Dan Lewis

Improving the MLB Playoffs: The Ladder

I’m a huge baseball fan. I follow the Mets all season long, tied to my TV or phone for (almost) all 162 games. I’m a scoreboard watcher for most of August through the end of the season, depending on whether the Mets are in the playoff hunt. And I watch the post-season games regardless of who is playing.

The playoffs are fun — but I want them to be more fun. And more importantly, I want the regular season to matter a lot more than it does. Here’s my plan.

tl;dr

1. The more fun: Except for the ALCS/NLCS and World Series, all playoff games become elimination games.
2. The “regular season matters” part: It’s a lot harder for a low Wild Card team to make it to the World Series than before.
3. We expand the playoffs.

How It Works

Right now, six teams from each league make the playoffs — the winners of each division and the three wild cards. The teams are ranked one through six; the divisional winners get the top three seeds based on their regular season record and the wild cards get the bottom three seeds based on theirs. I’m not changing any of that — not immediately, at least.

In the current system, the #3 seed hosts the #6 seed in a best-of-three series; the #4 seed hosts the #5 similarly. The winner of 4/5 faces the #1 seed in a best-of-five series and the winner of 3/6 faces the #2 seed. That leads us to the LCS. I’m keeping the basic structure there — 3 plays 6, with the winner playing 2; 4 plays 5, with the winner playing 1.

So what’s new?

The first two rounds are now a two-game series, which I’m calling a “best of two.”

• The lower seed hosts both games.
• The higher seed has to win both games to advance.

What does this mean?

First, all of the first and second-round games are elimination games. If a 5 or 6 seed loses the first game of their best-of-two, they’re done. In the second round, if the 1 or 2 seed wins the first game, their opponent is eliminated. Making every game an elimination game increases the drama by a lot, and therefore, makes the playoffs a lot more fun (for more casual fans especially).

Second, it means that low seeds need to win four games in a row, against “better” teams, on the road, to advance to the LCS. That’s doable, but it’s a big hurdle — one that an 87-win team should have to overcome if they want to get into the World Series over multiple 100+ win teams.

Would This Have Changed 2022? Maybe?

Here are the results of the 2022 Playoffs, via MLB.com:

In the new ladder system, the overall bracket would have been the same, as explained above. (That will change with my “future state” idea below, but don’t worry about that for now.) The results would have been different — and please, don’t think I’m suggesting this just because the Mets come off better. The Mets had plenty of chances and got what they deserved, sadly.

I want to focus on the Astros and Phillies, though — the two World Series teams. The Astros, being the 1 seed in the AL, would have simply needed to win one of two games against Seattle (which, even in my system, earned their upset of the Blue Jays) to advance to the ALCS; they clearly would have still done so, and they almost certainly would have still faced the Yankees. So no change there. The Phillies — the 6 seed in the NL — would have faced a tougher road, but maybe they make it to the World Series as well. They did what they needed to do in the Wild Card round, beating the Cardinals two games to zilch in St. Louis. They won the first game against Atlanta but lost the second; perhaps they play it differently if it’s an elimination game? And if they did advance, it’s possible that they’d have to face the top-seeded Dodgers, given LA’s relatively easier path forward. In short, the Phillies still may have made it to the title bout, but it would have been more difficult. That’s a good outcome, given their regular season performance.

The Big Problem: Fewer Games, Fewer Dollars

MLB expanded its playoffs before the 2022 season for a very clear reason: money. Playoff games make a lot of money for the league, and the more games, the more you make. My system cuts back on the number of games, and that’s a huge problem. (Don’t worry, I have a fix! And it’s a good one.) In 2022, we had nine total Wild Card games; my system caps that at eight, and realistically, you’re looking at probably around six. The LDS is even worse: my system gives the league a maximum of four games, but the current system gives us a minimum of six and as many as ten.

Realistically, I’m costing the league about ten games. There’s no way MLB is going to switch to my plan unless I can make up some of that gap. The “every game is an elimination game” aspect probably helps me out a bit — you’re likely to see better TV ratings for elimination games than you would otherwise. But I need more.

That’s where the “ladder” comes in.

Let’s Add Four More Playoff Teams

Right now, 12 of the 30 MLB teams make the playoffs — that’s 40% of the league. The NFL has 14 of 32 make it, or 43.75%. The NBA has 16 of 32 (50%) unless you count the “play-in” tournament, in which case it’s 20 of 32 (62.5%). The NHL has 16 of 32 (50%) go to the postseason.

There’s room for growth.

I think the big reason that the league, players, and even fans are reluctant to add more playoff teams is that doing so devalues the regular season. With a 162-game season, you don’t want to do that. We need a way to add more playoff teams and not have to worry about diluting the importance of the regular season results.

Let’s say we added two more teams per league to the 2022 playoff picture, using the National League as an example. The Brewers (86-76) would be our 7th seed and the Giants (81-81) would be the 8th seed. In a traditional bracket, the Dodgers (111-51), as our #1 seed, would have faced the Giants, and the 2-seeded Braves (101-61) would face the Brewers. For the Dodgers and Braves, that’s really bad; in the current system, they have a bye past the first round, and in an expanded format, they’d have to re-prove themselves against a team that, arguably, shouldn’t even have been given a postseason berth. The traditional bracket doesn’t work.

But there’s another way: the ladder. Ladders work exactly as they do in real life: to get to the top, you need to start at the bottom rung and make your way up. In this case, the playoff would work exactly as they do in my idea above — except that we’d add a round before the Wild Card.

• The 5th seed hosts the 8th seed in a “best-of-two” series
• The 6th seed hosts the 7th seed in a “best-of-two” as well
• Everyone else gets a bye

Then, we go into what I had before. The 4th seed hosts the winner of 5/8; the 3rd seed hosts the winner of 6/7.

That only adds two to four games back into the playoff schedule, but I think that’s enough to get by. Why? Because it massively increases the value of the end-of-season pennant race. In reflecting on the expanded 2022 playoff field, Sports Business Journal noted that “when Major League Baseball announced a postseason expansion from 10 clubs to 12 as part of its new five-year collective-bargaining agreement last spring, the primary motive was to keep more markets engaged longer” — and the results bore that out. “The league drew 1,644,658 fans the last weekend of the regular season, marking the best-attended weekend overall since August 2015.” While it’s definitely true that “more playoff games equals more money,” it’s also true that “more playoff teams equals more money.” And that’s before we factor in the obvious value of being the #4 seed over the #5 seed.

The Playoffs Are Going To Expand Anyway. Let’s Make Them Great.

MLB is going to expand to 32 teams before 2030 — that’s pretty much a given. And when they do, they’re not going to stick with 12 playoff teams. A 16-team playoff is inevitable.

Ideally, when that happens, we’ll also get realignment — but I fear we’ll end up with four divisions in each league. I’d like to see the opposite happen, and if it does, a playoff ladder would be incredible.

Imagine four divisions total: NL East, NL West, AL East, AL West. For our purposes, I’m going to use a hypothetical NL East of the Braves, Mets, Phillies, Marlins, Nationals, Pirates, Reds, and a new Montreal team. Let’s assume the Braves take the regular season pennant, like they did in 2022, followed in order by the Mets, Phillies, and then the Marlins. If we mirrored the current MLB playoff format, you would have a regular tournament bracket — the Braves host the Marlins in a best-of-three, the Mets host the Phillies in the same, and the winners face off in a best-of-five. That really reduces the importance of the regular season.

Alternatively, we could have an NL East ladder. The Phillies host the Marlins in a best-of-two, the winner goes to New York to face the Mets in a best-of-two, and the winner of that then goes to Atlanta for a best-of-two. Winning the division is a huge, huge advantage — not only do you have to win one game to get into the NLCS, but you have two chances to do so, and you’re playing both on basically full rest. The regular season becomes massively important, but the lowest-seeded team still has a chance. And if the Marlins (in this case) manage to win six games in a row, on the road, against the three better teams in their division — I think it’s fair to say they earned that NLCS bid.

And, Most Importantly, It’d be SO MUCH FUN

Imagine: three days left in the MLB regular season. The Marlins are a game ahead of the Pirates for 4th place in the new NL East, and they’re facing the Mets at Citi Field. The Mets are two games back of first-place Atlanta and a game ahead of the Phillies. Every game matters.

