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…
Willy Adames and the Glorious Futility of Loving Shortstops While Rome Burns Dave’s Locker – International Sports & Existential Dread Desk If you’ve been too busy doom-scrolling about the latest currency collapse or wondering which hemisphere will spontaneously combust first, you may have missed the fact that Willy Adames—yes, the Dominican shortstop with the swing…
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…
The San Francisco Giants—yes, those orange-clad technocrats of Oracle Park—published their latest depth chart this week, and the planet promptly resumed its slow spin toward Armageddon. From the smog-choked skyline of Shenzhen to the moldy basements of Leeds, analysts parsed whether Tyler Fitzgerald really is the everyday shortstop or merely a placeholder until Marco Luciano’s…
José Altuve, the 5-foot-6 defibrillator to baseball’s collective ego, has become a geopolitical Rorschach test—proof that the planet can still unify around something, provided that something is arguing about a man who can’t reach the top shelf at Carrefour. From Caracas to Copenhagen, the diminutive second baseman is discussed less as athlete and more as…
