Last year, I wrote about ICE’s initial foray into San Diego, and I connected it to the billionaire class that owns our sports teams. Below is that essay, lightly updated and edited.

A years-old tip alleged fake papers, so agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement dressed for the Battle of Fallujah and came to my city, to a pizza joint. They found middle class people eating pizza and the staff that served it. ICE arrested four people, dishwashers and servers.

No one served pizza or washed dishes that night. The restaurant had closed after the raid. No one served pizza or washed dishes the following Monday or Tuesday. The restaurant had closed to regroup. A community reeled. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers. Republican lawmakers gloated, or they said nothing. The Otay Mesa Detention Center processed four new detainees.

A few days later and a thousand miles north, Seattle Sounders players protested the revenue split for the Club World Cup, so team owner Adrian Hanauer dressed down his employees. The Club World Cup is a tournament organized by the nation-state of FIFA. It stands to make millions, millions that trickles down to continental governing bodies and club owners.

MLS players will not make millions. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players is silent on the Club World Cup, it being a recent invention. Hanauer wants to hoard the Sounders’ take. In a week or so, the workers he cursed out will play in the competition on spec.

If the illusion of freedom was a coin, then these events would be its two sides.

Hanauer embodies how liberty in the US has become synonymous with wealth. If taxes are communism, then neoliberalism is freedom. Freedom, then, is earned and wielded, like capital. Rich people have the most of it and so they are most uninhibited.

Hanauer scolded his employees not because he signs their checks and not because they wanted fair pay. He lashed out so forcefully because the players attacked the scaffolding of his existence. If capital is freedom, then who is Hanauer with less wealth? He must defend his soul—his bottom line—and he’s free to. No one will hold him to account for acting like a child.

Hanauer is a man not happy enough to be cut into a monopoly. He is not happy enough to control one of the best soccer teams in North America. He is not happy enough with all the freedom money can buy. I’m sad for him.

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The immigration enforcement in San Diego and elsewhere reflects a belief that freedom and liberty, like wealth, are limited. If someone is free, or wanting to be, then that must come at the expense of someone else. Oppression is the tool to allot the freedom. 

There is no policy basis to ICE’s actions. There is only the need to be dominant, for a worldview premised on scarcity requires someone to lose. Those losers are always the most vulnerable. To justify the oppression, the losers must be villainized. They must be hated, and the more they are hated the more free the oppressors are.

It is exhausting to hate people. It is costly to hate people. I think of Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. He is a man not happy enough to ascend to the highest office in the country, twice. He is not happy enough to be the president’s right hand man. He is not happy enough with all the freedom that his status as a white native-born American affords. I’m sad for him. 

“When you stomp on the part of yourself that is repulsed by this kind of cruelty, something important dies.”

It’s a line Ezra Klein has used a lot. One thing that dies is freedom. 

We have rights and laws and rules and regulations, but liberty doesn’t derive from paper. It comes from within and is expressed socially. It’s the ultimate act of faith. My freedom relies on people believing I’m free, that I’m worthy of being free, even when I am not good. And my freedom relies on my believing that people, wherever they’re from and whatever their status, deserve the same. Encouragingly, it’s apparent that the people in power targeting workers and families will not and cannot extinguish that faith.

The Sounders players held fast to their position after Hanauer admonished them. San Diegans ran armed and masked ICE agents out of their neighborhood with nothing but their voices and phones, proving how pathetic and insecure the MAGA movement is. Donald Trump and his ilk persecute us today, but their fear is beyond mine. 

I am back in Paris, where there are at least five Statues of Liberty. I have seen a few of them while living here for graduate school. The “real” Statue of Liberty, the one standing sentinel in New York Harbor, was donated by the French to the United States, which was founded in Philadelphia, which is where I lived and work this summer.

This trivia qualifies me to offer the following four reasons why America is great.

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Baseball exists

People who think football is America’s pastime are ignorant of baseball’s load-bearing columns behind the drywall: Nothing brings more people together more often than baseball, and it’s played everyday and at a relatively gentle pace, making it the game that most reflects (and is imbued with) everyday life.

I’ve stated and argued for these tenets many times, but living in Europe has given me new perspective on the uniqueness and centrality of baseball.

No other team sport in the world features as many games, and we Americans created the modern iteration of the game. We are the best at it (World Baseball Classic results notwithstanding). Perhaps Americans are more divided than ever, but 71.5 million people attended MLB games last year, to speak nothing of games in Little Leagues, high schools, etc. Baseball is a cultural force whose scale is mind-boggling.

I don’t point this out as a rosy-cheeked, pearl-clutching nostalgist—I’m looking at you, George Will—but rather as a Dumocrat who gets frustrated with my fellow liberals. Saying “Sports, go sports!” is not funny, and neither is calling for a home run during a football game. The lazy irony blinds us to the fact that a better America in a post-Trump era runs through the baseball diamond. The impending labor battle between the MLB players union and team owners will show us that yet again. Us non-MAGAs ignore baseball at our peril.

The US is a soccer country

The tired arguments against soccer are not worth rebutting because football troglodytes and xenophobic losers are like fighters in a cave who have not heard the war is over. By any metric, the US is soccer country.

It’s one of the most popular youth sports. Tournament organizers—from youth levels to FIFA—can’t get enough of our consumer market. Neither can leagues like England’s Premier League or Germany’s Bundesliga. On the ground, the World Cup this summer was a blast, and it revealed how perfectly suited a nation of immigrants is for such an international competition. If baseball is our way of sitting around the kitchen table and maintaining familial bonds, then soccer is our way of lending our edger to the neighbor.

The problem is that organizing bodies choke the life out of the game by prioritizing money. MLS controls the professional game in the US, which allows it to impose severe payroll rules that drain the league of any sort of competitive juice but make their team owners a buck. US Soccer, the organizing body for all of soccer in the US, stands by as the pay-to-play system in the development pipeline is devoured by private equity. This further proves my points that the US is a soccer country, for nothing is more American than monopoly and exploitation.

