The Wheelysports Mailbag Column

I'm out of ideas, so I made the readers do all the work

Photo Credit: Luis Gomez, Unipublic

From time to time I get an email or a DM from a journalism student or other young writer asking how I got to where I am professionally. Which is a two-part question: “How did you get your job?” and “How did you develop the skills to do your job well?”¹

The first question is a long story and involves a lot of hard work and patience, and even more being in the right place at the right time. Not for nothing, but I think people in any kind of advantageous social position, whether that be professional or otherwise, would do well to consider the lucky breaks they got that helped them get there. Luck, or privilege, or whatever other label you want to call it, doesn’t negate the skill and hard work you put in, but it matters. There’s no such thing as a truly self-made man, and the fact that we pretend otherwise in order to preserve the infallibility of the state religion of capitalism and the myth of meritocracy…well, it’s clogging up a lot of pipes in the civilizational utility system.

Anyway, the second question is simple enough to answer: I got good at this because I wrote a lot. I like to think I have some natural talent, but when I was in my early 20s, I was writing several blogs a week, anchored by a multi-thousand-word mailbag column at a now-defunct Phillies website called Crashburn Alley.²

Every week for about four years, come hell or high water, I wrote and wrote and wrote, and learned how to churn out clean, entertaining copy quickly and in high volume. Take it from someone who hated practicing music; there’s no substitute.

Mailbag columns were all the rage at the time. Most of the writers I looked up to at the time, most notably Bill Simmons and Drew Magary, wrote one. And over the years I figured out why: It’s easy.

I mean, you still have to write the damn thing. That’s not easy. But an underrated time-consuming part of writing is coming up with a topic. The mailbag is the last refuge of a writer who’s out of ideas. (Please consider purchasing a membership at FanGraphs, where one of the perks is access to a special weekly members-only mailbag, to which I’m a regular contributor.)

That’s where I found myself this week. We’ve got the Tour de France Femmes in the rearview mirror, and the Vuelta is still a week away. The cycling websites I read are mostly talking about one of two things: The transfer market, where the only move so far that I have significant thoughts about is Remco Evenepoel to Red Bull. And the conversation about Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s weight loss.

Transfers Get Bigger, Riders Get Smaller

In hindsight, perhaps I was foolish to burn both of those topics on one post last week.

So I turned to you, my dear readers, for help. Do the thinking for me, I pleaded on Bluesky. And here we are, with a smattering of questions that I hope will tide everyone over for another week.

From Nick Reed: “Which non grand tour race would you most like to attend every stage of, assuming time and money were not issues?”

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were watching Pedal to Survive,³ and out of nowhere she asked if—one day, time and money permitting—I’d like to go to the Tour de France.

This was a breakthrough moment for me. I don’t want to make it seem like our marriage is one of those gender stereotypes where the guy spends all day thinking about sports and the gal goes along to get along but deep down doesn’t care or understand. My wife is a big sports fan, but, like, by normal person standards. She follows one sport closely and goes nuts for the Olympics and the World Cup, but she doesn’t have a favorite baseball or basketball team, and only tunes in to those sports for big events. But compared to someone who works in sports for a living and has multiple tattoos related to sports he doesn’t write about, she looks pretty ambivalent.

Anyway, even the whiff of a willingness to undertake an expensive intercontinental vacation got me excited, and I think I blew it by telling the truth.

If I were going to see one race in person, it would be the Tour of Flanders, not the Tour de France. In a grand tour, you’re humping your car or your camper out to the middle of nowhere to watch the entire peloton zoom by in a blur. If you want to see something meaningful, you have to climb the day’s mountain on foot at oh-dark-thirty to stake out a good spot. And that just doesn’t look like fun.

The Tour of Flanders covers big climbs multiple times, so the live viewing experience is better, and most of those climbs are in towns with bars where people hang out and party all day. That sounds like way more fun to me.

Of course, that means trading a week in the gorgeous Alpine summer for a day in the freezing, muddy Belgian spring. So I might’ve fucked up the whole idea.

And at any rate, that’s not responsive to the question, because the Tour of Flanders is a one-day race, not a one-week race.

I was tempted to pick a random one-week race that’s just in a place I’d like to visit, like the Volta ao Algarve, but if I’m making this big trip to Europe I want to see the best riders in the peloton with something significant on the line.

Practically, that narrows it down to one of the one-week races in the spring. I kicked around the Tour de Suisse or the Volta a Catalunya or the Dauphiné,⁴ but I landed on one of the two mid-March World Tour races: Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico.

Both attract huge names and feature a variety of stage types across lovely parts of Europe, so I’d be happy with either. But Paris-Nice has the edge because the two cities in the name are inner-circle Hall of Fame European tourist destinations even when there isn’t a bike race. I know it was freezing cold there this year, but I can always put on a jacket.

From Tyler: “Of the young GC contenders, who’s next to make the leap into the Big 3/4/5, whatever we want to call it (it’s really a Big 1)? Del Toro, Ayuso, Onley, Lipowitz, Vauquelin, Skjelmose?”

