Go Somebodies
Literally tens of thousands of people have been clamoring for a baseball update, and like look, I don’t know what to tell you, my team is bad and they’re super not supposed to be. We hired a fancy manager and signed our big star player for another year, and got a bunch of other players who are mostly now kind of better than him, and then we lost 28 games by 1 single run as of press time. If we had won half of those games, we would be dominating our division to such a degree that I would be pasting the “stop, stop, he’s already dead” meme to my group texts six nights a week, dunking on the Brewers, trying to pretend to be sad about Christian Yelich’s injury in order to determine what Brewers empathy would be like for a change. Instead, I am doing a normal thing in response, which is that I am rooting for the Orioles & Padres. This is sensible, a thing that rational people do when presented with a burning world where nothing makes sense.
Neither of these teams are known for excellence. I have spent most of my life making fun of the Padres. You’re not supposed to expect anything out of them. Their continual investment in attempting to succeed makes them only funnier. But now we have two intersecting things happening at once: they are actually doing well, and they are competing against the Dodgers for their division title. The Dodgers have invested the GDP of the entire Caribbean in their roster, despite the fact that they already won the World Series only four years ago. We spoke of one person already, but there is more than one like him. Their payroll is high enough to consider whether we need to send their whole front office into rehab for some new condition we’ve invented. And they might lose the division against the Padres.
Nothing more important is happening in the world right now than this. As I write this, the Padres are three games behind the Dodgers. That means if the Dodgers lose two and the Padres win two, the Padres will be ahead of the Dodgers by one game. There are approximately 40 games left in the season.
The same narrative is playing out on the east coast, in the American League. The Orioles last won in 1983, and they haven’t been known for a great track record ever since. They are playing noted white supremacist organization the New York Yankees for control of their division, and the two teams are 0.5 games apart as of press time. The Yankees are the Death Star in baseball form. The Orioles are basically a bunch of prospects and one good pitcher. They are young. They are feral. They play in one of the best stadiums in the country. And you can’t not root for them.
I have one final point to make, which is that the Chicago White Sox are bad this year. Like, really bad. Like they tied the AL record for consecutive losses bad. Like they’re on track to drop 4/5 of their games bad. At the end of their 2023 season, they got into a fistfight in the clubhouse with each other, and somehow things got worse this year. They fired their manager a couple of weeks ago just to feel something. They are so bad that tickets are under $10 in this economy, and you can get nosebleeds and sit wherever you want, including right behind home plate. So if you want some world-class baseball to unfold 15 feet in front of your face, I invite you to take the red line to 35th Street and walk through a probably zombie-infested, hulking, desiccated husk of a formerly populated stadium, one which has better concessions than Wrigley but has otherwise descended into the maw of irrelevance. I hope they’re playing someone good that day so you can watch them lose by 20.
That’s it. There’s your baseball update. The monte carlo simulation that we made into our collective psychic prison continues ever anon, and I hope the Phillies win the World Series because it will cause Citizens Bank Park to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.