Soccer is an electric sport. The US men’s national team flaming out of the World Cup was so upsetting because we’ve at long last plugged into that current.

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Americans are superficially polite (complimentary)

Compatriots regularly ask me about French brusqueness, which is fitting considering the word ‘brusque’ comes from the French, and I regularly tell them the same thing. No, French people aren’t rude, and no, they don’t hate Americans. In fact, upon my rentrée I saw billboards celebrating the US’s recent 250th anniversary. (Thank you, France, for saving our asses in 1777 after the British took Philadelphia.)

The rude bit is harder to dispel, particularly because French people’s facial gestures are so expressive. The most intimidating reaction—and the reaction I imagine most American tourists have experienced and most fear—is the “Huh?” face. Furrow your brow, stick out your head from your neck, and quickly say “huh?” from the front of your mouth. It comes out when untrained Anglophones try to speak French or the American ways of communicating are lost on the French.

I suspect this stems from the idiosyncrasies of the French language, in which subtle sounds and pacing are essential to oral comprehension. The French simply cannot understand what we say. They mean no harm. The French highly value social order, and in a (perverse) way they are showing respect by not dancing around the problem and so quickly and clearly communicating that they do not understand.

Americans, on the other hand, are extremely, almost obscenely polite. We are patient, even gentle, when someone struggles with an accent. Small talk is an expected, if not required part of social interaction. We say “It’s okay” or “Don’t worry about it” even when we’re significantly inconvenienced or aggrieved.

American individualism is bullshit, an ideological con perpetrated by capitalists to sustain an economic order to their benefit. Workaday Americans know we’re in this together, which is why we go to baseball games so often, and why we have embraced soccer, and why we are warm, open, and friendly to each other.1

The expectation of progress is not dead

Three years ago, I said baseball is not dead and neither is America. For as anti-American as the MAGA-verse is, and as much institutional and sociological damage the Trump movement has caused and is continuing to cause, the US will not stop being a place of hope and opportunity as long as people are willing to fight for that vision. This is still true.

National examples abound, but I’d rather attest to this with two personal examples.

This summer, I worked at Family Promise of Philadelphia, a small nonprofit whose formal mission is to help families with children get and stay housed. What they actually do, in a city targeted by the Trump administration and especially impacted by its economic policy, is everything—they do anything and everything to help the moms and kids in their care have a better life. Angels do indeed bless America. Those angels are called social workers.

And early this summer, my former boss in San Diego City Councilmember shepherded an effort to protect San Diego’s Office of Child and Youth Success from budget cuts. It was an office that I, as his policy director, had helped create in a previous budget cycle. I use the word ‘shepherd’ purposefully, for the real thrust of the effort was from young people in San Diego who refused to succumb to the false choices in contemporary public finance.

The youth organized, advocated, and ultimately succeeded. They are why I reject nonsense about “kids these days,” and they prove that America’s greatness and its capacity for improvement are not mutually exclusive.

Now, how do we get America to invest in trains?

I started drafting Out in Left’s weekly post last Sunday, something about the psychology of FIFA president Gianni Infantino and his scheme to sell shares in the World Cup, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I’m soccer-ed out. I’m Infantino’d out.

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I thank my ancestors for not bequeathing me an addictive personality, but I do believe I am withdrawing from the World Cup.

For almost a month, tides of football fans from France and Ecuador and Côte d’Ivoire and everywhere else descended on and retreated from Philadel…

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In my last post, I reveled in being right about the World Cup. Now, I must admit that FIFA president Gianni Infantino was right. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is “the greatest event that humanity, that mankind, has ever seen and will ever see.”

Infantino said those words in December, at FIFA’s shambolic Wo…

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If you called me a FIFA alarmist, then I wouldn’t protest. Two of the best read pieces in these hallowed pages are “Everything insane at the FIFA 2026 World Cup Draw, ranked” and “New Jersey may have a ‘chilling effect’ on the World Cup. Does FIFA have a point?”

But I knew something others didn’t. I knew the 2026 FIFA World Cup would no…

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Major League Baseball’s players union, as expected, offered tweaks to the sport’s existing economic model. Team owners, as expected, countered with a hard salary cap. Then the first grenade of MLB’s epic labor showdown rolled into the room. This week, President Donald Trump endorsed a hard salary cap. Good.

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MLB is the only ma…

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The attorneys general from New York and the great state of New Jersey launched an investigation this week into FIFA’s 2026 World Cup ticketing practices. “Being honest about ticket sales is not complicated,” New Jersey Attorney General Jen Davenport, said in a stat…

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It has rained in Philadelphia this holiday weekend for four straight days, and I’ve scrolled Instagram for just as long. This mean I’ve consumed a lot of soccer content, and chatter in my group chats is picking up about the World Cup, too. With the tournament less than three weeks away, my overall impression is this: I have no idea how it will go. No on…

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A friend in France recently asked me about New Jersey, indicating my native state’s long-awaited ascension into international renown and respect. Yes, yes, we are, in fact, hosting the World Cup, behind only the Olympics, which Paris recently hosted, as one of the big…

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Hungover from a wedding in Ireland and with time to kill before my flight back to Paris, I committed myself to the most literary of transportation methods: I walked the 6.8 miles (or 11 kilometers)…

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I knelt before my editor at Padres Mission, and with a sword he tapped on one of my shoulders, and he tapped the other, then I rose to my feet and solemnly nodded, my mission understood: For the love of God, write something different about José E. Feliciano.

The Wa…

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“The year is 2020. Olivia Rodrigo is working on a new album. The Trump administration is trying to figure out what to do with Iran. And San Diego Padres catcher Luis Campusano is primed for a breakout.

It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

So begins my first piece for Padres …

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I felt like a bozo, sitting there at the pub and looking up at the TV. Expecting Tottenham Hotspur to offer anything besides a desultory performance turned into a fool’s errand, and for that errand I wore a vintage Spurs shirt. By the 87th minute, Spurs were losing 3-0 at home. I was reminded of the opening verse of Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe”:

See…

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Update: I first published this essay a year ago, almost to the day, and I was reminded of it for three reasons. First, Europeans really don’t care about American college basketball. I cannot find this year’s NCAA tournament anywhere in France—if you like televised snooker, then I know just the continent for you—and my lack of familiarity with college basketball this season is reflected in my standing in last place in my bracket competition, a competition I won handily last year.