And then, when the regular season ends, the real fun begins. Over a ten-day stretch in October, we go from sixteen playoff teams to four — courtesy of a blitz of at least 12 and as many as 24 elimination games. It’s like March Madness, but for MLB.

Why I’m Optimistic About the 2024 Mets

If you told me on Opening Day that, on August 2nd, the Mets would be basically out of the playoff chase, starting multiple players I hadn’t heard of before tonight, and no longer have Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander on their roster, I’d have thought you were crazy. But here we are, with our eyes looking past 2023 and onto 2024.

And you know what? I think 2024 is going to be a good year.

tl;dr

In case you don’t want to read the whole thing:

1. I’m confident that the Mets won’t sell off Alonso, but I also think they’ll not add any top 10 free agents.
2. I think they’ll add a few lesser free agents — and probably one or two in the top 25 — to plug the biggest holes on the roster.
3. I’m optimistic that doing the above will get them to an 87+ win season and a playoff berth
4. I’d be shocked if the Mets do not make a real run at Ohtani, but I also would be surprised if he chooses the Mets — not because 2024 could be weak, but because there are other places he’d simply rather play.

Why? Let’s go.

Where We Are Right Now

First, let’s do some level-setting:

• The Mets have a lot of players under team control for next season
• The actually have room in the budget
• But there are huge, huge needs
• Oh, and the team they’re bringing back underperformed dramatically last year
• And none of the guys they traded for during the 2023 sell-off are going to help

The Status Quo: Players

When it comes to position players, the Mets are returning a full cast:

• C: Alvarez, Narvaez (player option)
• 1B: Alonso
• 2B: McNeil
• 3B: Baty
• SS: Lindor
• OF: Marte, Nimmo, Mauricio
• DH: Vientos, Vogelbach
• UT: Guillorme

There are other guys (Nido most notably) that may make the team when things all shake out, but if the Mets go with what they have right now, this is what you get. It’s a full lineup and perfectly viable.

The bullpen is similarly fine. Diaz, Ottavino, Raley, and Drew Smith make up a fundamentally sound core. (Ottavino has a player option.) Trevor Gott and the currently-injured Eliesar Hernandez are also arbitration-eligible.

The rotation, though? It’s … bad.

• Senga (great!)
• Quintana (ok)
• Peterson (eh…)
• Megill (um…)
• Lucchesi (omg)

The Status Quo: Budget

The Mets 2023 payroll is roughly $350 million, according to Fangraphs. (As of this writing, they have it at $346 million, but that’s actually a bit lower than what it should have been, because it omits the dollars the team recouped this year by trading away some players.) The team traded away Scherzer and Verlander, sending about $57 million with them, but the duo was owed roughly $87 million. So, the Mets actually shaved $30 million off their 2024 payroll. On top of that, the team is free of the (net) $20 million owed to Robinson Cano.

When you subtract that out as well as the money from expiring contracts, Fangraphs estimates that the Mets are currently on the hook for only (“only”) about $204 million next year. That doesn’t include the arbitration-eligible guys, but the only really notable one there is Pete Alonso. Let’s assume, possibly incorrectly, that the team simply gives him a one-year deal for $20 million. That puts them at ~$225 million, a far cry under the $350 million they were just at. The clear conclusion is that there’s money available — the question is, how much will the Mets spend, and on what?

The Four Ways Forward This Offseason

The Mets have four possible paths this offseason, excluding the Ohtani situation, which I’ll address separately. In order of likelihood:

1. Retool
2. Do Almost Nothing
3. Sell
4. Buy Big

Let’s explain each one and why I ranked them that way.

Path 1: Retool

In this scenario, the Mets spend about $50 million (in average annual contract value) to get two starting pitchers and a reliever or two. For example, say they get Yoshinobu Yamamoto on a five-year, $75 million deal similar to Senga’s contract and maybe grab Lance Lynn on a two-year, $26 million deal similar to Quintana’s. Substitute in other pitchers if you want, but that’s roughly a $30 million allocation to fill two of those starting pitching spots. And I think that’s basically what the Mets will do again.

Similarly, I think the Mets bring in a high-leverage reliever — maybe Robertson comes back! — just like they did last offseason. But I also think they learn from their mistake and add a second arm. Let’s say Trevor May, just to stick with familiar names. The two of them cost, total, $17 million last year (on a couple of one-year deals) and the Mets shouldn’t have a hard time hitting that number.

Finally, I think the Mets add a bench bat — Tommy Pham, redux — and maybe send Narvaez packing (and bring Nido back up) to recoup some dollars. That puts them in the ballpark of that $50 million investment. And at that point, they’re done. You roll with Peterson as the 5th starter, maybe move Megill to the pen, and not worry too much about the last bench player.

Can that team win 87 games? Absolutely. Alvarez, Baty, Vientos, and Mauricio can be a lot better than we think. McNeil, Marte, Lindor, and even Pete may have much better seasons. Quintana may be good for a full year and Diaz will be back. There’s a lot to be excited for here — and with the right additions, we can get to a playoff-level number of wins. Maybe we can even get to 95.

Could they also be an epic disaster? As 2023 showed, yep. The kids may stink, the veterans may fail to rebound, Senga’s walk rate may not come down, Quintana may show his age, our free-agent signings may bust again, and our bullpen may be a joke. The downside is all very much still there.

But if they go this way — and again, I think they will — I’m optimistic. The team I’ve outlined above is definitely good enough to compete and make a deep run into the playoffs, and if all goes well? At the deadline that high-end starter who is in the last year of a deal, and suddenly, you’re a bonafide World Series contender.

Regardless, I think this is where Steve Cohen and Billy Eppler are headed — and I’ll be very surprised if they do anything differently.

Path 2: Do Almost Nothing

The Mets could go into 2024 with, basically, a holdover roster from 2023, and not much else. A backend of the rotation with Peterson, Megill, and Lucchesi is bad… but it’s also something you could reasonably see happening if you squint.

I don’t think this is likely, at all — but there’s a possibility they’ll do this if it keeps them under a luxury tax threshold. I don’t think it will, though, and I’m including this path here mostly to show how shocked I’d be if the Mets sold or went on a massive spending spree.

Path 3: Sell

If you want to (a) get even more prospects and (b) get under a luxury tax threshold (or all of them), that’s doable. The Mets could be sellers this offseason — but there’s really only one path to get there. You have to trade Pete Alonso.

The Mets simply don’t have a lot left to sell. Almost everyone under team control is either really cheap (Alvarez, Baty) or on a deal that goes through at least 2026 (Diaz, Lindor, McNeil, Senga, Nimmo). As noted above, I think Narvaez could be traded regardless, so I wouldn’t include a trade of him in this scenario, but there are four others who could be: Marte, Raley, Quintana, and Pete.

Raley and Quintana each have value and combined are due $18.5 million next year (and are free agents after). Neither were moved at the 2023 deadline, suggesting that Eppler didn’t get the offer(s) he wanted. I don’t know what the asking price was, of course, but given how the team handled all of the executed trades, the goal wasn’t “save money.” (Cohen has previously said that he considered those contracts as “already spent money,” to paraphrase.) I could see a situation where the front office trades both to get more youth in the system, but I’d be surprised if either player is dumped for salary relief — the amount recouped isn’t quite enough to make a difference.

Marte, on the other hand, could be a salary dump. He’s owed a lot of money — $20.75 million a year for the next two years — and had an awful 2023. I think the Mets are basically stuck with him; they could pay most of his salary and they’d still not get anything back. Creative trades can happen (see Cano, Robinson and Kelenic, Jarred), though, but if the goal is to get under that salary cap, the Mets wouldn’t get much in return.

The only way that happens, though, is if the Mets are resigned to losing in 2024. And in that case, they all but have to trade Pete Alonso. Maybe not before the season but definitely by the trade deadline.

The case for extending Alonso is crystal clear — he’s a homegrown player who crushes the ball, and the Mets don’t hit a lot of homers otherwise. But the case against is also very clear. He’ll be 30 years old for the 2025 season — the same age Brandon Nimmo was for 2023 — and the contract needed to keep him would definitely surpass the $162 million, eight-year deal Nimmo received. If you’re not intending to compete in 2024, why spend $20 million and forgo the bounty of prospects you’d get for his services?