This is a great question. Like he said, the current GC pecking order is Tadej Pogačar, then Jonas Vingegaard, then Remco Evenepoel. Then there are a bunch of older guys (Richard Carapaz, Primož Roglič, the Yates brothers, maybe Enric Mas and Ben O’Connor) who are really good, and can make noise when the big three aren’t present.

After that, handicapping the 25-and-under crowd is tough. Way tougher than it would’ve been four months ago. Back then, I thought the easy answer for next man up was Juan Ayuso and it wasn’t close. I also thought that Isaac del Toro was nowhere near ready. Both of those assumptions turned out to be extremely wrong.

Gun to my head, I’d probably still have Ayuso first by a hair over del Toro, with Onley in third. I know Lipowitz just beat Onley for the last podium spot at the Tour de France, but Onley is 1) more than two years younger and 2) riding for a much worse team. I think Onley, therefore, could kick up a level if he joins a Visma-Lease a Bike or UAE down the line.

Speaking of, the scuttlebutt is that Kévin Vauquelin will be moving to Ineos Grenadiers next year, which could be fun. I thought he was terrific at the Tour, and still has lots of potential, even if he just busted up his leg going down a flight of stairs.

The one guy you didn’t mention who I think bears watching is Red Bull’s Giulio Pellizzarri, who podiumed a mountain stage of the Giro last year at age 20, finishing behind only Pogačar. In 2025, he ended up sixth on GC after all the fucking around on Stage 20. Anyone who does that well that young is worth a look.

From Remz: “What is your preferred awful looking pro cyclist of all time (Escartin, Voeckler, Healy, Vansevenant etc. )?”

I followed up with Remz to make sure he meant pedaling style, and was not asking which rider I thought had the most busted-looking face.

And I’m sorry for going a little Route 1 with this, but it’s got to be Chris Froome.

Taking nothing away from what he achieved, but that head down, shoulders hunched, elbows out style was just hideous to watch.⁵

I might just have it out for tall, super-skinny GC guys, because I always thought Andy Schleck looked weird too. Like his head was disproportionately big and his bike was disproportionately small.

From David: “Brandon McNulty just won the Tour de Pologne. If he went to the Taste of Polonia Festival this Labor Day weekend in Chicago to be honored for his win, how many polish sausages could he eat? If he had a beer to accompany the sausages, could he drink it faster than Puck Pieterse?”

Friend, you are speaking my language.

Man, I should’ve just written about this. My beloved B-Mac winning his first World Tour GC, and the first one for an American man since Sepp Kuss won the Vuelta in 2023. That’s big stuff.

Not as big as what he could put down in kielbasa, however.

OK, the average pro cyclist eats between 5,000 and 8,000 calories a day. According to the internet, a serving of kielbasa is 127 calories, but it also lists the serving size at just two ounces, which…I don’t even know what to say. If you think two ounces of sausage is a serving, you don’t know sausages, or Polish-Americans.

Back to the question at hand: 127 goes into 8,000 almost exactly 63 times, which is 126 ounces—or 7 7/8 pounds—of sausage. According to this forum on the Bradley Smoker website, the length-to-weight ratio for a medium-size sausage is about one pound of meat for every two feet of casing. So call it 16 feet of sausage.

Brandon McNulty is a cyclist, which means he eats a lot of carbs. I bet he could stuff more sausage down his gullet than the equivalent weight of pasta and rice cakes. Make it 20 feet.

There is the added complication of kielbasa not being the most interesting sausage. I say that not as an insult; all sausage is good sausage. But you’re gonna need condiments and dressings to get through more than six meters of Chicago’s finest. Mustard, for sure, but also sauerkraut. Call it one cup, at 27 calories, per foot of sausage.

So that’s my final estimate: 20 feet of sausage and 1 1/4 gallons of sauerkraut. One day of glory and one night of the most interesting poops of your life.

From Seth: How do we know the Pog isn’t doping? It seems crazy he could be this dominant in climbing and classics, and top 3? In TT. It seemed like he didn’t have to try at the TDF. I think you already addressed this and there probably isn’t an answer but my enjoyment was really sucked out by the dominance and then I got bummed out that it wasn’t real.

What a positive, uplifting question! But, sadly, a reasonable one.

I’m not really sure why all the doping stuff is coming back now, after the Tour de France. I don’t think Pogačar showed us anything new at this year’s Tour that he hadn’t already demonstrated at Paris-Roubaix, or last year when he sleepwalked to the Triple Crown.

The actual answer is: You don’t know he’s not doping! You never will! Especially after Lance Armstrong, no amount of negative tests and strident, self-righteous defenses would ever get me to trust a cyclist 100%.

With that said, I’m not aware of any evidence, other than the results, to suggest that Pogačar is doing anything illegal. Or, to be more precise, that he’s doing anything illegal that isn’t also common among his competitors. A couple weeks ago I talked about this on the For All You Kids podcast, which is ostensibly about the New York Mets, but the co-host, Jarrett Seidler, is a big cycling guy⁶ so he hijacked the discussion to talk about the Tour, and we went into some detail on this very question.