Second, just one of San Diego’s Division I basketball teams made the tournament this year, and the UCSD women’s team was trounced in its only game. This puts last year’s achievement, when the city sent four teams to the Dance, in greater perspective.

Third, a friend and former colleague from San Diego visited Paris this week. We reminisced about our city, and I complained, yet again, why the absence of an inanimate object (clouds) is the source of civic pride. As San Diego poet Ernie McCray wrote recently for , “I’d go so far as to say / that the city and the UT / owe these remarkable athletes / an apology.

Originally published March 23, 2025

San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country.

There are more accomplished regions, of course. North Carolina’s “Research Triangle” boasts 13 men’s national championships among Duke, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University.

There are more accomplished states. What would be the point of Indiana or Kentucky if not for college basketball?

And there are cities that have produced more NBA players, including Los Angeles, which, to many San Diegans, is like Voldemort. It’s the city that shall not be named yet we are fixated on it.

But there is only one city—not a metro region, not a state, but a single city—that sent four teams to the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament this year, and that is San Diego. That accomplishment has been years in the making, and it improbably starts with the nerds.

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Until last weekend, UCSD had 27 more Nobel Prize winners than NCAA tournament berths, which is to say the university has 27 Nobel Prize winners. For years, the men’s and women’s basketball teams dominated the Division II ranks, and in a move compelled by student-athletes UCSD athletics rose to Division I in 2020. 

“The students were the ones that created the impetus for Division I, because as they looked at UC San Diego, and they looked at other high profile schools, [Division I] was a missing denominator,” UCSD director of athletics Earl W. Edwards told me in October. “So the students came to us and said, ‘We'd like to move to Division I.’”

Because the NCAA makes no sense, that move initiated a four-year “reclassification period,” in which the university would compete in Division I athletics but not be eligible for postseason play. A lot of locals probably didn’t know that the school could make March Madness this year, and to most non-San Diegans UCSD is irrelevant. (Just don’t say that to an aspiring engineer or scientist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, the men’s team won the regular season Big West Conference title in a wire-to-wire romp, then won the conference tournament to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. They entered March Madness on a 15-game winning streak and with 30 wins overall. Only five other teams in Division I eclipsed that mark heading into the tournament. Three contributors stand out.

Senior guard/forward Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones was named the Big West Player of the Year and also took home the Out in Left Best Name Award. Head coach Eric Olin was honored as the Big West Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season. Senior guard Hayden Gray was named the conference’s best defensive player and is one of ten finalists for the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Award. The three sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the podium after the team’s victory in the Big West final over UC Irvine. 

“They’re the ones that changed our program. They’re the ones that people come out to watch,” Olin said of his players. “The way that they play, the way that they share the ball, how selfless they are, how much fun they have—it resonates with people. That’s what people come out to see. Our campus and the San Diego community will absolutely support great basketball, and these guys played great basketball all year. The sellouts at home, the fans we had at Irvine, the fans in line to get in at our home games—all of that is a byproduct of the way they play basketball.”

The UCSD women’s team had a less successful regular season, entering the Big West Conference tournament at 17-15, but behind star sophomore guard and San Diego native Sumayah Sugapong the Tritons beat three teams in the conference tournament to punch their ticket to the Big Dance.

It’s a similar story across town for the San Diego State women’s team. (UCSD is a few stops down the Blue Line and a transfer at Old Town away from SDSU. Please let me know what the rail connection is between USC and UCLA.) A solid regular season preceded a remarkable conference tournament—the Aztecs won in an epic triple-overtime final against Wyoming, giving the program its first NCAA tournament bid since 2012.

For the SDSU men’s team, it’s business as usual, and that business is being pound-for-pound the best college basketball program in the country. Their at-large bid marked the fifth-consecutive appearance in the NCAA tournament. It would have been the sixth, had Covid not cancelled the 2020 NCAA tournament. At 30-2, the Aztecs were then having their greatest season ever.

This year’s tournament bid is their 14th since 2002, when legendary coach Steve Fisher turned the program around. Sprinkled in that span are four Sweet Sixteen appearances and, under current coach Brian Dutcher, a run to the 2023 championship game. Dutcher is San Diego’s Coach K, if Coach K had been underpaid, under-resourced, and underappreciated.

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Discussing San Diego sports requires qualifiers. It’s the largest media market without an NFL team. Until Peter Seidler’s ownership, the Padres had long been dismissed as a small-market minnow (and the team is devolving into that again after Seidler’s passing in 2023). The city’s college programs are considered mid-majors. There have been no major sports championships since 1963.

Finally, with four teams in the NCAA tournaments, the city had something to claim as its own, and it’s a claim that’s hard to argue, at least before this weekend: San Diego is the best college basketball city in America.

That’s without mentioning the University of San Diego, another Division I school, or Point Loma Nazarene, which boasts a top Division II basketball program, or San Diego City College, which is one of the best junior college programs in California. San Diego is known as a laid-back surfing town, when it’s really a big city brimming with and great at basketball.

“I don’t think we have to prove anything to them,” UCSD’s Hayden Gray said, referring to the bigger, more famous Michigan team they faced in the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament. “Teams don’t win 30 games by accident. We’re going to go out there with confidence and see if they can stop us.”

UCSD would ultimately lose to Michigan, which featured two ballyhooed seven-footers, after a would-be game-tying three rattled off the rim at the buzzer. Gray’s words are those that a proud city—a confident city—can live by.

Except no one cared. No one made the argument that San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country, and no one here cared that the city had four teams in the tournaments. National media mostly ignored the San Diego bids, besides patting the UCSD men’s team on the head and saying Aw, look at you trying. The St. John’s program has been irrelevant for all of my life, but this year on ESPN I’ve seen more clips of head coach Rick Pitino’s dyed hair plugs than actual basketball.

