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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. 

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.

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.

Substack-featured and -recognized sports writing!

Oh, sure, swirly awards are great and all, but here’s what some of our favorite readers from our nearly 1000-strong community have said about their favorite Project 3.18 stories:

I'm enjoying the bejezus outa these tales. Please keep it up.

I came here for the baseball but I’m staying for the history stuff. This is among the best short pieces I’ve read anywhere this year.

This is only Part 1? This is one of the best sports stories I've ever heard!

I can't get enough of this outside-the-lines history of our once and future national pastime.

The events related herein are worthy of epic status. And you’re clearly the best man for the job. Don’t forget to drop Hollywood a line.

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Subscribing reflects your support for/interest in this endeavor and ensures our newsletter will conveniently arrive in your inbox whenever we post.

…but there IS a BONUS story for subscribers!

When you subscribe, you’ll get a link to a secret story we don’t make available any other way.

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.

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.

Telling stories together 

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.

The design for Project 3.18 was completed by Ketaki Kulkarni!