I don’t think there’s a meaningful chance the Mets go down this path, at least not during the offseason. (I could see them revisiting it at the 2024 trade deadline.) Trading Pete would cause the fan base to doubly erupt — it would signal that 2024 is dead and that the team doesn’t value its most notable homegrown player.

Path 4: Buy Big

This isn’t going to happen.

But let’s imagine it anyway.

Ohtani aside — we’ll get to him in a moment — there is plenty of talent out there this offseason, as there is every offseason. Before the 2023 season, the Mets spent a fortune extending Diaz, McNeil, and Nimmo and still added three top starters (Verlander, Senga, Quintana), Robertson, and Narvaez. They paid James McCann to go away and sent a low-level prospect to Tampa Bay to get Raley, who wasn’t all that cheap. And this was just a year removed from a huge investment to get Scherzer, Marte, Canha, and Escobar. They’ve spent big before: why not do that again?

Okay, the obvious reason why is because it didn’t work. Well, it worked the first time (2022) but didn’t the second (2023). But, I think, there’s a less-obvious reason: it’s just not sustainable.

Free agents are generally more expensive than the homegrown alternatives — and they’re also older. The net result is that you have to keep spending to make up for declines and injuries and the like, and even when you do that, you’re always at risk for a season like we saw in 2023. Further, the market supply may not match your current needs. If you need a third baseman (the Mets don’t, as far as I’m concerned) and the best free agent available is Josh Donaldson, well, draw your own conclusion as to why a “buy big” strategy won’t work.

The Mets learned this the hard way this year. Over the last two off-seasons, the Mets added six players who, in 2023, were age 35 or older. That doesn’t include Canha, Escobar, Marte, or Quintana — all of whom are now 34, or Carlos Carrasco (36), who was acquired the year prior. Of those 11 players, only two (Marte and Quintana) are on the roster for 2024. The team simply isn’t going to make the same mistake again.

As a result, think there’s simply no way the Mets give a three+-year deal to any free agent over the age of 33. And I don’t think they’re going to give a five-plus year, nine-figure deal to the younger free agents like Aaron Nola (31 years old), Lucas Giolitto (29), or Julio Urias (27). If they were going to sign one of them, they would have kept Verlander instead.

I could be wrong here. But I’d be shocked if any of those three are part of the 2024 Mets, and I’d be flabbergasted if they went more than a year or two on someone like Lance Lynn or Kyle Hendricks.

The Most Likely Path is Also the Right Path Forward

If 2023 taught us anything, it’s that being old and expensive isn’t good for a baseball team. And beyond 2024, the Mets are now nicely set up to be neither old nor expensive — but still be good. Outside of Ohtani, there’s no one player that is worth deviating from that plan dramatically. Given what’s out there, you’re much better off rolling with what you’ve got and retooling the Major League roster where you can.

Based on what we’ve seen over the last week and what we’ve heard from Cohen and Eppler, I think that’s the way they’re going. It’s not a team that’s going to win 101 games, absent something miraculous, but it’s also not going to be one that’s going sub-.500, absent something disastrous. And we’ve seen that miracles and disasters both happen, even when you plan for other outcomes.

If Cohen and the front office bow out of the free agent market virtually entirely, that’s a big miss — and one I don’t think will happen. If they sell, trading Alonso, yikes. That’s a bad decision, and I’m not happy with that being a reasonable possibility. But if they spend but not spend big, I’m fine with it.

Except: I think they should make a run at Ohtani. And I think they will.

The Ohtani Factor

The tl;dr version:

• The Mets will make one of the three best offers to Ohtani.
• He won’t take it.
• Talk radio et al will blame the 2023 sell-off for that result.
• That take will be wrong (but unprovable).

Just days before Christmas 2022 — after signing all the guys already discussed above — the Mets signed Carlos Correa. Well, kind of, sort of, almost. Steve Cohen’s rationale was simple: he was the missing piece to turn a 90+ win team into a 100+ win team.

That was wrong, of course, but it was still instructive: Steve Cohen isn’t going to let money stand in the way of the Mets being great. Steve Cohen has money — more than he’ll ever need and the rest of us can ever imagine — but like the rest of us (who are old enough to remember), hasn’t seen a Mets championship parade in nearly 40 years. Money can’t buy that, as we learned this year, but it definitely helps.

And there’s only one Shohei Ohtani.

Ohtani’s contract is going to be ridiculous — 12 years, $500 million, maybe? — and he’ll be worth more than that for the first half of the contract. The second half? Who knows, but that’s the price you have to pay to get the first half of it.

From a financial perspective, the Mets are well-positioned to make that offer. If they follow my expected “Retool” path, Cohen would easily be able to handle the $40 million+ to also add Ohtani. From a competitiveness perspective, Ohtani would truly be a missing piece on both sides of the puzzle — he’d elevate a good lineup to great and a potentially mediocre rotation to potentially a great one (depending on the other signings). The Mets are going to be in on Ohtani, and there’s really no reason to think any other team will be meaningfully outbidding Steve Cohen.

But: I don’t think Ohtani takes Cohen’s money.

When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, a 10% haircut doesn’t hit all that hard. Ohtani isn’t going to choose a $500 million, 12-year contract from the Twins if the Dodgers are offering a $450 million, 11-year one — my guess is that he’d rather play baseball in LA than in Minnesota, with apologies to those in the Twin Cities. Yes, he’d be leaving money on the table, but is it really all that much? For the first 11 years, it’s roughly the equivalent of the Major League minimum ($720k). And retiring a year earlier while also being fabulously rich? For non-athletes, we’d call that a dream come true.

Ohtani is going to have a ton of offers and get to choose where he plays. This is rank speculation, but I’m betting he stays on the West Coast. It’s where he’s been his whole MLB career and it’s much closer to Japan than New York City is. Or maybe there are other factors that help him choose his destination. Money won’t be the only factor, and given how much he’s going to be offered (and likely from multiple teams), it probably won’t even be the main factor.

I do think that he’ll want to sign with a good team over a bad team, but I also don’t think he’s going to just look at the 2023 standings and conclude that the Brewers or Marlins are “good” and the Mets and Padres are “bad.” He’ll be signing a decade-long deal that eats up maybe 20% of his new team’s salary — it’d be beyond foolish to just look at 2024. If Shohei Ohtani wants to win a World Series or two before he retires, he should sign with a team that (a) has a pipeline of talent for years to come and (b) will spend on players to complement him. That sounds a lot like the Mets — but also the Dodgers and maybe the Padres, Orioles (crazy, right?!), Rangers, and probably a half-dozen other team. The 2023 season helps make the case for the Dodgers over the Mets, but the 2023 trade deadline helps make the case for the Mets over the Yankees, Red Sox, and about a dozen other potential suitors.

To Sum It All Up

I’m optimistic next year for two big reasons: the Mets core is actually pretty good, and the front office and Cohen will supplement it with enough talent to cover most of the holes nicely. It’s a good plan and you don’t need to win 100 games to make the playoffs; 87 gets you there (probably), and that’s absolutely within reach using that plan.

I Asked ChatGPT To Tell Me a Story about Cookie-Obsessed Squirrels and Iron Man’s Presidential Run. Here’s What It Cooked Up.

The story is below; the screenshots are underneath, as proof that ChatGPT wrote this with my minimal prompting.

Iron Man was a man of many talents. In addition to being a brilliant inventor and a skilled fighter, he was also a natural leader. So when he announced that he was running for President, many people were excited.

Iron Man’s campaign was a huge success. He promised to use his wealth and technology to make the world a better place, and people believed him. But as the election approached, some people began to have doubts.

It turned out that Iron Man was not the man he claimed to be. He was actually a Manchurian candidate, standing in for an organization of super-intelligent squirrels. These squirrels had been working on a secret project: the development of the perfect recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

Iron Man’s true purpose was to use his position as President to further the squirrels’ goal. He would use his powers and resources to help them find the best ingredients and techniques for making delicious cookies.

The people were shocked and outraged when they learned the truth. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Iron Man was still the best candidate for the job, and he was elected President. And as for the squirrels, they continued their work, determined to create the ultimate chocolate chip cookie.

“Squirreling Away with Iron Man: The Quest for the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie”

Iron Man was a man of many talents. In addition to being a brilliant inventor and a skilled fighter, he was also a natural leader. So when he announced that he was running for President, many people were excited.