Locally, San Diego’s NCAA bids elicited a balkanized and almost indiscernible response. Some news hits on the local TV affiliates here. Some boosterish social media posts there. Local news outlets covered them. In real life, there was no buzz. There were no watch parties or lead-up hype or prideful and knowing nods towards strangers dressed in school colors. It’s standard fare to light up a civic building or skyscraper with the colors of a city’s teams, except, I guess, in San Diego. 

This past week, I asked several San Diegans what they thought about the city’s quad bids, and because no one had thoughts about it I asked why no one cares about San Diego’s quad bids. Almost to a person, the response was some version of “San Diego is too busy surfing.”

This is as lazy as it is ridiculous. La Jolla and Ocean, Mission, and Pacific Beaches, the neighborhoods with most of the city’s surf spots, are home to just 8% of the population. Most San Diegans live in denser and more urban communities east of the 5 and south of the 8 freeways. In 2019, a local nonprofit organized a trip to the beach via public transit for kids from City Heights. The 11-mile trip took an hour-and-a-half. For decades, Barrio Logan had been cut off from San Diego Bay despite sitting next to it. As for youth participation rates, over 2,000 boys and girls play high school basketball across 168 teams in the city of San Diego. Across the city’s 17 surf teams, there aren’t 200 participants.

Saying most San Diegans are too busy surfing is like saying most New Yorkers are too busy hanging out in Times Square. It’s by any metric inaccurate and dismissive. Perhaps I’m taking the insinuation too literally, that the idea of surfing, of laid-back hangs with suntanned friends, is really what people mean, but I can’t think of a worse idea than bobbing in freezing cold water with territorial white people.

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One friend’s response has stuck with me. “No one’s going to think we’re the best if we’re not saying it ourselves,” he said. It’s a higher order thought that makes me sad. 

More than any big city I’ve experienced, San Diego is preoccupied with what others think of it, rather than what it thinks of itself, which leads the city to try to appeal to everyone, which leads to banality and mediocrity. “America’s Finest City” is the nickname invented by former mayor Pete Wilson to obscure the local establishment bungling and ultimately losing the 1972 Republican National Convention to Miami. The “-est” is inherently a comparison, and aspiring to be “fine” reflects the city’s tired adherence to milquetoast suburbanism. 

I’ve written about another example in Snapdragon Stadium. We had a blank canvas for a world-class facility, but instead we built a cheap, multipurpose bowl surrounded by parking lots. It’s exactly what we had there before the Chargers vacated it for Los Angeles. It’s as if building a replica of Qualcomm Stadium would conjure some mid-century magic and wind the clocks back to when rampant greenfield development and Cold War defense spending made San Diego feel important. A friend from LA stabbed us in our inferiority complex and twisted the knife: “You’re obsessed with us, but we never think about you,” she said. Oof. 

The other side of that coin is a lack of vision. Proclaiming greatness, or striving for it, requires a suspension of disbelief. A better world is possible if we accept the possibility of a currently fictional world, and it’s risky to do that. It’s more comfortable to accept the familiar shitty public services and infrastructure and to tolerate the resorts that extract wealth and send it to multinational REITs incorporated in Delaware. 

An exception is Petco Park. The Padres market it as America’s No. 1 ballpark, and not coincidentally it has shown up in recent years at the top of ballpark rankings. It’s a Greatness Feedback Loop. The more the Padres call their home great, the more that outsiders consider it that way, and the more people think Petco Park is great, the more the Padres want to keep it that way. It is astonishing and refreshing to see someone, or something, in San Diego make an unqualified claim to greatness.

I don’t expect everyone to be sports or basketball fans, and that probably isn’t advisable. Sports are at the center of culture in Philadelphia and it is a deranged place. Big 5 partisans think Philly invented basketball and the Palestra is the only arena in the world and that it’s still 1955 when La Salle was the reigning national champion. Remind them that Villanova isn’t actually in the city and they stuff a soft pretzel in your mouth, throw you in the back of a van, and dump your body into the Schuylkill. 

It’s also a generalization for me to say that no one cares about college basketball in San Diego. SDSU’s and UCSD’s local alumni networks are massive, and any casual sports fan—or anyone with a pulse—can buy into a championship run. Whenever I’m in a funk thinking about, say, a president illegalling consolidating power or a major political party ceding the government to an unelected billionaire, I think back to the packed bar at which I watched Lamont Butler drain a buzzer beater in the Final Four. Limbs, as they say across the pond.

But for the first round of this year’s NCAA tournaments the Gaslamp should have been closed to cars for a watch/block party. The County Administration Building should have been lit up in alternating colors of blue and red. Fans should have been bussed to the tarmac at Lindbergh Field so local news cameras could get a clip of the teams being sent off in style. Employers should have relaxed their dress codes and encouraged school colors. The city should have hung basketball hoops on light posts. (I’m for anything that makes NIMBYs lose their minds.) None of that happened because San Diego doesn’t have a civic language or tradition that informs and enlists normies into something important/fun.

It’s a sentiment and history worth exploring more in a different piece, but a major reason is that we mistake climate for culture. Think of any major city or region and the first thought would be about people. London: keep calm and carry on. Midwest: friendly cheese-eaters. New York: assholes. Think of San Diego and you think of the weather. That’s in large part because the modern city1 was founded that way.

We had no water. We had no arable land. We had no oil. We had no precious metals. We had no mountain passes for trains. The bay was mostly unnavigable. So in the early 1900s local robber barons turned to tourism to stabilize San Diego’s economy.

“[John D. Spreckels] owned major tourist assets and appreciated the obvious business logic of moderate public investments in parks, beaches, and pageantry,” Mike Davis writes in Under the Perfect Sun. “At least while waiting for the satanic mills to arrive from the East, it made sense to package the climate for sale to a leisure class of wealthy retirees, consumptives, and cultists—all of whom might stay in Spreckel’s hotels and tent cities or buy lots adjacent to Spreckel’s streetcar lines.”

