Cincinnati Reds Lose Again, World Somehow Keeps Spinning: A Global Dispatch from the Church of Perpetual Rebuilding
The Cincinnati Reds, a franchise that began life as the Red Stockings when Otto von Bismarck was still young and optimistic, played a baseball game last night. This apparently parochial event in the American Midwest was streamed from Great American Ball Park to 183 countries—one more than currently recognizes Taiwan—proving once again that late capitalism can monetize even a 162-game season of mostly statistical noise.
From the vantage of a Tokyo salaryman watching on his phone in a 7-Eleven parking lot, the Reds looked less like a team than a slow-motion metaphor for post-industrial decline. Their 5-3 loss to the Cardinals unfolded with the inexorable logic of a Greek tragedy sponsored by a regional insurance conglomerate. The Cardinals, baseball’s answer to the Jesuits—disciplined, smug, and historically successful—scored three runs in the seventh inning while half of Cincinnati debated whether to switch to Netflix. Somewhere in the EU, a Strasbourg bureaucrat checked the WTO rules on existential despair.
The global significance here is not the score, but the spectacle itself. Baseball, that pastoral hallucination invented to reassure 19th-century factory workers that time could still be measured in leisurely afternoons, is now a data-harvesting operation wearing stirrups. Every pitch, swing, and sunflower-seed spit is fed into algorithms that optimize sportsbook odds from Lagos to Macau. When Reds reliever Alexis Díaz threw a slider at 95.2 mph, the number pinged servers in three continents, where quants in Singapore recalibrated futures on whether he’d still have an ulnar collateral ligament by 2026. The game is no longer played; it is strip-mined.
Yet the crowd persisted, 24,117 souls lured by $5 beer night and the human need to sit next to strangers who share your specific form of inherited misery. To the international observer, the stands resembled a UN summit on coping mechanisms: fathers teaching sons the art of stoic disappointment, couples navigating the silent diplomacy of whose turn it is to buy nachos, and one guy in a Vladivostok sweatshirt who wandered in thinking it was a hockey arena. The wave—humanity’s last universally understood protest against boredom—died somewhere in the upper deck, like so many utopias before it.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical undertones were impossible to ignore. Reds first baseman Christian Encarnacion-Strand, whose surname sounds like a failed Central American trade pact, struck out with bases loaded. In that moment he embodied every over-leveraged emerging market: all promise, no contact. Across the diamond, Cardinals outfielder Lars Nootbaar—actual name, not a Bond villain—flipped the bird to entropy by hitting a two-run double. Somewhere in Davos, a panel on “Resilience in Uncertain Times” quietly plagiarized the highlight reel.
The post-game press conference was a masterclass in saying nothing with maximum sincerity. Manager David Bell, whose face carries the permanent resignation of a man who has read the terms and conditions, explained that “we just didn’t execute when it mattered.” Translation: the universe is indifferent, but we have a charter flight to Milwaukee. A Japanese reporter asked about the team’s “fighting spirit,” causing the interpreter to pause, visibly age, and render it as “grit index.” Even metaphors get outsourced now.
As the stadium lights dimmed and the Ohio River resumed its eternal shrug, one could almost hear the planet’s collective yawn. The Reds will lose 90 games this year, give or take a biblical plague, and the world will still spin, wars will still start over lesser things than blown saves, and tomorrow the lineups will be posted like new horoscopes for the statistically devout. In the end, baseball remains what it always was: a ritual to make waiting for death feel like strategy. And for $12.99 a month, you can watch it anywhere.
