I Don't Care If We Never Get Back

Book excerpt: Two friends take a wild month-long road trip to hit every Major League Baseball stadium in America: “A fun ride” (The Boston Globe). Ben, a sports analytics wizard, loves baseball. Eric, his best friend, hates it. But when Ben writes an algorithm for the optimal baseball road trip, an impossible dream of every pitch of thirty games in thirty stadiums in thirty days, who will he call on to take shifts behind the wheel, especially when those shifts will include nineteen hours straight from Phoenix to Kansas City? Eric, of course. On June 1, 2013, they set out to see America through the bleachers and concession stands of America’s favorite pastime. Along the way, human error and Mother Nature throw their mathematically optimized schedule a few curveballs. A mix-up in Denver turns a planned day off in Las Vegas into a twenty-hour drive. And a summer storm of biblical proportions threatens to make the whole thing logistically impossible, and that’s if they don’t kill each other first. I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back is a book about the love of the game, the limits of fandom, and the limitlessness of friendship. “Moneyball-worthy mathematical algorithms and the sharp, hilarious prose that has made Lampoon alums famous for generations . . . Nate Silver numbers and James Thurber wit turn what should be a harebrained adventure into a pretty damn endearing one.” —Kirkus Reviews “Evokes the spirit of sports stunt journalist George Plimpton and the dazed road-trip fever of Hunter S. Thompson, minus the mind-altering substances . . . . It’s great watching Blatt and Brewster race home.” —The Boston Globe “A cross between The Cannonball Run and The Great Race, with portions of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World thrown in for good measure . . . The dynamic and back-and-forth tension and sarcasm between Blatt and Brewster is funny . . . Worth reading.” —The Tampa Tribune