Dodgers on Top: How First Place Became a Global Power Play
The Dodgers—those perennially over-funded denizens of Chavez Ravine—currently sit atop the National League West like a bored oligarch atop a yacht, lighting Cuban cigars with the hopes of 29 other franchises. From the outside, the standings look tidy: first place, best run-differential on the planet, payroll roughly equivalent to the GDP of Fiji. But zoom out, way out, and the numbers become less a scoreboard than a geopolitical weather map.
In Seoul, an office drone streaming the game on a cracked phone during his 14-hour shift doesn’t see “L.A. 38-24.” He sees a trade balance: the Dodgers import Korean superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, export highlight clips that keep Korean advertisers in business, and still manage to underpay stadium janitors who speak the same language his aunt used before she emigrated. In Mexico City, a lucha-libre promoter glances at the same standings and calculates the exchange rate—how many pesos equal one Mookie Betts home run, and how long before MLB relocates a “home series” to his neighborhood to harvest new fans like avocados ripe for export.
Europe, bless its regulation-addicted heart, pretends indifference. The Champions League final just delivered more drama in 90 minutes than the Dodgers have in a month, but La Liga executives still sneak peeks at Los Angeles’ luxury-tax bill the way a failing art-house director eyes Marvel’s CGI budget: equal parts envy and moral superiority. Meanwhile, the British Museum—fresh from repatriating nothing—quietly inquires whether the Dodgers might loan them a Clayton Kershaw curveball for the “Imperialism & Curveballs” wing.
Back in the States, cable-news pundits have discovered that the standings are actually a Rorschach test. MSNBC insists the Dodgers’ lead proves progressive taxation works (look at all that shared revenue sharing!). Fox News counters that it’s a triumph of bootstrap capitalism (never mind the $8 billion TV deal stapled to those boots). Somewhere in between, a data scientist in Palo Alto trains an AI to predict when the standings will collapse under the weight of their own symbolism; the model keeps spitting out the same date humanity achieves universal healthcare, so the server was quietly unplugged and given stock options.
The standings also serve as a soft-power index. When the Dodgers visit Tokyo next season, Japanese newspapers won’t merely report the score; they’ll measure how many centimeters closer the team bus parks to the Imperial Palace compared to the 2019 trip—an imperialist parade disguised as spring training. Australian broadcasters will splice the highlights with dramatic didgeridoo riffs, implying that if cricket had designated hitters and $15 beers, it too might colonize American prime time.
Of course, the cosmic joke is that standings are temporary tattoos on the epidermis of time. Injuries, arbitration, and the eventual heat death of the universe will erase every decimal point. Yet humanity insists on treating them like scripture. In refugee camps from Lesbos to Lampedusa, kids who’ve never seen a baseball draw diamond-shaped diagrams in the dirt, inventing leagues where everyone leads the division forever—because displacement has taught them that “first place” is just another way of saying “not home.”
And so the Dodgers remain in first, a glittering monument to the idea that if you throw enough money, analytics, and mildly exploitative labor practices at a children’s game, you can manufacture hope at scale. The standings reassure us that order exists, even as the planet warms, oceans rise, and another crypto exchange files for bankruptcy between innings. Perhaps that’s the true international implication: in a world tilting toward entropy, we still agree—moment to moment—that someone has to be on top, if only so the rest of us have a clear target for our tomatoes.
Play ball, Earth. The game is meaningless, but the merchandise sales are eternal.
