Friars with Fighter-Jet Budgets: How the San Diego Padres Became a Global Metaphor for Late-Stage Capitalism
The San Diego Padres, a baseball franchise named after Catholic friars who preferred sandals to spikes, have improbably become a Rorschach test for the late-capitalist West. From a café overlooking the Bosphorus, where I’m nursing a Turkish coffee and an existential headache, the Padres’ recent spending spree—roughly the GDP of Montenegro—reads less like roster construction…