Iron Man’s campaign was a huge success. He promised to use his wealth and technology to make the world a better place, and people believed him. But as the election approached, some people began to have doubts.

It turned out that Iron Man was not the man he claimed to be. He was actually a Manchurian candidate, standing in for an organization of super-intelligent squirrels. These squirrels had been working on a secret project: the development of the perfect recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

Iron Man’s true purpose was to use his position as President to further the squirrels’ goal. He would use his powers and resources to help them find the best ingredients and techniques for making delicious cookies.

The people were shocked and outraged when they learned the truth. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Iron Man was still the best candidate for the job, and he was elected President. And as for the squirrels, they continued their work, determined to create the ultimate chocolate chip cookie.

The super-intelligent squirrels had been working on their secret project for many years. They had collected a vast array of ingredients, from the finest cocoa beans to the most delicate spices. They had studied the science of baking, and experimented with different techniques and combinations.

But their ultimate goal was still elusive. They knew that the perfect chocolate chip cookie was out there, just waiting to be discovered. And they were determined to find it.

With Iron Man as their agent, they had access to even more resources. He helped them procure the best ingredients from around the world, and used his technology to analyze and test their recipes.

The squirrels worked tirelessly, day and night, in their secret laboratory. They mixed and matched ingredients, trying different combinations and proportions. They baked batch after batch of cookies, tasting and analyzing each one.

And slowly but surely, they began to make progress. They discovered the secret to creating the perfect dough, and the ideal temperature for baking. They found the perfect balance of sweetness and bitterness in the chocolate chips.

Finally, after many long months of work, the squirrels had done it. They had created the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. It was crisp and golden on the outside, and soft and chewy on the inside. The chocolate chips were perfectly melted, and the flavor was indescribably delicious.

The squirrels were thrilled with their accomplishment. They knew that they had achieved something truly remarkable, and they were eager to share their creation with the world. And with Iron Man as their ally, they were confident that they would be able to do just that.

Despite the squirrels’ best efforts, their plan to use Iron Man as their agent ultimately failed. This was due to a number of factors.

First and foremost, Iron Man was a hero, and he had a strong sense of right and wrong. As he learned more about the squirrels’ true motives, he began to have doubts about their plan. He realized that their obsession with chocolate chip cookies was misguided, and that they were using him for their own gain.

In addition, Iron Man’s position as President was not as powerful as the squirrels had hoped. As the leader of a nation, he was bound by laws and regulations, and he could not simply do whatever he wanted. This made it difficult for him to help the squirrels achieve their goals.

Furthermore, the people of the world were not as easily swayed by Iron Man’s charms as the squirrels had anticipated. Many of them were suspicious of his sudden change of heart, and they did not trust him as they once had. This made it difficult for him to gain support for his policies, and hindered his ability to help the squirrels.

In the end, the squirrels’ plan was foiled. Iron Man was unable to help them achieve their goal, and they were forced to abandon their pursuit of the perfect chocolate chip cookie. The squirrels were disappointed, but they learned a valuable lesson: sometimes even the best-laid plans can go awry.

* * *

How To Get Rid of Lots of Old Books

If you’re reading this, you are in the situation I was in two weeks ago: in a fit of decluttering, I ended up with a hundred or so old books, almost all in very good condition, that I had zero use for. And not wanting to see the books go to waste, I wanted to donate them somewhere.

That proved difficult. But thanks to the readers of Now I Know, my free daily trivia email newsletter that you really should sign up for, I was able to get rid of all the books (without resorting to putting them out with the recycling). Now I Know’s readers made dozens and dozens of suggestions, which you can find below.

Selling Your Books

If you’re lucky, you can do this quickly. Otherwise, it’s doable but it’ll take forever. Either way, you won’t make a lot of money.

If you’re lucky, you live near a Half Price Books. They have about 120 stores but aren’t everywhere. If you have one nearby, just take your books to them — they say they’ll look through them and make you an offer.

Or: you could find a local used book sale. Book Sale Finder is a website full of book sales; maybe there’s one near you. Call ahead, though — as I learned, not all of them will let anyone sell books there.

For the rest of us, your best bets are eBay or maybe Mercari. And if you have an incredible amount of books, Amazon has dropshipping services — that will get the books out of your house, too, until they sell (and obviously, after they sell, too). I have no idea how the Amazon dropshipping process works, so if that page isn’t helpful, sorry.

Another selling option is a consignment arrangement with either a local store or, more likely, a company that runs estate sales. Now I Know readers said that consignment shops can be very picky (understandably; if they don’t think it can sell, they don’t want it). The two readers who suggested estate sales both warned that those companies will often only pay you if the books sell at their next sale; otherwise, you effectively donated the books to them (or more likely, the unsold books went out with the trash).

Trading Your Books for Other Books

This is doable but slow and potentially expensive. The easy way: if you have a local used book shop, start there — they may take many/most/all of your books and give you a store credit.

If not, there are a handful of websites that facilitate book trading, but you almost always have to pay for shipping:

• Discover Books
• Paperback Swap
• BookMooch
• BookCrossing

Giving Away The Books

If you don’t care if you get anything back, it’ll be a bit easier to get rid of the books — but not much.

The easiest way is Better World Books. This is what I did. Better World Books is an online used book retailer, and they came up with a really neat idea: put huge donation bins all over the eastern United States. People like me can dump their unwanted books in the bin, they come by once a week or so to pick it up, and then they sort through the books. They sell what they can, they donate what they can’t, and they recycle what they can’t donate.

It’s really difficult to find a local institution that will take your books. Your local library is your best bet, but the vast majority of them have zero interest — they already have a lot of books and don’t have the staff or the space to handle all the donations. Call ahead first, and if they say no, ask if they know of any other local libraries that are accepting books. Also, ask if there is a “friends of the library” that they’re affiliated with — those groups, which effectively are volunteers that fundraise on behalf of the library — often run used book sales, and may take your books.

Similarly, while many local schools have libraries (and all have classrooms), few will take your books. It’s the same problem the libraries have — once one person donates, the whole town may follow suit, and the school isn’t set up to handle that.

Other institutions in the area may actually be more interested than your library or schools. Prisons and jails may be a good bet, and some will even take children’s books so inmates can read to their children when they visit. Hospitals, rehabs, and eldercare facilities may also take some books. Similarly, Boys and Girls Clubs may have libraries. Other readers suggested homeless shelters as well. But this is all hit-or-miss and based on the local institution’s specific need.

Also in this category, thrift shops/Goodwill may take your books. But in my area, neither wanted the books I had to give away.

Social media may be a good option. If you’re on Facebook, your community Facebook Group may be an option, and there’s probably a “Buy Nothing” or “FreeCycle” Facebook Group that covers a wider geographic range. Either one may find you a taker. Similarly, Nextdoor and Craigslist may be good options.

There may be a curbside solution — beyond the trash. Many communities have Little Free Libraries, which are basically roadside bins designed to hold about 25-50 books; anyone can come by and take a book or drop some off for others. The downside here: they’re too small to handle dozens of books, and they’re often full.

A lot of readers said they had success with a less formal version of the Little Free Library: they suggested putting your books on the curb with a sign that says “Free Books.” That wouldn’t work where I live, but it may in other places.

When all else fails, recycle them.

So you’ve never watched a Marvel movie but you want to watch Avengers: Endgame. Here’s how to get ready.

This hit my Twitter timeline a few minutes ago and now I’m obsessed with answering it.

It turns out that I’m really well-suited to answer this because:

(a) I’m really into MCU (that’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, for the non-Spidey web-crawlers out there). I’ve seen all the movies except Thor: Dark World (which I’ll rectify at some point) and The Incredible Hulk (which I probably won’t bother with). I’ve even binge-watched all five seasons of Agents of SHIELD.

(b) I really only got into it after watching Infinity War. Or, more accurately, Infinity War was the first MCU movie I saw in theaters, probably the fourth or fifth MCU movie I watched, and maybe the 2nd or 3rd I really paid attention to.

In other words, I went into Infinity War mostly blind to the universe and came out a believer. You can, too! Here’s how I did it. The great news — it’s easily replicable.

You have to watch Infinity War.

I’d not watch it first — the steps below will help Infinity War make more sense — but it’s really key. Infinity War does a great job of introducing us MCU-newbies to the Infinity Stones, to the bad guy, and even to the rift from after Captain America: Civil War. It gives you almost everything you need to feel like you have a decent idea as to what is going on. The items below help fill in the gaps.

