Baseball

This afternoon, just shy of 75,000 fans of American football will flood in to watch the Atlanta Falcons take on the Indianapolis Colts, in what is set to be the Colts’ largest attendance for a home game this season. A few weeks ago, more than 86,000 turned out to watch the Jacksonville Jaguars face the LA Rams in what was the Jaguars’ best-attended home game this year. The most surprising thing about this? Both games were taking place more than 4,000 miles from the NFL’s heartland – one in Berlin, one in London. Recently, Sean Thomas claimed on Spectator Life that America has failed to export its ‘laughable’ sports.

Boris Johnson didn't like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn't based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for our times in the eyes of the former Prime Minister. I'm not sure his logic fully holds up to scrutiny (nor, for that matter, does Keir Starmer's plan to show Adolescence in schools). But if it is real-life drama that Boris wants then Netflix, with impeccable timing, this week released another one of those sports documentaries at which they have become rather adept.

Shohei Ohtani had a baseball season for the ages. The Dodgers’ sensational designated hitter hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases to become the founding member of baseball’s 50/50 club. Even before his Dodgers won the World Series and Ohtani won the National League’s MVP award, sportswriters were calling him the best player in baseball history. His heroics bring a key question into play: is Ohtani’s 2024 season one of the greatest performances in sports history? It’s up there for sure, but there are other contenders. Jesse Owens won four gold medals under Adolf Hitler’s nose at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

To this day, the exact origin of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is unknown. It may be easy to blame poor old Mrs. O’Leary, though the conspiracy-minded out there speculate that the blaze might have been a deliberately planned event orchestrated by powerful interests to reshape the city for profit and control. Whether or not these theories hold water, the fire offered a convenient opportunity to rebuild the city with stricter building codes and modern brick and steel structures that allowed the city’s elite to seize prime real estate, drive up property values and transform Chicago into a modern hub of wealth and innovation. It has taken all of 153 years, but the fire has crossed the South Branch of the Chicago River and reached West 35th Street.

How good is Shohei Ohtani? “If he were a Yankee, he’d be Taylor Swift-famous,” a friend says. That might be a rare case of overselling the Los Angeles Angels’s pitcher and designated hitter, the lone supernova in a sputtering old pastime that needs all the hype it can get. It has been more than a century since baseball had such a double threat. Babe Ruth was once one of the game’s best pitchers, but not even Ruth, who focused on hitting after the Yankees bought him from Boston in 1919, ever dominated on the mound and at the plate like the twenty-nine-year-old Ohtani has done since he left Japan to join the Angels in 2018.

It’s a better thing to travel hopefully than to arrive, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote back in 1881. I find myself inwardly repeating that line almost every time I venture out to a public event. Whether it’s someone’s phone repeatedly inserting the klaxon-like intro to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” into the hushed denouement of a play, or the musical hooliganism of the idiot who chats his way through Paul McCartney singing “Eleanor Rigby” (it’s the Beatles classic we came to hear, mate, not a monologue about your dog’s bowel issues), it seems that narcissistic self-absorption is the rule on these occasions, and an even tenuous grasp of other people’s existence the exception.

There were runners on first and second. The batter hit a ball through the gap between the shortstop and third base, and off the runners went. Except the shortstop immediately got in the way of the runner coming from second, and started smacking him with a glove. The confused runner covered his head with his hands as he maneuvered around the shortstop, and barely made it to third base in time to beat the throw from left field. Such are the joys of little league baseball, of which I recently completed my third season of coaching. I approached the shortstop after that play, and explained to her that she was not allowed to tag the runner with her glove unless she actually had the ball. “Oh, I know,” she retorted. “I was trying to stop him from getting to third base.