Podcast: The Cubs have the concepts of a plan

Desipio/Pointless Exercise Shop

Wear your favorite newsletter and podcast!

Visit the store

Carter Hawkins and Elise Menaker join the pod from the GM meetings in Vegas, well, sort of. Oleg and Praz are on hand to break down Carter's nonsensical interview. But there's also a big announcement as we're starting a Lockout Book Club to pass the time while the owners and players are goofing off all winter. Tune in to find out the first book, and who the co-host is going to be. But there's plenty of Cubs talk, with complicated medical discussions of Ben Brown's neck, a look at the estimated offers for guys like Seiya and Clay Holmes and David Peterson and Ian Happ, who the Cubs might target, and much more.

Podcast: The Cubs have the concepts of a plan - Nov. 10, 2026

Announcement: If baseball's going to be sitting around all winter doing nothing, we're going to need something to occupy our time. So we're starting a Lockout Book Club. Michael Bradt and I will be picking books for each other to read (all bangers) and we'll give you a few weeks to read it too, and then take reader questions and discuss. I got first pick and our first book (with a pod date of right around December 1 when the lockout starts) is Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner's Heat 2.

Heat 2: A Novel

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice, Collateral, and Heat teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic heist film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie.“A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist.” —EsquireOne day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city in this suspense thriller.In a tense prequel story set in 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel, dual timeline narrative driving through the years following Heat.Heat 2 projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds—from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.Heat 2 is engrossing, moving, and tragic—a masterpiece of crime fiction and a must-read action thriller with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.

William Morrow PaperbacksMichael Mann and Meg Gardiner

You can get it on Bookshop.org for less than $10, or almost certainly get it at your local library.

I'll be honest, I kept avoiding this book thinking that it seemed kind of dumb to write a sequel to a movie with no plan to make a movie out of it. But I kept hearing how good it is, and finally bought it and it's incredible.

And now, it is going to be a movie, one that's filming now with Leonardo DiCaprio in the Val Kilmer role, Christian Bale in Al Pacino's, Stephen Graham as a younger version of Robert DeNiro's Neil McCauley, and also starring Adam Driver (as a truly horrible villain--seriously, wait until you get a load of this asshole in the book), Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jason Clark.

Here's Bookshop.org's write up of Heat 2.

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!

Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice, Collateral, and Heat teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic heist film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie.

“A hard-boiled, cinematic read that moves as fast as a well-planned heist.” —Esquire

One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city in this suspense thriller.