I watched the first Avengers movie a few months after it came out. On Netflix, I think. It’s probably a good idea to start here, but if you have to skip this step, you can make do with my cheat-sheet below.

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the first MCU movie I watched but it’s the first one I even remotely cared about. I grew up with a passing interest in X-Men and Spider-Man; most of my superhero affinity was for Adam West’s Batman and Christopher Reeves’ Superman. Iron Man and Thor weren’t on my radar; Captain American only barely. The first “Avengers” movie, though, felt bigger — not big enough for me to go to the theater (which at the time was difficult, schedule-wise) but certainly, something I made an effort to watch. I kind of got the idea that this was part of a bigger story, but only slightly, and not enough for me to say “I really need to know what happens next.”

If memory serves, and it probably doesn’t, I had previously seen one or two of the Iron Man movies by then and the first Thor movie. But I had done so on TBS-level reruns and didn’t really pay attention to the movies. If I had to recap them then, I’d not have been able to. The important part here — and you’re going to see a theme here — is that The Avengers really helps explain who all these characters are, and that’s kind of important given how many of them hit the screen in Infinity War. But if not, no worries! I made a cheat-sheet below.

I watched the first Guardians of the Galaxy. I kind of think this movie is important to watch.

The hype was big and I couldn’t avoid it. But I did wait until I could watch it from my couch. I liked it but didn’t realize at the time that it was part of this huge Infinity Stones/Thanos story. It’s important because the Guardians aren’t classic superheroes and it’s hard to really get the characters without this introduction.

It may be a good idea to watch Dr. Strange.

It’s possible that I saw Dr. Strange before I saw Infinity War — I just really don’t remember. I know I watched it on Netflix a few times, but I’m not sure when, so maybe that’s why this oddball bullet comes in. As a character, at least insofar is Infinity War is concerned, Dr. Strange (and his sidekick, Wong) is pretty straightforward — he’s a wizard who can open up portals and do some random other wizard-y stuff. But Strange and Wong are the viewer’s introduction to the Infinity Stones in Infinity War, and the Time Stone is really important to the story, so maybe watch this one.

And similarly, it may be a good idea to watch Age of Ultron. But honestly, it’s not a priority.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t see this first. I saw Ultron well after watching many other MCU movies, Infinity War included. It helps explain the also-important Mind Stone and also introduces you to a couple of new heroes who are central to Infinity War’s storyline.

Everything else you can kind of muddle through without much backstory. That doesn’t mean you should skip the other movies, though — Black Panther, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Thor: Ragnarok are all in my top 3 MCU movies (probably) and Captain Marvel and both Ant-Man movies are also really good. (You shouldn’t watch the second Ant-Man movie before watching Infinity War, though.)

Oh, you may want to watch both Ant-Man movies.

Total speculation, but there’s a decent chance that the Quantum Realm is going to matter a LOT. My guess, though, is that Endgame will explain this in decent-enough detail where you’ll be like, “okay, I kinda get it.”

* * *

Okay, to recap, the absolute minimum you have to do is:

1. Watch the first Avengers movie or, in the very least, read my cheat-sheet below. But you really should watch the movie.
2. Watch Guardians of the Galaxy.
3. Watch Infinity War.
4. Buy your tickets to Endgame.

The cheat-sheet

The first Avengers movie features the following:

Iron Man (aka Tony Stark) is basically Batman but with a lot cooler tech. His superpower is that he’s rich and smart and can build lots of toys. He’s basically worthless without his supersuit but that’s okay, because he seems to always have it hidden somewhere.

Thor is literally the god of thunder, but he’s more accurately the god of lightning. He used to have a hammer which was basically unbreakable and super-awesome but it’s gone, long story, watch the other movies if you care. His brother, Loki, looks nothing like him and is the god of tricks. He’s totally untrustworthy and is the bad guy in the first Avengers movie, but things are basically cool between him and Thor at this point. Kind of. Oh, yeah, and the two of them have a friend with a magical sword which can teleport people across the galaxy.

Captain America is a normal dude who is super-strong and stuff. He used to have a shield made of indestructible metal, but he lost it. He doesn’t look like a walking American flag anymore, either; now he has a beard and wears a lot of black.

Black Widow is a world-class spy who will kick your ass.

The Incredible Hulk you probably know. Big green guy, comes out when his alter ego Bruce Banner gets angry (usually), basically impossible to control as he smashes stuff. At times has problems remembering who to smash and who not to smash. He’s increasingly been used as comic relief, though.

Hawkeye shoots arrows with crazy-awesome accuracy and the arrows aren’t normal arrows — they do cool stuff. He’s what Katniss Everdeen would have been if he were raised to be a superhero.

Nick Fury is the dude who put the original gang together. Maria Hill is his current #2, using a very liberal definition of “current.” Pepper Potts is Tony Stark/Iron Man’s fiancée and may actually have super powers too, but no one really ever seems to remember that. Happy Hogan is basically Tony Stark’s and Pepper Potts’ guy Friday. Phil Coulson probably won’t be in Endgame but if he is, they’ll explain what’s going on.

The people/things who aren’t in the first Avengers that you need to know about:

Thanos is the bad guy. Even if he’s not in a movie, he’s the bad guy. He’s that bad.

There are six Infinity Stones. The Mind Stone keeps Vision (below) alive. The Time Stone lets Dr. Strange (also below) manipulate time. The other four you don’t need to know anything about beforehand. Most people can’t hold them without blowing stuff up unintentionally. Having all six lets you do bad things.

Ant-Man is a kind-hearted goofball who has no business being a hero except for the fact that he has a cool suit which lets him change size, and that he has a well-tuned moral compass (minus his whole criminal backstory). There’s also The Wasp, which is another Ant-Man but she’s a she and has wings.

Black Panther and the rest of the Wakandans other than Shuri. They’re awesome warriors with more of that indestructible metal, except that they use it for more than just shields. T’Challa, the Black Panther himself, also has some powers which make him kind of like Captain America, but probably stronger and better. Shuri is his sister, and she’s a brilliant scientist. Like, Bruce Banner and Tony Stark, they’re geniuses, and Shuri makes them look dumb.

Vision isn’t human and he has an Infinity Stone in his forehead so he can basically do anything, but he most often doesn’t.

Scarlett Witch can move things with her mind and will also kick your ass.

Dr. Strange and his sidekick Wong are wizards. They can open up portals which basically teleport people and things, and make magical shields which block stuff. And they can do other magic, too, but it’s pretty straightforward that it’s magic when they do it. Dr. Strange has a magic cape which he can make do stuff.

Spider-Man is Spider-Man. He’s also like 17 years old or something and has a suit made for him by Iron Man.

You’re going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. I so this cheat sheet will ignore them otherwise.

The other heroes probably aren’t all that important to the storyline yet. Bucky Barnes is missing an arm, and that’s important in other movies, so don’t be confused when it comes up in the movies above. Falcon has a mechanized set of wings. War Machine is the guy in the silver Iron Man suit. Captain Marvel is a human with alien powers who can do all sorts of crazy stuff but we’re not sure what to make of her yet because we just met her like, last week (although her movie’s events were set in the 1990s).

Enjoy!

Why I Bought a Costco Membership for the Woman About Whom Paul Ryan Made a Stupid Tweet

It really bothers me how toxic the Internet has become. It has such power to connect people with such positive results — a power I’ve been the beneficiary of — and yet, we default, too often, for the opposite. The Internet should be a tool for kindness and empathy; of late, in particular, it seems to be neither. I want to change that. In December of last year, I decided to do a little bit about it. I used my newsletter (with my birthday as an anchor) to raise money for the Sesame Street Yellow Feather Fund, which brings education to children in need. On Twitter, I’ve been posing the question “how can I help?” to anyone who sees those tweets. I figure the least I can do is lead by doing.

Which is why, moments ago, I put $60 in the mail and sent it to a woman from Lancaster, Pennsylvania that I’ve never met and likely never will. She’s a secretary at a public school there and that $60 will cover her Costco membership for the year. That’s a big deal for her and I’m glad I could help.

