The Dodgers—those perennially over-funded denizens of Chavez Ravine—currently sit atop the National League West like a bored oligarch atop a yacht, lighting Cuban cigars with the hopes of 29 other franchises. From the outside, the standings look tidy: first place, best run-differential on the planet, payroll roughly equivalent to the GDP of Fiji. But zoom…
The American League West: A Pocket-Sized Empire in a World That Barely Notices Somewhere between the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait, the planet’s most combustible shipping lanes hum with crude-oil tankers whose cargo value dwarfs the combined payrolls of the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners. Yet if you scroll far enough down the…
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…
For anyone who has ever tried to explain baseball to a cricket-obsessed Bengali rickshaw driver, the American League West standings feel like a cosmic joke told in a language no one outside the Pacific time zone ever bothered to learn. Yet here we are, late May, and the Seattle Mariners—those soggy, oft-ignored denizens of Puget…
In a smallish corner of Foxborough, Massachusetts, 65,000 people are presently losing their minds over a leather prolate spheroid. The rest of the planet, meanwhile, is busy losing its mind over everything else—meteorological tantrums, sovereign-debt cliffhangers, and the latest celebrity-sponsored crypto rug-pull—yet somehow still finds bandwidth to rubberneck at the Patriots game today. Why? Because…
