Elly de la Cruz: The 21-Year-Old Who Made Baseball Cosmopolitan Again (and Other Delusions of Grandeur) By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge at Once If you mention Elly de la Cruz in Santo Domingo, a taxi driver will quote exit velocity before the meter starts. Say the name in Seoul and a K-pop producer…
In the wee hours between Wall Street closing and the Nikkei opening, two professional baseball clubs from the American Midwest—geographic trivia that still baffles most of the planet—met under Queens’ sodium lights to decide precisely nothing. The New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs, franchises whose combined payroll could refinance a small Balkan republic, squared…
Roger Clemens: The Rocket Who Never Quite Escaped Earth’s Orbit By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent PARIS—While the rest of the planet wrestles with inflation, AI-generated popes, and whatever fresh geopolitical dumpster fire is trending on Elon’s latest toy, the ghost of Roger Clemens still hovers over baseball like a foul-smelling memory you can’t quite Febreze…
If you squint at the MLB playoff bracket long enough it starts to look like a Rorschach test for geopolitics: twelve blots of color arranged in neat little brackets, promising order where none actually exists. From a barstool in Montevideo or a rooftop in Lagos, the diagram is less a sports schedule than a coded…
**The Global Empire of Rafael Devers: How a Dominican Slugger Became Baseball’s Reluctant Geopolitical Power** In the grand theater of international relations, where nations jockey for influence through trade agreements, military alliances, and the occasional proxy war, one mustn’t overlook the soft power wielded by a 27-year-old man from Nizao who can hit a baseball…
Brewers vs. Padres: A Minor Skirmish in Baseball’s Forever War for Planetary Attention By Matteo “Mirthless” Morgenstern, International Desk, Dave’s Locker MILWAUKEE—Somewhere between the Baltic’s latest gas-pipeline panic and the Pacific’s newest island-building scheme, two American ball clubs squared off last night in a contest whose ramifications, we are assured by regional television executives, are…
Charlie Morton, the American baseball pitcher whose right leg shattered like a fortune cookie under the weight of a World Series dreams, has become an improbable global metaphor: a man who kept throwing strikes on a broken fibula while the rest of the planet can’t even stand on its moral compass without collapsing. From Kiev…
Mike Trout and the Cosmic Joke of Global Stardom By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific When the name Mike Trout surfaces in a bar in Manila, a café in Lagos, or a noodle stall in Chengdu, the reaction is the polite nod normally reserved for a cousin’s baby photos: vaguely…
**The Curious Case of Walker Buehler: America’s Baseball Casualty as the World Burns** While the planet grapples with climate negotiations that move at glacial speeds (ironically, the only things not melting), nuclear proliferation disguised as energy solutions, and economic systems that somehow make billionaires richer during pandemics, America has found its latest tragedy: a 30-year-old…
**When Giants Fall: The Global Schadenfreude of a Dodgers Dynasty** The San Francisco Giants’ ritual humiliation of the Los Angeles Dodgers—baseball’s answer to a Goldman Sachs quarterly report—has achieved that rarest of feats: making the rest of the world give a damn about American baseball. From Singaporean hawker centers to São Paulo’s metro stations, humans…
**The Curious Case of Parker Messick: How a Florida State Pitcher Became the World’s Most Specific Metaphor** In the grand theater of global affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns—there’s something perversely comforting about the international community’s ability to unite around the truly important things. Like…
**The Curious Case of Cristopher Sánchez: When Baseball’s Forgotten Corners Become the World’s Mirror** In the grand theater of global affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken over postage-stamp islands and central bankers treat entire economies like their personal slot machines, the emergence of Cristopher Sánchez as a legitimate MLB starting pitcher might seem about as…