* * *

“Paul Ryan Deletes Tweet Lauding a $1.50 Benefit From the New Tax Law”

That’s an actual headline from an actual New York Times article. The short version: The Associated Press ran an article titled “Tax bill beginning to deliver bigger paychecks to workers.” It quotes a handful of people who talked about the extra money in their paychecks, each a result of lower withheld federal income taxes from their paychecks. House Speaker Ryan, hoping to show the positive effects of the GOP tax bill he championed, decided to highlight many of those quoted via Twitter. Here’s one of his tweets — the since-deleted one:

As one would expect — and as he should have expected — Twitter exploded in a fiery rage at the Speaker.  No matter what you think of the changes to the U.S. income tax system, it’s rather tone deaf to cite this example as an exemplar of its success. Thousands of thousands of Twitter users chastized the Speaker, and he ultimately thought better of it, deleting the tweet. (Of course, the damage is already done.)

My reaction wasn’t just a stunned disbelief at Ryan’s comment. Ryan’s tweet was strikingly lacking in empathy, hence the obvious backlash. I’m not one to often engage in Internet political pile-ons anyway, and this wasn’t going to be an exception. It can be cathartic, sure, but it typically just adds another voice to an already crowded and tribalist echo-chamber. Or, in other words, the backlash also lacked empathy. Having your finances be the butt of everyone’s joke must suck. Hearing thousands of people say “a buck fifty? who cares?!” and thinking “well, I care” — that’s got to be awful. I wanted to make the “Internet dumpster fire,” as she’d later call it in our conversation, a positive experience for her.

Then I noticed this tweet from CBS reporter David Begnaud.

Begnaud caught her on Facetime — while on a school field trip (on a Saturday!) — and asked her “were you happy about that? were you like, this is progress? Or did you kind of laugh like, you know, who cares? It’s a dollar fifty.” Her reply — and you should watch it to get the emotion behind it — was this:

“A dollar fifty is a dollar fifty; I’m not going to — I noticed it. I watch my finances and I noticed it. So, it [her paycheck] didn’t go down, so that was good. I was pleasantly surprised because it went up; it did not go down.”

Honestly: if my paycheck went up $1.50, I’d not notice. Or if I did, I would have kind of laughed — you know, who cares! It’s a dollar fifty. But: It mattered to her. It mattered so much that she knew exactly how she’d be spending it; she’d be using it to offset her $60 per year Costco membership. If I could not notice the $1.50, and if it meant so much to her, well, maybe I should give her my unnoticed $1.50.

So, I replied to Begnaud’s tweet with the following:

“I’d like to buy her a one-year Costco membership. I can afford to and if it can make her life appreciably better, I’m glad to. Can you connect her with me?”

He didn’t, but a few dozen people liked the tweet and three retweeted it… and then the secretary from Lancaster, PA herself replied. We connected via Twitter, she graciously took me up on my offer, and gave me permission to publish my thoughts on why — just a few moments ago — I put $60 in an envelope, to cover that Costco membership, and mailed it to her.

The Internet helped me help make the world a kinder, more empathetic place, I hope.

Harry Potter and The Problem With The Pensieve Memories

I’ve read each of the Harry Potter books multiple times. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (HBP), Dumbledore takes Harry through a half-dozen memories — some his, some those of others that the Headmaster has collected. And for years, something was troubling me about them — they didn’t add up. Over the last few days, I’ve finally pieced together why.

(If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you know the books rather well.)

Background

The Six Memories: A Timeline

Here are the six memories in the order that the recollected events occurred. (We’ll begin exploring when Dumbledore collected the memories later.) I’ll be relying on these memories throughout, so, it’s good to have a point of reference.

• 1924 or 1925: The arrest of Marvolo and Morfin Gaunt (Bob Ogden’s memory)
• 1938: Dumbledore meets Voldemort ¹ in the orphanage (Dumbledore’s)
• 1943: Voldemort asks Slughorn about creating multiple Horcruxes (Slughorn’s)
• 1943: Voldemort and Morfin Gaunt argue before the murder of the Riddles (Morfin Gaunt’s)
• Sometime between 1955 and 1961: Voldemort visits Hepzibah Smith ² (Hokey the House Elf’s) 
• Sometime between 1965 and 1971: Voldemort visits Dumbledore at Hogwarts (Dumbledore’s) 

(It’s unclear which of the two memories from 1943 happened first, but it’s immaterial.)

We’ll need to address most if not all of these six memories, but the Bob Ogden one was the one that didn’t sit right with me. As it turns out, it’s not all that important, but let’s start there anyway — because I did.

What is Ogden’s Memory About?

The first one is the memory of Bob Ogden, the Head of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad, who investigated Morfin Gaunt (Voldemort’s uncle) for using magic in front of a Muggle (who happened to be Tom Riddle Sr., Voldemort’s eventual father). Ogden shows up, finds out that Morfin and his father Marvolo are poor wizards who are mean to Merope (Morfin’s sister and Voldemort’s eventual mother), who they believe to be a Squib. The Gaunt men are also pureblood elitists who believe that they are above the law, especially when it comes to how they act toward Muggles and those they believe to be Squibs. ³

For us readers, this establishes where Voldemort came from and his family tree. Like Harry, we learn that the Gaunts are descendants from two major Wizarding families. First, we again learn they are descendants of Salazar Slytherin’s (which we knew about already from the Chamber of Secrets) when we find out that the Gaunt family owns Slytherin’s locket, which Merope wears around her neck. We also find out that Voldemort is a descendant of the Peverell family, specifically Cadmus Peverell (as we’ll learn later) because Marvolo shows Ogden a ring he’s wearing. Marvolo calls the markings on the ring’s stone the “Peverell family crest” and, in the words of the book, “the ring sailed within an inch of his [Ogden’s] nose.”

It’s unclear why Dumbledore shares this memory with Harry otherwise, though. Unlike the other memories, it doesn’t do much to help inform what or where the remaining Horcruxes are. It introduces the ring but Dumbledore already has that, and for that matter, it’s already been destroyed. It also introduces the locket, but Hokey’s memory does that too, and Hokey’s memory is critical for Harry to see regardless. (And Dumbledore thinks he is relatively close to finding the locket, in any event.)

The memory may serve two other purposes, though. First, it kind of, sort of helps establish that Voldemort never experienced love, not even through the relationship of his parents, which was loveless. It explains why Voldemort grew up in an orphanage even though his father and uncle are both alive at the time. Voldemort doesn’t understand love, and that — love — is “the power the Dark Lord knows not,” according to Dumbledore’s interpretation of Trelawney’s first prophecy. If Dumbledore thinks Harry is skeptical about this “power,” driving it home by showing Harry this memory makes a lot of sense.

The other purpose — and the one I’m more interested in: Harry now has a critical clue about the identity and location of the Resurrection Stone. Of course, at that time, he has no idea that there is such thing as the Resurrection Stone, but when he learns about it and the other Hallows in the seventh book, Harry uses this memory-learned connection to the Peverells to figure out that the Stone is real (which he then perhaps aggressively concludes is inside the Snitch). In telling Ron and Hermione this in Book 7, Harry admits that he couldn’t make out the sign of the Deathly Hallows from Ogden’s memory (“There was nothing fancy on there, as far as I could see; maybe a few scratches. I only ever saw it really close up after it had been cracked open”) and couldn’t be sure it was the same sign. But he made the connection nonetheless.

Why Did Dumbledore Seek Out Ogden’s Memory?

This is simple to answer at first — when sharing Morfin Gaunt’s memory, Dumbledore tells Harry that he “was able to secure a visit to Morfin in the last weeks of his life, by which time I was attempting to discover as much as I could about Voldemort’s past.” It makes sense that he’d interview the Ministry official who investigated Riddle’s magical family.

But keep in mind that this is a wild goose chase. While Harry (and by extension, us as the reader) learn a lot from this memory, Dumbledore didn’t. He already knew that Voldemort was the son of Merope Gaunt, the grandson of Marvolo, and the nephew of Morfin. Dumbledore already knows that Tom Riddle Sr. was Voldemort’s dad. Dumbledore was also a member of the Wizengamot and almost certainly knew about Morfin’s attack on Tom Riddle Sr. and on Marvolo’s attempt to defend his son against Ogden and the other authorities. In other words: Dumbledore already knew why Ogden went to the Gaunt shack and how that basically played out. Seeing Ogden’s memory of the events doesn’t add much to that. What was Dumbledore hoping to see?

I’ve seen a few explanations, but only one makes sense.

