Bobby Witt Jr. and the Last Empire: How a Kid from Texas Became the World’s Unwitting Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s International Sourpuss-in-Residence Somewhere between a NATO summit and a TikTok dance-off, the planet’s attention economy pivoted last week to a 24-year-old shortstop who still looks like he ought to be carded at a Kansas City…
TOKYO—Somewhere between the sixth karaoke rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and the seventh Asahi Super Dry, it hit me: the 2025 MLB standings, freshly unfurled on the electronic ticker above Shibuya Crossing, have become a global weather vane for late-capitalist anxiety. Yes, the Yankees are clinging to the AL East like…
Trevor Story, the Shortstop Who Outran the American Dream By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Boston and the End of Civilisation If you want to understand the 2024 global order, ignore Davos communiqués and instead watch a 31-year-old Coloradan with a titanium wrist swing at a 95-mph fastball. Trevor Story, erstwhile Rockies…
Chicago Cubs vs. Pittsburgh Pirates: A Global Forecast in Nine Inning Acts of Controlled Chaos By Eduardo “Nostradamus on Expenses” Marín, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere between the Danube’s latest political sewage spill and Shanghai’s newest AI traffic warden, two baseball clubs—one historically allergic to success, the other…
Dodgers Games: The Global Circus Where Baseball Meets Geopolitical Theater By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen More Bullpens Than Bull Markets LOS ANGELES—While the rest of the planet obsesses over missiles, microchips, and methane, 53,000 sunburned pilgrims still shuffle into Chavez Ravine each night to watch grown men in pajamas swing sculpted lumber at a sphere…
Tarik Skubal and the Curious Global Economy of a Left Elbow By Elias Marrow, International Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker DETROIT—Somewhere along the grimy I-94 corridor, a 27-year-old Arizonan with a surgically re-wired ulnar collateral ligament is quietly propping up the hopes of a city that once believed its salvation would ride in on a V-8 engine….
Freddie Freeman and the Geopolitics of First Base By Our Man in the Dugout, currently exiled to a Marriott in Singapore where the mini-bar charges more than the GDP of Tuvalu. The planet reels from inflation, drought, and the creeping suspicion that every push-notification is a ransom note for our attention. Meanwhile, Freddie Freeman—first baseman,…
Somewhere above the 47th parallel, under a sky the color of old pewter, the Seattle Mariners are playing baseball—an activity that, to the uninitiated, looks like nine men in pajamas trying to swat a pill while the rest of the planet negotiates grain corridors and microchip embargoes. Yet on this particular evening the Mariners game…
Cody Bellinger: A Center-Field Metaphor for the Post-Globalization West By the time the jet-lagged Tokyo Dome crowd had stopped bowing politely at his routine fly-outs earlier this spring, Cody Bellinger had already become more than a ballplayer—he had morphed into a walking, gum-chewing allegory for the late-capitalist order itself. Once crowned National League MVP, now…
Anthony Rizzo and the Geopolitics of a First-Baseman’s Elbow By Our Man in the Dugout Bar, Somewhere between Caracas and Queens Somewhere in the world tonight, a war correspondent is filing copy on grain futures while Anthony Rizzo’s cervical fusion is trending above a failed cease-fire. That’s not a punch-line; it’s merely Tuesday. The Yankees’…
The San Francisco Giants, as any seasoned traveler will tell you, are not merely a baseball team. They are a portable piece of American mythology—equal parts Horatio Alger and late-stage capitalism—exported nightly by satellite to insomniacs in Jakarta sports bars, insolvency lawyers in Frankfurt, and hedge-fund analysts in Singapore who’ve never smelled garlic fries but…
In the grand theatre of American baseball, where the grass is greener than a Swiss bank vault and the hot dogs cost more than a week’s rent in Lagos, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Baltimore Orioles are currently engaged in a pas de deux that has the international commentariat choking on its own metaphors. One…
