TheFiftyTwo

the most pivotal play so far in 2026 happened 18 days ago

Brewers manager with Springsteen tattoo got call from The Boss before World Series usatoday.com/story/sports/ml…

The “F.U.” joke in The Odd Couple almost got cut. On Broadway, producers panicked about profanity rules; Mike Nichols refused to budge. Opening night, Walter Matthau delivered the line, the audience filled in the blanks and erupted. By the time it hit the screen, everyone knew it

DL Hall lived in about 15 different houses growing up. On his days off in Milwaukee, he builds houses for families buying their first one. Friday night he pitches in the World Series. Start in Valdosta, Georgia. His grandfather Carlo Beam owned a plumbing company and so did his father, Stevie Hall. He started working for them at ten. He puts it like this. "So I went from the tool-getter at age 10 to, by the time I was done, being able to build whole bathrooms." His senior year at Valdosta High School he got out of class at eleven in the morning and went straight to his grandfather's job site. He did that until the day Baltimore took him 21st overall in 2017. Here is why he does it. "I lived in, like, 15 different houses growing up, so I'm super, super connected to that cause." "Sometimes I looked at other people and I thought, 'Dang, I wish I had that one house I called home my whole life.'" Adam McCalvy at MLB.com is the one who got him to say that. He built a Habitat for Humanity house in the Harambee neighborhood in 2024. He was back again this May, framing and signing the first wall of a new house. The one year he missed it, he was on the injured list the whole spring. "I've had a bunch of different houses, so being able to give somebody a steady place to call home and go to that same place every night, it's pretty special to me." He did something else nobody asked him to do. He grew his hair long for years and then cut fifteen inches of it off for a group that makes wigs for people with cancer. He had tried once before, but nobody at the barbershop knew how it was done and the hair ended up on the floor. So he grew it back out for two more years and did it properly. The baseball has not been easy. His elbow went in 2021. His knee in 2024. A lat strain cost him the start of 2025 and an oblique cost him the end of it. As of last spring he had never thrown 100 professional innings in a season. This year he went 4 and 0 with a 1.91 earned run average in 47 games. In the playoffs he has not given up a run. In Game 3 against the Dodgers he came in with the game hanging and struck out Kiké Hernández and Tommy Edman, and the Brewers swept Los Angeles out of the series. He is not the only Brewer who does the Habitat work. Brandon Woodruff has been on those builds for six years. And the fifty thousand dollars behind this year's house came from the team foundation, not from Hall. What he gives is a day and a pair of hands. But he is the one who never had the one house. He lived in about 15 of them. He builds them now. And he made his major league debut against the Tampa Bay Rays. On Friday night he faces them again, in a World Series.

Self Portrait, 2026 14” × 11” Oil on linen “The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror” Derek Walcott, from “Love After Love”

JACKSON CHOURIO WINS IT. PANDEMONIUM IN MILWAUKEE.