Cardinals vs Mariners: A Proxy War Between Two Empires Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Upper Deck, Nursing a $14 Beer and Existential Dread Tokyo—If you squint through the smog of a Wednesday morning in Shibuya, the giant outdoor screen above the crossing is looping the same highlight: St. Louis’ Lars Nootbaar—yes, that’s…
The Global Pastime Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific Baseball, that pastoral hallucination of America’s 19th-century leisure class, has spent the last century smuggling itself across borders like a bored customs officer with a side hustle. What began as an excuse for Union soldiers to avoid Civil…
The Fastball That Flew Past Borders: How Aroldis Chapman Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ever wanted a single anecdote that explains why late-stage capitalism looks suspiciously like a 105-mph heater aimed directly at the strike zone of human dignity, look no further than Aroldis Chapman. The Cuban…
**The Geopolitics of a Division Race: How the NL West Became a Proxy War for Global Anxiety** While the world watches actual proxy wars, supply chain collapses, and the slow-motion demolition of the international order, the National League West has quietly emerged as baseball’s most compelling metaphor for twenty-first-century power struggles. If you squint hard…
In the grand theater of global sport, where nations still pretend that victory on a diamond, pitch, or court somehow elevates their GDP, Eugenio Suárez has become an unlikely case study in the economics of despair. While the world’s central banks play whack-a-mole with inflation and diplomats trade strongly-worded postcards, Suárez—currently the Seattle Mariners’ third-base…
From the marble lobbies of Dubai to the sweaty karaoke bars of Manila, the planet’s attention has lately pivoted—ever so briefly—from wars, viruses, and crypto-crash eulogies to a 24-year-old kid from Colleyville, Texas, who smashes baseballs as if personally offended by the laws of physics. Bobby Witt Jr., the Kansas City Royals’ shortstop-turned-overnight-geopolitical-emoji, just wrapped…
Mariners vs. Braves: A 7,000-Mile Proxy War for the Soul of Late-Stage Baseball Somewhere between the Space Needle and the Chattahoochee, two ball clubs—one named after 19th-century sailors, the other after Confederate infantry—are locked in a contest that feels less like sport and more like a blue-screen error in globalization’s operating system. The Seattle Mariners…
The Phillies and Marlins, two clubs whose combined payroll wouldn’t cover Mbappé’s weekly dry-cleaning bill, squared off again last night in South Philadelphia. From an international vantage point—say, a cramped sports bar in Naples where the espresso is stronger than the Wi-Fi—this NL East tilt carries all the geopolitical weight of a UN resolution on…
Kodai Senga and the Global Art of Vanishing Stuff When Kodai Senga uncorks his ghost-forkball somewhere over the Atlantic this summer, the pitch will do more than dive like a drunk albatross—it will carry with it the weight of two countries’ mid-life crises, the hopes of a billion-dollar television deal, and the faint smell of…
NL Wild Card: The Last Gasp of American Exceptionalism, Now Streaming Worldwide by Dave’s Locker International Desk If you tune in from Paris at 3 a.m. or from Lagos at 9 p.m.—thanks to the miracle of geo-pirated streams and unquenchable insomnia—you’ll discover the same tableau: grown men in poly-blend pajamas sprinting across manicured Kentucky bluegrass…
