Zac Gallen: The Last Functioning Global Institution Throws 95 on the Black
Zac Gallen, Fastball Diplomat of the Apocalypse
By Dave’s Locker Foreign Service (Mental Health Optional)
Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, a 28-year-old Floridian with the hair of a 1980s tennis prodigy and the temperament of a man who’s read too much Camus is throwing a baseball hard enough to make radar guns question their life choices. To the casual observer, Zac Gallen is merely the Arizona Diamondbacks’ ace—ERA hovering around three, curveball that breaks like a central banker’s promise, the usual résumé filler. But step back, squint through the haze of geopolitical dumpster fires, and you’ll see Gallen for what he really is: the last functioning multilateral institution in the Western Hemisphere.
Consider the context. While the World Trade Organization limps along on life support and the United Nations Security Council spends its afternoons vetoing the concept of lunch, Gallen is out there nightly enforcing a rules-based order 60 feet 6 inches at a time. His strikeouts are binding resolutions. His pick-off move? Sanctions. When he plunks a batter, it’s a targeted reprisal—swift, proportionate, and without the tedious paperwork required by Brussels.
Globally, the timing is exquisite. Europe is rationing electricity like it’s 1944, China’s Belt and Road has turned into a Long-Term Parking Initiative, and half of South America is experimenting with currencies that double as origami. Into this vacuum steps Gallen, offering the one export still universally accepted: filthy, unhittable sliders. If the WTO had a 95-mph cutter, maybe we wouldn’t be bartering cheese for microchips right now.
Baseball, of course, is itself a parable of late capitalism: nine innings of asset optimization punctuated by commercials for products that promise to reverse hair loss and existential dread. Gallen, raised in the manicured suburbs of New Jersey—where cul-de-sacs are named after the forests they replaced—understands the assignment. He logs innings the way hedge funds log carbon credits: efficiently, cynically, and with one eye on the exit clause. Last winter he settled on a two-year deal worth roughly $5.6 million, or the cost of a single Russian oligarch’s seized superyacht fuel top-off. Value is relative; velocity is forever.
His international reach is subtler than satellite launches, but real nonetheless. Japanese fans stream his starts at 9 a.m. Tokyo time, mistaking the D-backs’ teal for a new cryptocurrency. South Korean scouts annotate his pitch grips like they’re state secrets. In Caracas, kids who’ve never seen a functioning grocery store mimic his delivery on cracked concrete, dreaming of a world where the only inflation is the one measured in ERA. Meanwhile, MLB’s European marketing department screens his highlights in sports bars from Prague to Porto, where patrons nod politely between sips of €9 pilsner and wonder why the defender isn’t flopping.
Even the geopolitical metaphors write themselves. Gallen’s repertoire is a NATO alliance: four-seam fastball (Article 5 mutual defense), curveball (strategic ambiguity), changeup (economic coercion), cutter (special forces). When he shakes off the catcher, it’s a veto in the Security Council; when he grooves a mistake, it’s a failed peacekeeping mission. The man literally throws strikes—something the International Criminal Court has never managed.
Back home, America has already moved on to its next apocalypse, but Gallen remains stubbornly present, a living rebuttal to the notion that nothing works anymore. While Congress debates whether to default on the national debt, he’s out there defaulting on bats. While Silicon Valley reinvents the wheel at 8 percent interest, he’s reinventing the strike zone for free. His durability is a quiet insult to the gig economy; his consistency, a subtweet to every streaming service that cancels your favorite show after one season.
And so, as the planet tilts ever more precariously toward a future that looks like a Black Friday stampede but with nukes, take comfort in the small mercies: 95 fastballs on the black, a curveball that buckles knees like bad unemployment data, and a man from Somerdale, New Jersey, who still believes in borders—at least the chalked ones around home plate. If civilization collapses tomorrow, the cockroaches will inherit the earth. Until then, Zac Gallen inherits the count—full, of course—and the faint, irrational hope that someone, somewhere, can still paint the corner.