My opinion on PEDs, which I came to after a long time following cycling and an even longer time following baseball, is completely nihilistic. I don’t care that much. Great pro athletes are often psychopaths who’d strangle a kitten in order to gain a 0.01% advantage. Doing sports at this level turns people into something most of us would cross the street to avoid in everyday life. Just read anything about Michael Jordan, Michael Schumacher, Tom Brady, basically anyone you’d put in a greatest-of-all-time discussion anywhere.

Some of those people are going to want to win so badly they’re willing to break the rules. To think otherwise is naive.

But it’s also, in my opinion, sad to go through life waiting to be let down by people who do superhuman things. How many greatest-of-all-time type athletes have we witness just in the past 10 or 15 years? LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, Shohei Ohtani, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods—some of them in disciplines where PEDs have been an existential or near-existential issue.

I’ve made the choice not to worry about the bad thing until I have a specific reason to, and if the bad thing comes, to deal with it in a straightforward, businesslike manner. I guess that’s a luxury of detachment; there is no cyclist whom I love so much that a moral failure of any kind would send me into a spial. Maybe that’s not true of some superfans, but it is for me.

It’s also helpful to remember that almost nobody, even the most legendary and sanctimonious figures from the past, is free of sin. If we find out someday that Pogačar doped, so what? So did Eddy Merckx.

From Jason J: “If we took a cyclist and put them on an MLB roster as an everyday player and took a player from MLB and gave them endless time (so he can take three days per stage if needed) to ride the full Tour de France course, what happens first, cyclist gets a hit or baseball guy finishes?”

My first inclination is to say that the baseball guy finishes first. By a lot, if I get to pick the baseball guy. I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap in body type and physical gifts between baseball players and cyclists, but there’s some. Jonathan Milan, for instance, is listed at 6-foot-4 and 87 kilograms, which is 192 pounds. Do you want to know how many people weight 192 or less have played in the majors this year, according to Baseball Reference?

332.

Now, baseball players usually get weighed for the last time in their professional careers when they’re like 20 or 21. I’m not going to name names but there are some guys on that list who say they’re 165 and are probably well into the 200s. But that’s fine, I’m not out to police anyone’s waist size; I’m just making the point that there is probably a big leaguer out there who is small and fit enough to make it through a Tour de France within, I dunno, two and a half times the lanterne rouge’s time this year?

The other question here is whether the baseball player has to ride alone, or whether he gets a peloton to draft off of. Because especially on a five-hour jaunt across a flat road, having someone to pace and cut through the wind is a massive advantage.

For the sake of argument, let’s give 10 big leaguers of my choosing—high power-to-weight, good on a bike, comfortable with heights and speed—a team time trial. And because I have no idea how to make a better educated guess than this, let’s say it takes them 200 hours to do the Tour de France course.⁷ If you have access to an active major leaguer’s Strava account and think this estimate is wildly out of whack in either direction, DM me.

If the baseball players are riding eight hours a day, they’ll finish those 200 hours in 25 days. If a cyclist got into a major league lineup, they’d get maybe 90 or 100 plate appearances in 25 games. There is no cyclist on a planet who’d get a hit off a major league pitcher in that time frame. Not even an American or Canadian or Colombian who grew up playing baseball as a kid.⁸

Some of these guys would straight up not be able to hold onto the bat even if they did make contact. That’s how much force is coming through a 98 mph fastball when the guy holding the bat weighs 140 pounds and hasn’t picked up a dumbbell in his entire life. And if you’re thinking the cyclist could get a bunt down and run for it, you’ve got another think coming, because have you seen these guys run?

In the spirit of making things fair, let’s give the cyclists as much time in the batter’s box against a major league pitcher as the baseball players need to finish the course. A good batting practice pitcher takes five or six seconds between throws, but we’re talking about a real in-game pitcher here.

MLB’s pitch clock runs 15 seconds with the bases empty. That’s four pitches a minute, or 48,000 pitches in 200 hours.

On second thought, 48,000 is a lot of pitches. If you showed 48,000 pro cyclists one pitch each, I am confident none of them would get a hit. If you showed 480 pro cyclists 100 pitches each, the same thing.

But after 200 hours of tracking pitches, the cyclists are going to settle in and make contact at least a few times. Some of those will end up fair, and at least one in 48,000 will end up as a Texas Leaguer or a seeing-eye grounder.

So I guess it depends how you define the question, because I think baseball players would be a lot better at cycling than the other way around. But in terms of actual time spent on the field, large numbers win out here.

1. “Well” is a matter of opinion, but, you know, I hope

2. This might be another instance of right place, right time, but it helped that I was being pushed by an extremely talented set of coauthors. Around that time, I wrote for three sites—two Phillies blogs and a Sixers blog—alongside at least 15 other people who would go on to have significant careers in sports or sports journalism. I don’t think that happened everywhere, and I was better off for the experience.

3. Government name: Tour de France: Unchained

4. Which also feels like cheating because it’s a miniature Tour de France

5. My wife called him “Weird Elbows” and never learned his name.

6. And one of the unfortunates who reads this newsletter. Hi buddy!

7. Pogačar did it in 76 and change.

8. I bet Remco would actually do pretty well, relatively speaking, despite his background being in soccer. Good all-around athletes pick things up quickly.