In essence, San Diego adopted—it was sold—a hollow identity. Weather is inanimate, and everywhere has it. It’s nothing distinctive. Culture, on the other hand, is human. One definition of culture is so beautiful I’m going to get it tattooed across my clavicles: “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”

Alumni and students hit the bars for the UCSD and SDSU games, of course, but that’s closer to networking than culture. The seeds of culture are Juan in accounting and Julie in marketing, hypothetical colleagues who rarely interact, realizing they can needle each other in good fun (i.e. bond) because, at the office on gameday, one wore a Tritons polo and the other wore an Aztecs shirt, even though neither of them can name a single player. San Diego is big enough for two research institutions with relevant athletics programs, and it should be big enough, and mature enough, to have a civic fabric that strangers can plug into and feel connected with the place and its people.

Last Sunday, San Diego became the only city to send four teams to the NCAA tournaments. In the ensuing three days, San Diego stood alone, and—brace yourself, Chamber of Commerce—it had nothing to do with the sun.

The other day, a friend sent me a video about Olympique de Marseille’s recent failures as a football club. A few hours later, a different friend sent me a video about gondolas, the aerial cable transit systems. My friends hate me. They forced me to think about Frank McCourt, who sucks the soul from two sports I l…

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As the Phillies stumbled their way through what became, somehow, a World Series season, I tried understanding why, amid a COVID era in which I managed an affordable housing campaign to a loss, subsequently struggled to land a job, developed anxiety, suffered my first panic attack, and experienced heartbreak, I cared and thought about the losingest franchise in United States sports history as passionately and as often as I did while growing up in South Jersey.

And unlike South Jersey Me, San Diego Me, the one in the trenches of adulthood, knows Major League Baseball is a commercialized behemoth comprised mostly of men and thinks every bad thing about society stems from MLB’s anti-trust exemption, which allows the league to skirt labor laws, impose television blackouts, and extort cities. At any one time, seemingly half of the owners, all of whom are billionaires, refuse to invest in their teams despite pocketing subsidies from their colleagues. The money I spend to watch and support the Phils, whose product is derived from the labor of players, enriches, say, the owner of the Miami Marlins, God help me.

Still I watch. Expressing either the last sane sentiment of the American conservative movement or an omen, George Will said, “[Baseball’s] a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything, and democracy is that way, too.” The amount of losing in baseball is staggering: Ted Williams failed six times out of ten in the greatest season ever for a hitter, and only once, in 1906, did a team lose less than a quarter of its games in a season, with those Chicago Cubs losing four times as much as the NBA’s all-time winningest team. Losing is the whole deal, making baseball similar to that Philly legend Rocky Balboa: you lose the title fight but win over Adrian by getting your ass kicked day in and day out and in the ring and out of it and still answering the bell. American democracy is that way, too.

The losses in our elections are small and large and local and systemic and occur ever year. Our system is predicated on accepting loss, which is why the emergence of Big Liars, election deniers, and insurrectionists have renewed a tradition of pronouncing the demise of American democracy. We’re still going to the polls, though, and more than ever. It’s because something in us knows trying is the point. That feeling and the institutions it props up are worth preserving.

The New York Times shoved these thoughts into my brain when, on May 21, 2022, it informed me that both “Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election” and “Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101.” The latter was the good news, since it profiled a literary man who, despite experiencing the Great Depression and World War II and rooting for the New York Mets, gave the world this:

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”

On its face, Angell’s quote conjures a nostalgia for a past that never really existed and misses the mark on no one “caring deeply and passionately” anymore. Forty-six years after Angell wrote that for the New Yorker, in an analysis of the “epochal” 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, Donald Trump directed an army of zealots to attempt a coup.

The drift toward illiberalism and the shock of insurrection revived centuries-old prophecies. “The will of a majority is the will of a rabble,” John C. Calhoun had said. “Progressive democracy is incompatible with liberty." Calhoun was the Southern, pro-slavery statesman who, while serving as vice president in 1832, threw the young country into chaos by pushing “nullification,” a legal theory under which states could deem federal law null and void. In These Truths, Jill Lepore wrote, “The nullification crisis was … a debate about the limits of states’ rights and about the question of slavery, an early augur of the civil war to come.” Almost two hundred years later, the Times published an investigative series titled “Democracy Challenged.”

Baseball fans know this tradition well. “The rage for base ball [sic] appears to be dying out,” the Omaha World-Herald observed in 1890, eleven years before the establishment of the American League. In December 2022, the Michigan Journal of Economics asked, “Is Baseball a ‘Dying’ Sport?”

Baseball’s death notices usually focus on the game’s finances and viewership or its aesthetics and cultural significance, but to me baseball’s survival is tied not to dollars and eyeballs but rather to politics, and I worry about the game in today’s environment. It’s not that Major League Baseball will go away in an increasingly illiberal America. It’s that the league’s owners will curry favor with neoconservative overlords, who, by changing election law and interpreting them to their advantage, will permanently entrench themselves in power. The owners have long done this (their anti-trust exemption was awarded by a sympathetic Supreme Court in 1922), but in this possible future their extortion efforts will become more brazen, their labor practices more exploitative, and their game product more divorced from the profits they make and the desires of their customer bases. As it always has, baseball would then reflect the country: ignorant of popular sentiment and determined by contrived results. MLB would then be a tool of the state to enrich oligarchs who stand by as fascism creeps towards us fans.

This is not fantasy. In profiling Roman Abramovich, journalist Catherine Belton outlined how Russian President Vladimir Putin infiltrated British society and government through sports. Belton concluded Putin ordered Abramovich, obscenely wealthy from his controlling companies once owned by the Soviet state, to purchase the Chelsea Football Club because “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport.” Since the invasion of Ukraine, most of Europe has strained to disentangle itself from Putin’s Russia. Belton wondered if “England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so.” In the States, MLB team owners contributed to the G.O.P. over the Democratic Party at a nearly 3-to-1 rate from 2016 to 2020, with owners of the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago Cubs contributing directly to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned political action committees in the 2020 election cycle. After losing that election, Trump organized his shock troops to overturn the results.

