Nick Lodolo and the Great American Pastime’s Global Hangover By Our Man on the Mound, Somewhere between Cincinnati and the Hague Somewhere in the bowels of Great American Ball Park, a 6-foot-6 left-hander with a curveball that bends like EU agricultural policy is quietly reminding the planet that the United States still exports something other…
**Reds Game Today: A Global Ritual in Nine Innings of Manufactured Hope** CINCINNATI—While the world grapples with supply chain shortages, proxy wars, and the slow-motion collapse of various democracies, roughly 30,000 humans have chosen to spend three hours watching grown men in pajamas attempt to hit a leather sphere with a wooden stick. The Cincinnati…
Reds Game: The Planet’s Newest Blood-Sport, Now Available in HD Somewhere between the 38th meridian and your mother’s Wi-Fi router, a baseball club wearing the color of unpaid invoices has become the global economy’s most reliable Rorschach test. The Cincinnati Reds—yes, those Reds, the ones whose payroll looks like a rounding error on a Bundesliga…
CINCINNATI—From a distance of 7,000 km, the Cincinnati Reds look less like a baseball franchise and more like a controlled experiment in how much nostalgia a single city can inhale before developing a collective pulmonary embolism. Here, on the banks of the Ohio, locals still speak of the 1975-76 “Big Red Machine” the way Sicilians…
