Welcome to:
Project 3.18 is a free weekly publication where we tell strange and surprising stories from baseball history and culture.
We write about forfeits, ejections, promotions gone wrong, and wild celebrations. We chronicle singular events and remarkable patterns as history echoes through generations of America’s ballparks and the world around them. We explore moments of frustration, exhilaration, confusion, and bone-deep malaise. We go beyond the foul lines, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms and back rooms of Big Baseball, where greed, tradition, and fandom mixed and sometimes ignited.
Whenever possible, we include the words of people who were there, wherever that was, chronicling what they saw, what they thought, and what they did.
Let’s put our work in terms of a familiar baseball consumable, the hot dog. When you order a hot dog, you presumably do so because of your interest in the hot dog itself and the tube-shaped bun. Whether it’s a sandwich or not, that’s the basis of your order, and you probably expect consistency there—no one who enjoys a hot dog really wants the basic formula changed. So it is with baseball.
But if your hot dog arrives without any condiments—no relish, mustard, or onions, to name but a few—you are going to be underwhelmed and probably disappointed.
Here at Project 3.18, we will always have mustard.
About our title
From the Official Baseball Rules (1971), Division 3, “Game Preliminaries”:
Rule 3.18: The home team shall provide police protection sufficient to preserve order. If a person, or persons, enter the playing field during a game and interfere in any way with the play, the visiting team may refuse to play until the field is cleared.
PENALTY: If the field is not cleared in a reasonable length of time, which shall in no case be less than fifteen minutes after the visiting team’s refusal to play, the umpire may forfeit the game to the visiting team.
Though the designation number has changed frequently, a version of this rule is one of the few non-playing rules that has been in place and relatively unchanged since the first National League Constitution was handwritten in 1876. It gives you a sense of the rule’s importance that the document’s framers included it (in Article XIII) in full while saying of their playing rules, essentially: “We’ll write those down soon and get back to you.”
The moments in history when Rule 3.18 has been invoked (or should have been) are one of our favorite topics.
What to expect from Project 3.18
Substack-featured and -recognized sports writing!
Project 3.18 publishes weekly, usually on Monday. We write long-form, deep-dive stories, the kind you might find featured in a monthly magazine. We excavate baseball history and bring it to life in the form of timeless, standalone stories, thoroughly researched and lovingly told.
Project 3.18 is a storytelling archive. Explore!
Our stories rarely focus on present-day, “in the news” subjects, which means they have a great shelf life. We encourage you to explore our stories by theme, team, or subject, and enjoy the bounty of stories available in our Archive. If you haven’t read a previous Project 3.18 story, we promise it will feel as fresh to you as it did to readers the day we published it.
There is no cost to subscribe
Subscribing reflects your support for/interest in this endeavor and ensures our newsletter will conveniently arrive in your inbox whenever we post. For a great seat, sign up here:
Telling stories together
Many of the stories we’ll tell here will cover events that have taken place in the last fifty years. You may be someone who was there, or you may know someone who was. Whether you’ve told the story a hundred times or never before, Project 3.18 aims to capture and preserve your contributions to a larger narrative of baseball and fandom. Whenever we can, we include reader contributions in standalone posts or as part of a multi-contributor rundown.
After we write about an event here at Project 3.18, readers are always invited to share their anecdotes, memories, and reactions via comments or emails sent to project318@substack.com.
Even if you’ve never had a grandstand seat for any of baseball’s more zesty moments, you can still help Project 3.18 by sharing our newsletter with family, friends, and colleagues.
The design for Project 3.18 was completed by Ketaki Kulkarni!