I sense that, through baseball fifty years ago, Roger Angell recognized this cynicism that has since metastasized. His lament for the extinction of caring is really his fear of an intolerance of losing—losing money, relationships, games, elections, whatever—for in losing lies truth and in truth lies freedom, as they say, but in all of it lies pain, or the potential of it. If there is anything that will at long last kill American democracy and in turn baseball, then it is our not wanting anymore to be Rocky Balboa: a nobody willing to lose for the ties that bind.

“It’s telling that this whole framework is fundamentally oriented toward history,” Emma Baccalieri wrote for Sports Illustrated. “If baseball is dying now, it must have been alive then. It’s all very sentimental.” It’s a retrograde perspective borrowed from America, whose Founding Fathers nobly conceived and then handed off the Greatest Country on Earth, only for us forebears to turn in botch jobs. Standing in for George Washington, etc. is baseball's first class of players inducted into the Hall of Fame. It just hasn’t been the same since Ty Cobb batted a career .366 against seven all-White teams of dairy farmers and steamfitters.

“How does baseball live?” Baccalieri continued, “offers more to examine, structurally and personally, than does Why must baseball die?” The former question feels like identifying an optical illusion, a thing so obvious that I wondered why my brain didn’t notice it in the first place, and reorients the perspective to the future, although that future feels a little barren. It’s not bad, per se, just unarticulated. What’s the vision for baseball? What do we want baseball to look like five, twenty, fifty years from now? Who do we want to have access to the game, and how do we want them to do it? Who’s ‘we’? Still, none of these questions address why I even care.

First, baseball’s fun. In the pivotal third game of last year’s National League Division Series, the Atlanta Braves pitched the league’s leading The Thing impersonator and the N.L. Rookie of the Year runner-up Spencer Strider. He submitted two typically dominant innings, but then in the third the Phillies tallied five hits on five consecutive pitches, including a Bryce Bomb that landed two seats to my left. When Strider walked back to the dugout, relieved of his duties mid-inning, 45,000 Philadelphians troll-chanted his name, and in that moment I ceased to exist as an individual, serving only as one cell in a delirious mass, and my entire world had collapsed at Citizens Bank Park into an image, now frozen in my mind, of what it means to believe in and belong to something mystical, which is to say it was an image of how fun it is to beat someone in a game. To quote Nancy Pelosi, I don’t hate anybody, but that was the closest I’ve ever felt to salvation. (At 6:46 a.m. on the Monday after returning to San Diego, I texted my buddy back home with whom I attended the NLDS. “STOTTY,” I said, still buzzing from his nine-pitch at-bat that initiated the rally. My friend responded with a screenshot of a text I allegedly sent a month prior, on September 25. “Stott sucks and I’m over him,” it read. Bryson Stott and I had both come a long way.)

On the other side of that coin are the rationalizations both embodied by and included in baseball that inure me to the mountains of losses in the sport and democracy and life. The 99-loss 2015 Phillies had to walk so a future team—the 2022 team, it turned out—could run; the authoritarian impulses of the far-right is just a phase; and one day I’ll be and feel fine. These are my subconscious defenses against nihilism and what makes it seem like there’s a point to everyday pain. To put it in baseball terms, I need to know there’s always next year. I think that’s why American democracy still exists.

Written constitutions around the world have lasted, on average, seventeen years, as Jill Lepore pointed out in the New Yorker. The U.S.'s turns 234 this year (and by my last count baseball still has 234 fans). Lepore characterizes the U.S. Constitution today as brittle, considering it is virtually unamendable anymore, but it must also possess a resiliency to survive this long. That resiliency comes from us, for institutions take on the characteristics of the humans that make and sustain them. There is nothing inevitable about American democracy (or baseball). Its death is not a certainty, and that’s because people like me tell themselves the essential little lies—we need each other, it gets better, and it’s worth fighting for—to avoid being swallowed by what’s at the core of the Big Lie: that nothing matters, including how we treat people.

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On this weekend last year, I posted the political guide to the 2025 MLB season and wrote this in the intro:

Donald Trump is running the country by fiat, Elon Musk has my Social Security Number, and the Philadelphia Eagles started a dynasty against the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl 59. This means it is finally baseball season.

It’s amazing how quickly things change. The Eagles do not own a dynasty, for they haven’t completed a forward pass since that Super Bowl. DOGE blew up on launch, like most of Musk’s actual rockets. And, after a disastrous federal occupation of Minneapolis, Congressional Democrats were able to wrangle the votes to impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office.

[puts hand to earpiece]

Wait.

[listens intently]

Yes, okay. I’m receiving reports that Congressional Democrats have done next to nothing to stop the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy, civil liberties, and separations of power, let alone enact an agenda that helps non-rich people. I’m sorry for the confusion. Some things, in fact, do not change.

Thank God baseball is one of them. It’s February, and so pitchers and catchers have reported and soon we will be at the ballpark drinking cans of Bud Light the size of grenade launchers. So badly do I miss baseball that I watched a video of Philadelphia Phillies ace Zack Wheeler leisurely warming up, if it can be called that, dozens of times.

There are plenty of power rankings out in the world, and they will all say the same thing: The good teams will be good, the bad teams will be bad. But there is only one political guide to the baseball season. It is here at Out in Left.

Baseball is the sport that most reflects every day life, so the best way to understand the upcoming season is through politics. As I did last season, I ask a question about (almost) every team that I think you, the reader, would ask to get caught up.

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N.L. East

Are the Philadelphia Phillies the most MAGA team in baseball?

In 2022, catcher J.T. Realmuto, pitcher Aaron Nola, and infielder Alec Bohm couldn’t travel with the team to Toronto because they failed to meet Canada’s vaccine requirements. First baseman Bryce Harper drinks raw milk, and this offseason he received an unapproved blood treatment from a quack doctor. Shortstop Trea Turner wants to meet Elon Musk. I count no less than six players on the roster from either Florida or Georgia (with several others from Louisiana, Indiana, and the Carolinas.) Finally, during their run to the 2022 World Series, the team chose as its rally song Calum Scott’s far inferior version of “Dancing On My Own.” Robyn should have sued for damages. Will the Phillies aging roster contend for the World Series? I have no idea, but I do know how they’ll be voting at the midterms.

