Blake Treinen: The 95-mph Diplomat Quietly Shaping Global Soft Power One Slider at a Time
Blake Treinen and the Curious Diplomacy of 95-mph Sliders
By Our Man in the Dugout, currently hiding from both MLB Security and Interpol
If you were trying to explain 21st-century America to a Martian anthropologist—or, more realistically, to a Chinese semiconductor executive who just bought a controlling stake in the Dodgers—you could do worse than point to Blake Treinen. The man is a living, breathing trade surplus: a Kansas farm kid who exports 96-mph two-seamers to Latin American batters on behalf of a media conglomerate, while importing his paycheck through a Cayman Islands subsidiary nobody is supposed to notice. Somewhere, an MBA thesis just sprouted wings.
Let’s zoom out. Around the planet, governments are busy weaponizing everything from microchips to grain futures. Meanwhile, Treinen quietly weaponizes late-inning chaos for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a franchise whose regional sports network reaches 66 countries, including places where baseball is less popular than competitive yak-milking. When he spins that slider—equal parts physics PhD and middle finger—the ripple effects are measurable in Seoul sports bars, Caracas betting shops, and Tokyo boardrooms where SoftBank executives calculate jersey-merchandise ROI down to the last decimal.
The international angle isn’t just cable boxes and souvenir caps. Treinen’s career arc mirrors the global supply chain: drafted by Oakland (cheap talent incubation), traded to Washington (mid-market asset flip), non-tendered (classic austerity program), resurrected by Oakland again (value buy), then poached by Los Angeles (imperial center absorbs the periphery). If that sounds like the IMF handbook with a rosin bag, congratulations—you’ve spotted the metaphor. Every time Treinen jogs in from the bullpen, he reenacts the World Bank’s structural adjustment program, only with better walk-up music.
And what music it is. The man warms up to “Stranglehold” by Ted Nugent—a song that, in several European Union nations, is technically classified as an act of cultural aggression. Commissioner Manfred’s office has received three formal complaints from the Finnish embassy alone. They claim the subwoofer violates the Geneva Conventions. Finland, as usual, is not joking.
Statistically, Treinen is a marvel of late-capitalist efficiency. In 2022 he appeared in 72 games, logged 73 strikeouts, and induced enough weak contact to crash the Taiwanese composite bat industry. Advanced metrics label his cutter “elite,” which is analytics-speak for “your children will never afford playoff tickets.” The pitch breaks so violently that physicists at CERN use it to calibrate particle detectors. Somewhere in Switzerland, a doctoral student is defending a dissertation titled “Quantum Entanglement and Blake Treinen’s Index Finger: A Love Story.”
Of course, nothing gold can stay, especially when that gold is denominated in deferred signing bonuses. Treinen underwent shoulder surgery last winter, a procedure so expensive it registered as a line item in the U.S. trade deficit. The Dodgers shrugged—insurance policies are the new aircraft carriers—and handed him a two-year extension that will pay roughly the GDP of Tonga. Across the Pacific, the Tongan prime minister publicly congratulated Treinen on Instagram, then quietly asked the IMF for disaster relief because, well, priorities.
Which brings us to the broader significance. In an era when nations weaponize energy grids and choke off neon gas exports, Treinen’s right arm remains a rare example of soft power that actually works. When he strikes out a Venezuelan phenom, Twitter in Caracas lights up with bilingual trash talk, temporarily distracting citizens from the fact that the local currency is worth less than the paper it’s printed on. Baseball, that antique pastime invented when Queen Victoria still had most of her teeth, has become the planet’s most ironic diplomacy tool—more effective than a hundred UN resolutions, and only slightly more corrupt.
So here’s to Blake Treinen: accidental ambassador, human supply chain, and the only export the United States still produces that doesn’t require a congressional hearing. Someday, when archaeologists sift through the radioactive rubble of our civilization, they will find a scuffed baseball with “BT 35” written on the sweet spot. Carbon dating will place it to October 2023. The inscription will read, in whatever pidgin survives: “Here lies the last thing we all agreed was beautiful.”
Until then, enjoy the slider. It’s on every continent but Antarctica—penguins prefer hockey, the snobs.