First, maybe Dumbledore was looking for clues about Horcruxes. That’s unlikely, for a few reasons, most notably because the memory is older than Voldemort himself. (That said, the memories do establish that both Marvolo Gaunt’s Ring and Slytherin’s Locket — two of the Horcruxes — were Voldemort’s family heirlooms.)

Second, maybe he was looking for clues as to what Trewlany’s first prophecy meant when she said that Harry (or Neville, but nevermind that) has the “power the Dark Lord knows not.” That certainly makes sense given the previous section, but the timing seems weird. Ogden was at least 20 years old when he visited the Gaunts in 1925 — and probably much older, given his title of Head of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad — and the prophecy wasn’t until 1980 (and Harry wasn’t marked as the survivor for a year after that). At best, Ogden was 75 or so. Most likely, he was long dead. ⁴ (In HBP, Dumbledore tells Harry that Ogden “died some time ago, but not before I had tracked him down and persuaded him to confide these recollections to me.”) It’s plausible, but it really requires you to force the math.

And finally, Dumbledore had no idea what he was looking for but figured it was worth the look. We generally think of that as a good idea: when you’re dealing with the Dark Lord, leave no stone unturned, right? But that’s not consistent with what we already know — Dumbledore began his investigation into Voldemort’s past starting with the Voldemort of 1943 if not before, as also established by Morfin Gaunt’s memory.

So that leads us to a question:

Why was Dumbledore investigating Voldemort’s past before Voldemort was Voldemort?

Here, to quote Dumbledore, we’re “entering the realms of guesswork and speculation.” I have three theories as to why Dumbledore began this investigation. All are plausible, but I prefer the last one because it’s novel (I think), it’s more likely (as I describe) and because it’s more fun.

Theory 1: He’s Investigating the Chamber of Secrets

A few months before the events of the two 1943 memories happened, Voldemort opened the Chamber of Secrets. He framed Hagrid for it but Dumbledore was skeptical. Dumbledore probably suspected Voldemort, having already learned (during his visit to Voldemort at the orphanage) that Voldemort was a parsletongue, and therefore a potential heir to Slytherin. Dumbledore also likely knew the events of Bob Ogden’s arrest of Morfin and Marvolo, even if he didn’t have the memory yet, which would have further helped establish that Voldemort was Slytherin’s heir. If Dumbledore wanted to exonerate Hagrid, and had Dumbledore noticed the clues above, researching Voldemort’s history would have made a lot of sense.

This is a perfectly plausible explanation — it wouldn’t surprise me if J.K. Rowling endorsed it — but it doesn’t sit right with me. Dumbledore never does anything with the information. And it wasn’t like Dumbledore was going to find any more information. Voldemort’s life was straightforward until that point: he was born, given up for adoption, came to Hogwarts, and… is still at Hogwarts. The only thing odd is the murder of his Muggle father and grandparents, but again, Dumbledore investigated that. Dumbledore — even if he doesn’t have Ogden’s memory yet — definitely has enough to get the Ministry and/or Wizengamot to investigate the theory and is at a dead-end otherwise.

You’d think that, if you had a murderer in your student population — even one who already graduated — you’d do something about it. But Dumbledore didn’t. So it’s unlikely he had Ogden’s memory while Voldemort was still at Hogwarts.

Theory 2: He’s Investigating the Murder of Tom Riddle Sr and Voldemort’s Grandparents

This one almost works. The reason it doesn’t is the key.

In 1943, Voldemort — a student without any friends or family, but one that Dumbledore knew well — shows up one day wearing a new ring. Just weeks before, his father and grandparents were murdered by his uncle. The uncle confessed but didn’t talk much about it; instead, he carried on about a lost ring. That’s going to set off alarm bells, no? Dumbledore already distrusts Voldemort; this link, I think, is something Dumbledore is going to investigate.

Dumbledore investigates this crime by obtaining Morfin’s memory. There isn’t much to the memory; as Dumbledore later concluded, Voldemort tampered with it. But it gives us three key clues.

First, it demonstrates that Voldemort was at his uncle’s house right before the murder. That’s pretty important!

Second, in the memory, “Morfin pushed the hair out of his dirty face, the better to see [Voldemort], and Harry saw that he wore Marvolo’s black-stoned ring on his right hand.” So, we have proof that before Voldemort visited Morfin, Morfin had the ring.

And third, there’s what Dumbledore tells Harry after the two have viewed the memory ⁵:

So the Ministry called upon Morfin. They did not need to question him, to use Veritaserum or Legilimency. He admitted to the murder on the spot, giving details only the murderer could know. He was proud, he said, to have killed the Muggles, had been awaiting his chance all these years. He handed over his wand, which was proved at once to have been used to kill the Riddles. And he permitted himself to be led off to Azkaban without a fight.

All that disturbed him was the fact that his father’s ring had disappeared. ‘He’ll kill me for losing it,’ he told his captors over and over again. ‘He’ll kill me for losing his ring.’ And that, apparently, was all he ever said again. He lived out the remainder of his life in Azkaban, lamenting the loss of Marvolo’s last heirloom, and is buried beside the prison, alongside the other poor souls who have expired within its walls.

That second paragraph is evidence of two things — first, that Marvolo didn’t have the ring upon his arrest, which occurred almost immediately after the murders; and second, that Dumbledore had reason to look into the whereabouts of the ring. ⁶

And, from Slughorn’s memory, in still tampered form, we learn that Voldemort had the ring right after the murder:

Harry saw that [Voldemort] was wearing Marvolo’s gold-and-black ring; he had already killed his father.

Dumbledore didn’t have Slughorn’s memory until probably the 1980s — Slughorn only tampered with it well after Voldemort graduated and moved onto greater, darker things. But Dumbledore didn’t need the memory to establish that Voldemort was wearing the ring at the time because Dumbledore was there, in the school, to see it for himself. Dumbledore had all the evidence you’d need to show that Voldemort was a triple-murderer: he had two memories (Ogden’s and Morfin’s) showing that the ring was previously in the possession of Morfin Gaunt — including one memory where Voldemort is present while Gaunt still has the ring; he has Gaunt’s persistent anguish about losing it; and he has the ring sitting there on the finger of the last person to see Morfin before the murders took place.

And again: You’d think that, if you had a murderer in your student population, you’d do something about it. In this case, though, Dumbledore may not have been able to paint the full picture. All the clues are there: Tom Riddle Sr. is dead. Tom Riddle Jr. appears with a new ring. The Chamber has been open by the heir of Slytherin, and Tom Riddle Jr. is a Parseltongue. Voldemort’s own memory tells us that Dumbledore kept an annoying watch on Voldemort after the Chamber was opened; it’d be ludicrous to think that Dumbledore wouldn’t investigate the murders of the Riddle family, given the previous two sentences. All he needs is evidence, and that can come in the form of their Ogden’s memory (establishing Voldemort as an heir of Salazar Slytherin) or Morfin’s (establishing that Voldemort was at the house that day etc.). So it makes total sense for Dumbledore to be on the hunt for that evidence.

But in 1943, he didn’t have it, otherwise Voldemort would have been expelled. But he kept investigating, and part of that on-going investigation brought him to Bob Ogden. ⁷ 

That makes a ton of sense, right? Dumbledore was investigating Voldemort in conjunction with the murder of the Riddles and, therefore, obtained Morfin’s (and Ogden’s) memory. But wait — that’s not what Dumbledore told Harry, right? Dumbledore said that he was “attempting to discover as much as [he] could about Voldemort’s past.” Why lie?

Okay, now we’re really going into speculation and guesswork. I think Dumbledore’s explanation — attempting to discover stuff about Voldemort’s past — is a lie. But that’s because he was ashamed of telling the truth.

Theory 3: Dumbledore wasn’t really interested in discovering more about Voldemort’s past or investigating the murder of the Riddles. He was investigating the whereabouts of Marvolo’s ring.

This is the theory I’m going with. 

Part 1: Dumbledore’s Lie

In the Deathly Hallows, Harry and Dumbledore reunite at some space-time between life and death, represented as King’s Cross train station. Dumbledore is dead. Harry has sacrificed himself to Voldemort’s killing curse. There’s really no need for Dumbledore to lie to Harry about anything — and yet, he does. To set it up, we need first to revisit Lily Potter’s letter to Sirius Black.

