as commissioner of the league he competes in, who once uploaded another owner's stats incorrectly, who went on a seven-game winning streak that was the most dangerous thing in the simulation — that man's streak is dead, his team is 3-7 in the last ten, and Bobby Bonilla is hitting .364 for absolutely no one's benefit because the pitching cannot hold a lead.

A radiologist who was the lead in Kiss Me Kate, whose car stalled on a back road after a successful late-night visit to a girl's house in 1989, who was investigated by the league office for fielding ineligible players, whose team collapsed from first to fifth in the span of three weeks — that man is 8-2 in his last ten and climbing like a patient whose scan just came back clean after months of chemotherapy. He is 16.5 games out of first and it does not matter. The radiologist is not trying to win the pennant. The radiologist is trying to prove that the diagnosis was treatable, and he has treated it, and the treatment is working, and somewhere in a darkened reading room in Loudon, Tennessee, Garth Graham is looking at his lineup card the way he looks at an MRI, finding things that other people missed, and nodding.

A man who was born on Christmas Day, who was frog-marched out of a Krystals by his own father while his future Milk Carton Babies bandmate kept eating, who wrote a book about a spaceship that cannot be stopped, who has moved his "persuasive media for high-stakes moments" consultancy to Chicago, is 17 games back and the spaceship is in a holding pattern.

And a Discipleship Pastor who played NAIA tennis at Lincoln Memorial University and once swore in front of Coach Burris in a church gym is managing a team called the Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers with 18 games separating him from first place, Roger Clemens striking out everyone in sight, and the quiet, pastoral acceptance of a man who has been in the small group his entire life and has made peace with the size of the room.

These are six men. They are all 54 years old, except Chris Broyles, who is 53 because he was born on Christmas and has been competing with Jesus for candles his entire life. They went to high school together. They played church-league basketball for Jeff Burris's dad. Two of them were in Grease and still won't say what roles they played, which has now gone on so long that the silence is doing more dramatic work than the performance ever could have. Two of them made action figures with human hair in a garage. One of them is a real black belt. One of them sold his business and kept working there. One of them runs the league he plays in. One of them stalled a car on a back road in 1989 and is still, in some ways, trying to get home.

And they named their teams — and I want everyone to sit with these names one more time, because we are nine columns deep and these names have not improved with familiarity — the Rick Astleys, the Iron Knob Explosions, the Knockemstiff Slap Daddies, the Fugging Honey Badgers, the Huanca Wankers, and the Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers. A British pop star. A South Australian mining accident. An Appalachian Ohio town paired with a phrase from a regional wrestling flyer. An Austrian village that sounds like what your mother told you not to say. A Peruvian city paired with a British vulgarity. And a Central American nation yoked to a thin French pancake. These are the names. These are the franchises. These men are professionals — an attorney, a veterinarian, a minister, a radiologist, a theatre CEO, and a strategic communications consultant — and they collectively looked at a blank text field and decided that this is what they wanted permanently associated with their competitive legacies. Not one of them intervened on behalf of another. Not one of them said "maybe not Slap Daddies." Not one of them said "perhaps Wankers is not the brand we're going for." They all approved of each other's worst instincts, and they all pressed Enter, and now I have to type these names in a professional column for the ninth consecutive time while my editors nod approvingly and the engagement metrics climb.

The season is entering its final stretch. Jeff Burris is winning. The simulation keeps simulating. The website — worldleaguebaseball.org, a URL that someone paid real money to register and that I have now visited more times than my own bank's website — continues to update, and I continue to read it, against my will, against my judgment, against every instinct I have as a professional sportswriter who once watched Kobe drop 81 and now writes about a radiologist's bullpen management with the emotional investment of a man who has lost control of his own beat.

I threw up in my mouth a fifth time. Five for nine columns. The average is climbing. The season is not over.

I'll see you next time. Or I won't. I've said that before. It's never been true. The simulation doesn't care what I want. None of them do.