NL West Standings: How Baseball’s Richest Division Became a Perfect Metaphor for Global Inequality
**The Geopolitics of a Division Race: How the NL West Became a Proxy War for Global Anxiety**
While the world watches actual proxy wars, supply chain collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of the international order, the National League West has quietly emerged as baseball’s most compelling metaphor for twenty-first-century power struggles. If you squint hard enough—and frankly, after three years of pandemic, inflation, and general civilizational malaise, who isn’t?—the division standings read like a UN Security Council meeting where everyone showed up hungover and armed with advanced analytics.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, that $280 million monument to soft power projection, currently sit atop the division like a pharmaceutical giant squatting on life-saving patents. Their payroll exceeds the GDP of several Pacific island nations, a fact that would be more disturbing if those nations weren’t already underwater due to climate change the Dodgers helped accelerate with their cross-country jet set lifestyle. Each home game consumes enough electricity to power a small Latvian village, but at least the villagers can stream the highlights on whatever 5G tower hasn’t been nationalized by China.
Meanwhile, the San Diego Padres have assembled their own coalition of the willing, importing talent like the Pentagon imports expensive failures. Their roster reads like a Davos attendee list: Manny Machado representing the Dominican Republic’s finest export (talented athletes, not sugar), Xander Bogaerts keeping the European Union’s baseball dreams alive, and Juan Soto carrying the weight of an entire nation’s hope that maybe, just maybe, baseball can distract from the fact that the lights only work four hours a day. The Padres spent $249 million to discover that money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a wild card berth, which in 2023 America is basically the same thing.
The San Francisco Giants, those tech-bro darlings, have weaponized Silicon Valley’s disruption theology into a .500 season that perfectly mirrors their hometown’s approach to urban planning: throw enough venture capital at a problem until everyone moves to Austin. Their analytics department presumably runs on the same algorithms that convinced WeWork was worth $47 billion, which explains why they’re currently trailing a team that plays in a stadium where the outfield dimensions were determined by a city planner having a stroke.
Further down the standings, the Colorado Rockies exist in that special purgatory reserved for organizations that mistake altitude for strategy. They’re the baseball equivalent of a cryptocurrency launched during a Super Bowl commercial: lots of initial excitement, questionable fundamentals, and a fanbase that’s either incredibly loyal or simply suffering from oxygen deprivation. Their home games take place exactly one mile above sea level, which coincidentally is how high you’d need to be to think this rebuild is working.
Bringing up the rear, the Arizona Diamondbacks play in a retractable-roof stadium because even the architects understood that watching baseball in 115-degree heat is a human rights violation. They’re owned by a man who made his fortune selling cheap chicken fingers to suburban families, a business model that somehow translates perfectly to professional sports: provide a mediocre product, overcharge for concessions, and hope nobody notices the metaphorical salmonella.
These standings matter because they don’t matter at all, which in our current dystopian funhouse is the most honest thing going. While democracy collapses and the planet burns, the NL West offers the pure escapism of millionaires playing a children’s game according to spreadsheets compiled by other millionaires. It’s the bread and circuses of our age, except the bread costs $18 and requires a reverse mortgage, and the circuses are broadcast on eight different streaming services you’ll forget to cancel.
The division will be decided by men being paid more per game than most teachers earn in a decade, and we’ll watch because the alternative is acknowledging that we’re all just Colorado Rockies fans now—hopelessly outmatched, playing at altitude, and pretending the air isn’t getting thinner every season.