We had a very quiet birthday tea, just us and old Bathilda who has always been sweet to us and who dotes on Harry. We were so sorry you couldn’t come, but the Order’s got to come first, and Harry’s not old enough to know it’s his birthday anyway!  James is getting a bit frustrated shut up here, he tries not to show it but I can tell—also Dumbledore’s still got his Invisibility Cloak, so no chance of little excursions. (emphasis added)

OK, got that? Now, to something Dumbledore said to Harry at King’s Cross.

“You. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained so much of his undetected wrong-doing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look . . . It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respect . . . and then your father died, and I had two Hallows at last, all to myself!” (emphasis added)

Harry was born on the last day of July; his parents were murdered on Halloween. That’s a three-month gap. It’s possible that Lily didn’t write the letter until a few days before Halloween, but that’s unlikely. It’s much more likely that Dumbledore is lying — especially when you look at what precedes this part of the encounter at King’s Cross.

To set up the scene, Harry meets a broadly-smiling Dumbledore in some place between the planes of living and dead. As the conversation continues, Dumbledore’s smile gets bigger and bigger — and then Harry brings up the Deathly Hallows.

“The Deathly Hallows,” [Harry] said, and he was glad to see that the words wiped the smile from Dumbledore’s face.

“Ah, yes,” he said. He even looked a little worried.

“Well?”

For the first time since Harry had met Dumbledore, he looked less than an old man, much less. He looked fleetingly like a small boy caught in wrongdoing. “Can you forgive me?” he said. “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Harry, startled by Dumbledore’s tone, by the sudden tears in his eyes.

“The Hallows, the Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore. “A desperate man’s dream!”

“But they’re real!”

“Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools,” said Dumbledore. “And I was such a fool. But you know, don’t you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know.”

“What do I know?”

Dumbledore turned his whole body to face Harry, and tears still sparkled in his brilliantly blue eyes.

“Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?”

“Of course you were,” said Harry. “Of course—how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!”

“True, true,” said Dumbledore, and he was like a child seeking reassurance. “Yet I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.”

“Not the way he did,” said Harry. After all his anger at Dumbledore, how odd it was to sit here, beneath the high, vaulted ceiling, and defend Dumbledore from himself. “Hallows, not Horcruxes.”

“Hallows,” mumbled Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.”

Even in death, Dumbledore was ashamed of his obsession with the Hallows. Here’s more on that from their conversation:

After another short pause Harry said, “You tried to use the Resurrection Stone.”

Dumbledore nodded. “When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts—the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons—I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry I was . . .

“I was such a fool, Harry. After all those years I had learned nothing. I was unworthy to unite the Deadly Hallows. I had proved it time and again, and here was the final proof.”

“Why?” said Harry. “It was natural! You wanted to see them again. What’s wrong with that?”

“Maybe a man in a million could unite the Hallows, Harry. I was fit only to possess the meanest one of them, the least extraordinary. I was fit to own the Elder Wand, and not to boast of it, and not to kill with it. I was permitted to tame and to use it, because I took it, not for gain, but to save others from it.

“But the Cloak, I took out of vain curiosity, and so it could never have worked for me as it works for you, its true owner. The stone I would have used in an attempt to drag back those who are at peace, rather than to enable my self-sacrifice, as you did. You are the worthy possessor of the Hallows.”

Shame. Lots of it.

So, if Dumbledore were looking into people’s memories to find himself one of the Deathly Hallows, he’d probably be ashamed to admit it — and he’d probably lie. Just like he lied when his afterlife-self told Harry that he only had the cloak for a few days.

Part 2: Dumbledore’s Obsession

That quote above has another key passage: the Ressurection Stone was “the Hallow [Dumbledore] had craved most of all.”  I don’t think I need to spell this one out, but just in case: after the death of his sister (perhaps at his hands), Dumbledore gave up the search for the Hallows, but only temporarily. He ends up acquiring the Elder Wand, takes the Cloak for a bit longer than he should have, and, as he admits above, he wanted to see his deceased family members again, and the Stone could bring that dream to fruition. And when he finally obtained the Stone, the normally calculating and logical Dumbledore makes the fatal mistake of putting the cursed ring on his finger — all in hopes of seeing his sister and family again.

The Hallows were an obsession of his youth; I think it’s fair to say that Stone was a life-long obsession.

So, let’s revisit the second theory

Again, it’s 1943. Voldemort — a student without any friends or family, but one that Dumbledore knew well — shows up one day wearing a new ring. Just weeks before, his father and grandparents were murdered by his uncle. The uncle confessed but didn’t talk much about it; instead, he carried on about a lost ring. That’s going to set off alarm bells, no? Dumbledore is probably going to end up getting a look at that ring. What he’s going to see is the mark of the Deathly Hallows. ⁸

His obsession is now within his grasp. Almost. Shortly thereafter, the ring vanishes.

So, he goes hunting for it. There are two living people who have possessed the ring: Voldemort and Morfin. Dumbledore probably isn’t going to get much out of Voldemort here — he may have tried, for all we know, but as we’d later find out, Voldemort wasn’t about to tell anyone where he hid the now-Horcrux ring. Morfin, of course, gives Dumbledore his memory. That’s a bit of a dead end ⁹, so the wild goose chase begins. Only one other person in recent memory, dead or alive, possessed the ring — Marvolo Gaunt. And the only person still alive who we know interacted with him? Bob Ogden.

Ogden’s memory doesn’t help Dumbledore locate the ring, but it does confirm (or close enough) that the ring is the Resurrection Stone. Marvolo pushes the ring “within an inch of [Ogden’s] nose,” so maybe Dumbledore got a good look at it; if not, Marvolo proclaims that the crest of the Peverell family is engraved upon it. Remember, as discussed above, that Harry makes the connection between the Peverell crest and the mark of the Hallows; Dumbledore surely would have realized Marvolo’s error.

A Final Piece of the Puzzle

There’s one memory I’ve almost entirely glossed over, and that’s Hokey the House-elf’s memory of the murder of Hepzibah Smith. It’s critical to figuring out that Slytherin’s locket and Hufflepuff’s cup (and by extension, Ravenclaw’s diadem) are Horcruxes. The timing, again, has a problem.

If you look at the timeline at the top, you’ll see that the events of Hokey’s memory occurred no earlier than 1955, more than a decade after Voldemort murdered his Muggle family. And after the murder of Smith, Voldemort disappears for a decade. In other words, there’s really no reason for Dumbledore to seek out Hokey’s memory if his objective is to learn more about Voldemort, because at the point of Smith’s death, Voldemort’s basically a nobody. Once again, you need to give Dumbledore a ton of credit for having the foresight to collect this memory — more foresight than even he is due.

But my theory makes it work without that stretch. Here’s another quote from Deathly Hallows which explains why:

By the time Hokey was convicted, Hepzibah’s family had realized that two of her greatest treasures were missing. It took them a while to be sure of this, for she had many hiding places, having always guarded her collection most jealously. But before they were sure beyond doubt that the cup and the locket were both gone, the assistant who had worked at Borgin and Burkes, the young man who had visited Hepzibah so regularly and charmed her so well, had resigned his post and vanished. His superiors had no idea where he had gone; they were as surprised as anyone at his disappearance. And that was the last that was seen or heard of Tom Riddle for a very long time.

You’re Dumbledore. Voldemort’s involved in an event where rare, treasured artifacts — including one owned the Gaunts — have disappeared. Is there a chance that Hepzibah Smith had the ring? Or that Tom had it when he visited her? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to get that memory from the aged Hokey before he dies. Which is exactly what happens.

Some Concluding Thoughts

As with any theories about works of fiction, this one has lot of holes. That’s what makes it fun.

Also, I think my version of the events makes Dumbledore a lot more human — and a lot more sympathetic. If you believe that he was investigating Voldemort’s background from a very early point, he seems brilliant and wise, yes, but ultimately ineffective because he’s insisting on going it alone. (This is also the vibe you get from him in Order of the Phoenix, so it’s a fair takeaway.) Mine, though, he’s still brilliant and wise, but he’s also flawed. And that flaw makes him accidentally effective — in the search for clues about the Hallows, he ends up learning a lot about Voldemort, his weaknesses, and the Horcruxes.

And you know what? I like that Dumbledore. He’s the greatest wizard of all time — that doesn’t mean he has to be perfect, or even should be.