What craven thing did New York Mets owner Steve Cohen do this time?

Honestly, nothing really. Last year, Cohen publicly bashed club legend Pete Alonso during contract negotiations in attempt to gain leverage, but this offseason baseball’s single-richest owner has been on his best behavior. Maybe he wanted no drama while New York considered his $8 billion casino project at Citi Field. Maybe he is still smarting from the Mets epic second-half collapse. Maybe he was hiding from scrutiny for letting Alonso and closer Edwin Diaz walk. In any case, I’m looking forward to the Mets coming up short again.

How much does Miami still owe for the Marlins ballpark?

In 2009, then-Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria convinced public authorities to fund most of the cost of a $634 million ballpark. Thanks to interest, the total hit to Miami taxpayers is estimated at $2.4 billion. The first payment is scheduled this year. The last is scheduled for 2049. Loria sold the Marlins in 2017 for $1.2 billion. The Marlins unironically call their ballpark loanDepot Field. The team stinks.

I will be able to copy-paste the above blurb for the next 23 years and it will be accurate. Indeed, I copy-pasted it from last year’s season preview.

Why have the Atlanta Braves been so quiet?

In 2021, the Braves won the World Series, and in the ensuing years they signed the following young players to expensive, long-term deals:

• Austin Riley, 3B

• Matt Olsen, 1B

• Spencer Strider, SP

• Ronald Acuña Jr., RF

• Sean Murphy, C

• Michael Harris, CF

• Ozzie Albies, 2B

They formed a core that won more than 100 games in both 2022 and 2023, but the Braves have underwhelmed since. They even finished below the Marlins last year. Most of the aforementioned players have either have been hurt or have underperformed, exposing the risk of the Braves’ payroll gamble. They don’t really have roster flexibility, so they’ve nibbled around the edges and swung some trades, to varying levels of success.

Oh, and the team’s owner, Liberty Media, spent over $3 million on campaign contributions in 2024, nearly all of it going to Republicans. Why field a winning ball club when you can “buy” illogical trade restrictions, net-zero immigration, and incompetent governance?

Years after trading away Trea Turner, Max Scherzer, and Juan Soto, the Washington Nationals are finally ready to emerge from their rebuild, right? Right???

(Here’s a great video summarizing the plight of the Nationals.)

N.L. Central

Why did the Milwaukee Brewers trade their best pitcher?

Freddy Peralta posted 2.70 ERA last season across 33 starts, cementing him as one of the game’s best starting pitchers. The Brewers, coming off a 97-win season and with a solid core intact, traded him to the Mets. Competitively, it makes no sense, but this is American sports we’re talking about. Winning doesn’t matter. Peralta is due $8 million in 2026, then he’s a free agent. It’s particularly frustrating because, in 2023, Wisconsin committed $500 million to improve the Brewers’ ballpark. Taxpayers are subsidizing the Brewers’ stinginess.

Will you beat up on the Chicago Cubs owner again?

Yes. The New Yorker called Cubs owner Todd Ricketts the president’s “fundraiser-in-chief,” and it came out in April that the Ricketts family spent $1.6 million on Trump’s 2024 inauguration. Since then, ICE agents descended on Chicago, leaving lasting impact on the city and its immigrant communities. While federal agents patrolled the streets, ICE broadcasted recruitment ads, including, according to intrepid Redditors, on Marquee Sports Network during Cubs games. Half of Marquee is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, an arch-conservative conglomerate. The other half is owned by the Cubs. Am I alleging that, through the ICE ads, Ricketts received a kickback paid with taxpayer funds? No, not at all.

Did the Cincinnati Reds just get a new owner?

This week, MLB owners approved the transfer of the Reds from Bob Castellini to his son, Phil. (Don’t let anyone tell you that the U.S. isn’t a meritocracy.) In 2022, Phil infamously said “Well, where are you gonna go?” in response to fans complaining about the team trading away its best players. He followed that up the next year by bemoaning guaranteed contracts in baseball. The team will never win anything while the Castellini’s are in charge.

What is there to say about St. Louis Cardinals?

Not much. The Cards traded away their best players, and their owner is seeking subsidies for stadium renovations and calling for a salary cap. Standard fare.

Are the Pittsburgh Pirates actually trying?

Well, in signing first baseman Ryan O’Hearn, the Pirates did ink their first multi-year free agency deal since Barack Obama was president. They also tried to sign several top free agents, including the Phillies’ designated hitter Kyle Schwarber, and the team made some solid trades. ’s newsletter thinks the Pirates are contenders in the weak N.L. Central. It’s easy to be jaded, what with team owner Rob Nutting being among the worst owners in American sports, but I’m down for some Postseason Pirates.

N.L. West

Are the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that forcibly removed a Mexican-American community from Chavez Ravine to build their stadium and a team supported by millions of people of color and a team that employs many immigrants — superstar Shohei Ohtani being one of them —actually going to the White House to commemorate their World Series victory with Donald Trump?

Yes.

What have the San Diego Padres been up to lately?

In the past year or so, the team has:

• Opposed a minimum wage increase in San Diego;

• Opposed the increase of public parking rates, a move meant to close budget holes and avoid slashing public services;

• Privatized the management of public streets near Petco Park;

• Increased season tickets prices by 7%, on average, marking the fifth straight year of increases;

• Announced the team is for sale, which will almost certainly net the owners billions (a few decades ago, the Padres could have been a public asset); and

• Amid ownership uncertainty, refuse to give president of baseball operations A.J. Preller a new contract.

Preller, of course, is the man responsible for the Padres current golden era. But why let competitiveness and the well-being of your fans get in the way of making money?

Is San Francisco Giants chairman Greg Johnson one of the few in baseball who isn’t crying about the Dodgers?

