BaT Stats, 2025 Awards, Watchlist Favorites, and Too Much Time in a Tiny Plane — Explained

This is Part Two of a three-part series. Click the link to read Part One.
It had been a glorious NoDak autumn Saturday morning for twelve-year-old me. I’d woken to a gorgeous orange-red sunrise and the cool prairie breeze drifting across my face as it blew through my opened window. All the birds outside were merrily greeting the day in song, all the robins and wrens and sparrows and meadowlarks and mourning doves, even the peacocks and ducks and geese and swans calling out from over at the Deaf School pond. I’d jumped out of bed and into my routine early, stripping off my pajamas and putting on my weekend duds before pouring myself a heaping bowlful of Lucky Charms then parking out on the living room couch to watch cartoons on our big thirty-six inch color console RCA. Four hours later—after Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner and the Jetsons and Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats and Archie and then Fat Albert—it was noontime and the Lucky Charms were long gone and I was hungry again so I’d decided to hop on my StingRay and ride across town to Grandma Lettie’s to see if she’d make me one of her world-famous fried bologna and Miracle-Whip sandwiches but when I got there she wasn’t home. Figured I’d wait for her a bit and headed out to her backyard to climb Big Olie, the giant oak she’d planted as a sapling fifty years ago when she first bought the house, but as I walked up to Olie’s trunk, I glanced across the way at Old Man Granger’s place and noticed something interesting—the walk-in door to his garage was ever-so-slightly ajar. Hm.

A week ago I was in the TT and rolled up next to a biker sitting at a stoplight. Three in the afternoon and hotter than blazes here in mid-August southeast Idaho. He was riding solo on a late-model Fat Boy—black on black. Was wearing what Hog riders all seem to wear: an unbuttoned leather vest over a tattered black t-shirt, leather chaps over worn and torn black jeans and a set of scuffed and scarred steel-toed boots. No helmet, of course, just a do-rag, but I saw a beanie-cap strapped to his rear pillion rack—in case he had to go to Oregon, I supposed. His face was mostly hidden by a bristly salt-and-pepper grandpa beard and his eyes were shielded by mirrored wrap-around Terminator shades. His skin looked thick and weathered and was deeply tanned, so deep it took a moment for me to see his arms were slathered shoulder-to-wrist with an ornate selection of tattoos. Flames and skulls and dragons and tombstones inscribed with initials and dates and symbols I didn’t recognize. He noticed me noticing him and gave me a big tobacco-stained snaggle-toothed grin then flashed me the peace sign. I flashed him one back and the light went green and he twisted the throttle and dropped the clutch and roared off to parts unknown. And as I watched him disappear into the shimmering horizon, somewhere inside my head Steppenwolf suddenly started to play.