Flushing, Queens—population 2.4 million if you count the pigeons—plays host today to a modest nine-inning affair between the New York Mets and whoever fate has lined up to be sacrificial. On the surface it’s merely “Mets game today,” three words that sound as routine as a Tokyo salaryman bowing to the 6:02 a.m. Chuo Line….
By the time the Arizona Diamondbacks finished their latest act of baseball kabuki on Thursday night, the final score—7-3 over the San Francisco Giants—was already scrolling across ticker feeds in Singapore, popping up in Buenos Aires sports apps, and being auto-translated into seventeen languages nobody asked for. Somewhere in Kyiv a war-weary IT contractor glanced…
The Curious Case of Teoscar Hernández: How One Man’s Bat Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time Teoscar Hernández launched his 10th postseason home run into the Chavez Ravine gloaming last October, the baseball had already cleared three time zones, two trade agreements, and one very confused customs officer in Tijuana. To the casual eye…
Miguel Rojas and the Global Shortstop: How One Man’s Glove Holds Up a Hemisphere’s Self-Image By the time the flight from Caracas touched down in Miami last Thursday, Miguel Rojas had already been traded in three different WhatsApp group chats, deified on a Reddit thread titled “Underrated Defensive Gods,” and quietly blamed by at least…
Robbie Ray: The 94-Mph Metaphor for a Planet That Can’t Decide Whether to Rebuild or Reload Bylines from Toronto, Seattle, Tokyo, and the existential void Every so often, the world needs a left-handed parable. Enter Robbie Ray—Cy Young winner, strikeout evangelist, and human embodiment of the international supply-chain crisis currently masquerading as professional sports. From…
Blue Jays vs Royals: A Featherweight Bout in the Coliseum of Global Spectacle By Diego “The Vulture” Valdez, Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker KANSAS CITY—If you squint past the fountains and the overpriced nacho helmets, the latest tilt between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals resembles less a baseball series than a miniature…
Boston and Tampa Bay, two cities separated by 1,200 miles of I-95 traffic and an even wider cultural chasm, met again last night under the merciless glow of LED banks that could guide aircraft. The Red Sox versus the Rays: a matchup that, on the surface, is merely nine innings of grown men in pajamas…
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…
Yankees vs. Orioles: The Empire Strikes Back (and Forth) in a World Already on Fire By the time the first pitch leaves Gerrit Cole’s hand at Yankee Stadium, roughly 3.2 billion people will have already decided that whatever cataclysm arrives next—nuclear winter, crypto collapse, another season of The Crown—will still be less cruel than the…
Clayton Kershaw Throws Curveballs at the End of History by Our Man in the Bleachers, Somewhere Over the Pacific There is, apparently, still a place on Earth where 50,000 people will pay triple-digit sums to watch one man throw a baseball 95 miles per hour with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker suffering from obsessive-compulsive…
Home-Run Diplomacy: How Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani Accidentally Became Soft-Power Envoys By Dave’s Locker Global Desk TOKYO—While the world’s foreign ministries argue over tariffs and tweets, the two men most likely to decide the 2024 MLB home-run crown are conducting their own brand of shuttle diplomacy—one swing at a time. Aaron Judge, the 6-foot-7…
The Curious Case of Nick Sogard, or How One Utility Infielder Became a One-Man Metaphor for Global Uncertainty PARIS—In the grand bazaar of professional sport, where fortunes rise and fall like crypto during a regulatory panic, few commodities are as gloriously disposable as the utility infielder. Enter Nicholas Sogard—26, switch-hits, plays every infield position except…