Yes, thankfully. In the NLDS, the Phillies outscored the Dodgers, had more hits and home runs, posted a lower ERA, and, until the very last play of the series, committed fewer errors. The Dodgers won the series 3-1. The Toronto Blue Jays took the Dodgers to seven games in the World Series, and they could have won the championship, like, 37 different times, if not for bad luck and insane plays. We do not need to change the rules for the Dodgers, and a salary cap will not bring about parity.

Last year, you said the Arizona state legislature was on the verge of allocating tens of millions of dollars to renovate Chase Field at the behest of the Diamondbacks owner. Did that come to fruition?

Yes, but I misspoke. It turned out to be hundreds of millions, not tens of millions. $500 million, to be exact. There’s nothing like taxpayers footing the bill for a new roof and HVAC system to ensure your team finishes in fourth place in their division every year.

Why do the Colorado Rockies exist?

I don’t know, but to be fair: Coors Field is criminally underrated, Rockies fans show up even when their team stinks, as it will this year, and owner Dick Monfort isn’t afraid to spend money. Now, he might spend it terribly, but it’s something.

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Intermission

Dodgers fans can have their free agents and their World Series. I will always have this:

A.L. East

How do the Toronto Blue Jays recover from losing what was arguably the greatest World Series ever?

By reimposing vaccine mandates.

Did New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner cry poor AGAIN this offseason?

Yes. Last year, Steinbrenner said, "It's difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that [the Dodgers are] doing. Payrolls at levels we’re at right now are simply not sustainable for us financially.”

After the season, Steinbrenner said, “Everybody wants to talk about revenues. They need to talk about our expenses, including the $100 million expense to the city of New York that we have to pay every Feb. 1, including the COVID year. It all starts to add up in a hurry.” (For the record, that payment to the city is for rent, because the Yankees got taxpayers to pay for their mausoleum of a ballpark.)

The Yankees are worth over $7 billion, and in 2024 they generated a record $412 million in ticket sales. That’s just one of their revenue streams. And yet, this year, they’re running back the same team. As I said last year, Steinbrenner being cheap is far worse for baseball than the Dodgers paying for good players. I will die on this hill.

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Can you remind me of the incompetence of the Boston Red Sox?

Happily. In 2020, the Sox traded a prime Mookie Betts because they didn't want to resign him to a long-term deal. Betts has since won two World Series with the Dodgers and is playing himself into Hall of Fame contention. The last vestige of that trade, catcher Connor Wong, posted a -0.6 bWAR last season for the Sox.

In 2023, the Sox signed third baseman Rafael Devers to a mega-contract. Two years later, they signed third baseman Alex Bregman to a mega-contract. Team executives leaked to the media a bunch of garbage about Devers after he, understandably, refused to change his position to accommodate Bregman. The Sox then traded Devers to the Giants, getting almost nothing in return because they offloaded the entire contract onto San Francisco. The Sox missed the playoffs.

In the offseason, Bergman opted out of his deal and signed with the Cubs. The Sox’ hopes for the playoffs in 2026 now rests on a bunch of rookies, when they could have had a lineup featuring Betts, Devers, and Bregman. Nice work.

Was ultra-billionaire and Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein named in the Epstein Files?

Yes.

What’s the latest on Tampa Bay Rays ballpark saga?

In 2024, Hurricane Milton ravaged the Tampa area and significantly damaged the Rays’ Tropicana Field. It threw a wrench into the Rays’ plans for a new ballpark—local jurisdictions could no longer afford to subsidize a new facility—and it ultimately led to the sale of the team to billionaire developer Patrick Zalupski.

Last week, we got renderings for yet another iteration of a new Rays ballpark. To make it come to fruition, the team is asking public authorities for a mere $2.25 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Local elected officials are considering raiding a community infrastructure fund to make it happen. In the meantime, the Rays’ return to the moribund Tropicana Field.

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A.L. Central

Did the Detroit Tigers, with MLB’s concurrence, try to lowball all-world starting pitcher Tarik Skubal in salary arbitration, but instead stepped on a rake and set a precedent that could lead to players getting paid more?

Yes.

Do I need to know anything about the rest of the teams in this division?

No.

A.L. West

Did you forget to include the Seattle Mariners in your preview last year?

Yes. I will make up for it by not saying anything poorly about the team or its management and by linking to a 40-minute compilation of their late-inning magic last season.

Are the Houston Astros cheaters?

Forever and always.

Are the Texas Rangers still the only MLB team that doesn’t celebrate the LGBTQ community?

Yes.

What’s the latest on the [redacted] Athletics?

The Athletics’ departure from Oakland and its residency in West Sacramento are disgraceful episodes in MLB history. I went to a game at Sutter Health Park and it’s simply an unserious operation. That said, the Athletics signed much of its young, exciting core to long-term deals, and the club’s ballpark in Las Vegas is under construction. I won’t be upset watching Nick Kurtz hit bombs into the MGM Grand marquee.

The Anaheim Angeles are a dumpster fire.

That’s not a question, but I agree. Here’s a list of recent key events:

• 2019 - Mike Trout has his last great season.

• 2020 - the team signs third baseman Anthony Rendon, which would become one of, if not the worst contract in North American sports history.

• 2021 - Albert Pujols’ 10-year, $210-million contract elapses. The team would make the playoffs just once in his tenure.

• 2022 - the team gets ensnarled in an FBI investigation involving the redevelopment of the Angels’ ballpark site.

• 2023 - Shohei Ohtani’s contract elapses, ensuring the Angels waste the labor of probably the most talented baseball player to ever live.

• 2024 - Angels hire veteran manager Ron Washington, who would later require heart surgery and end his tenure prematurely.

• 2025 - they finish last in the AL West, then hire Kurt Suzuki as their new manager, though on a peculiar one-year deal.

Arte Moreno needs to sell the team.

Tyrese Maxey is a superstar. Joel Embiid has figured out how to maintain elite production without possessing knee ligaments. Rookie guard V.J. Edgecombe has been a revelation. They’re starring for a team bound for the playoffs. And yet, the Philadelphia 76ers got worse on purpose at this week’s NBA’s trade dead…

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