NowLoop

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I really loved attending games. Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Miami came at the old Dolphins/Marlins stadium, a truly horrible place to watch any sporting event, but also one that was a mere 10 minute drive from my home. I went to countless Marlins games in the summer of 2003, watching them slowly put things together into what would eventually be an improbable second World Series title that fall. (I was lucky enough to attend Game 5 of that World Series, back when tickets were merely expensive and not expensive.) Baseball's constant motion kept me grounded in the rudderless months of Miami summer, when the heat is so stifling that you could get tickets behind home plate for Sunday afternoon games for about $20. There's another reason that I loved baseball so much, though, and that is that I was in the exact right age demographic for the golden age of baseball video games. My late single-digit years and my early teens coinciding with the releases of such bangers like Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., Triple Play 2002, and the glorious trilogy of MVP Baseball 2003 through and especially 2005 brought together two of my great loves: sports and gaming. I remember spending a big part of a month in Venezuela one summer just playing Triple Play 2002 for days on end, only coming out for air to eat, and sometimes not even that. I also remember learning every single starting lineup and rotation in MVP Baseball 2004, while trying to keep my defending champion Marlins at the top of the league. I remember all of these things because they made me grow closer with the sport, and made me understand what I wanted to get out of being a baseball fan. Fast forward a couple of years, and baseball video games fell off rather quickly, as did, and perhaps not coincidentally, my love of the game. Part of that is that the Marlins did what the Marlins do and traded away Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis and a bunch of other stalwarts from the 2003 World Series team, but I also went off to college in 2007 and had other things on my mind. I've tried since then; I briefly got into the MLB 2K series before that went kaput, and once I made the swap from Xbox to PlayStation, one of my first purchases was whatever year of MLB The Show was out then (14, if memory serves). I did love the latter, but it never held my attention quite like the games of my teen years did.

Viewed strictly within the context of the Western Conference Finals, there was nothing all that shocking about the San Antonio Spurs' 111-103 road victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 7. That doesn't make what happened on Saturday night feel any less destabilizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bOMYQFgK4I Consider everything that went wrong for the Thunder throughout this series. Injuries to Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell reduced their all-important depth and left Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with very little support in the offensive backcourt. Victor Wembanyama's mere presence gummed up their offense, leaving their turnover-generating defense and timely shooting from role players as their most reliable methods for producing points. Unless Wembanyama was playing like shit, the Thunder's chances for victory in every game this series were banished to the margins.

By their very nature, cup finals do not necessarily make for exciting matches. For every 2022 World Cup final, there are 15 2019 Champions League finals. That does not excuse what happened on Saturday in Budapest, though. Over 120 minutes, Arsenal forced Paris Saint-Germain into a torture rack of Mikel Arteta's creation, and the result was a tense and relatively even affair. Ah, who am I kidding? The result was a big ol' piece of crap match that was excruciating to watch, a perfect distillation of every critique I (and others) have had about Arsenal's style of play this season. Saturday's Champions League final did buck one trend, though, as Arsenal was not ultimately rewarded for its offensively defensive performance. PSG came back from an early and nearly match-killing 1-0 deficit to first even things up and then win in a penalty shootout. Oh, and don't worry: The penalty shootout was also terrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRnJRQmVMTg

The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now. In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentially be a repeat of 1992, as it would also feature a Bush versus a Clinton—in this case, former Florida governor and younger ­brother of 43, Jeb Bush, versus former First Lady and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. When asked by Chuck Todd how he would likely depict the 2016 candidates, Trudeau stated, “I have a long history of unpacking the baggage of the Bush ­family.” He added that it would be hard to draw Hillary Clinton ­because “­we’re just waiting for her to make ­mistakes.” But in the end, Trudeau would never draw a strip about either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, because the 2016 election became a nonstop Donald Trump reality TV show.

There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course: Are they any good?  It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Since 2021, only two of the NWSL’s six expansion teams have made the playoffs—San Diego Wave in 2022 and Bay FC in 2024—and the rest have finished closer to the table’s basement. Evaluating an expansion team by their results, then, is a recipe for disappointment. But there’s a better metric out there, one that corresponds to the NWSL’s best trait: chaos. When I’m judging a new team, what I’m looking for is fun. If I tune into a game they’re playing, am I going to have a good time? Ten games into its existence, the Denver Summit already has me answering that question in the affirmative. They began the season with a bang—their inaugural match, a loss against Bay, included three total goals and a red card for the new squad. They went on to take points from both of the league’s most recent champions, tying the Orlando Pride 1-1 and beating Gotham 2-0. Then came a couple of duds: scoreless draws against Washington and Gotham. Those goose eggs seem to have steeled Denver’s determination to make things happen moving forward, and since the April international window, each game they’ve played in has been full of goals.

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives little clue as to what could happen inside its cover. Behind the title there are several misshapen die with colorful dots and crumbling edges. It is a strange book, with a strange protagonist, and a sentence structure so mesmerizing that I couldn’t put it down.  When I picked up this book, I had no understanding of it except that it was “about baseball.” But the book isn’t about baseball, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s about a version of baseball that exists only in the mind of the book's protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, who lives alone in an apartment, neglects his job as an accountant, and has pastrami sandwiches delivered to him so that he can spend all of his time working as the commissioner of a baseball league he has made up in his vivid imagination. Each game is played with die rolls that determine how a batter performs at the plate and what happens to the ball. The keys have been built over decades of play by himself. The teams themselves have backstories, difficulties, and histories. There are events that exist inside the world of the league that are not real and yet impact the behavior of the players, who are also not real. There are songs that Henry has written for the league, up-and-coming stars, and a Hall of Fame he keeps meticulously in a book on his shelf.  This kind of world creation is similar to the work of creating a novel. You as the creator invent people and give them problems. You build out a world for them to exist in and hope that they behave in certain ways. At some point, you forget that you’ve made it all up, that none of these people are real, that if one of them is behaving in a way that does not function narratively, you can simply make them do something else, or delete them from the story altogether. The work of creation of any kind is often dangerously close to the work of disassociation from the world you actually live in, and Coover displays this with terrifying, mesmerizing clarity. 

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a tuxedo cat, approximately 8.5 pounds and 1 year old. Second, I made new friends who have two cats of their own: A tortico former mother named Guagua (or 瓜瓜, a cute way of saying "melon" or "gourd" in Chinese), who is perhaps the most perfect and angelic cat I have ever met, and a weird little man named Sesame. Our three protagonists are pictured below. Clementine (left), Guagua (center), and Sesame (right). Not to scale; though Sesame is, as previously mentioned, a "weird little man," he is physically huge. While I met Clementine first, my self-employment as cat tutor only started when I met Guagua and Sesame, and my friends told me that Guagua knew tricks. I had never before met a cat in real life who knew tricks. The trick-knowing cats I saw on various internet platforms appeared to me like unusually dignified and intelligent creatures, sometimes upsettingly purebred, and now Guagua—a normal cat from the streets of Philadelphia who does not have teeth—had proved herself part of that circle. She demonstrated her suite of tricks: sit, spin, paw, other paw, high-five, other high-five, down, and going wherever she was pointed. She was, it was clear to me, a genius, and also extremely food-motivated, which in animals tends to be related.

This past Saturday, Barcelona Femení met OL Lyonnes in the Champions League final and crushed them by a score of 4-0. The scoreline was a little misleading, but only a little. On one hand, the first half of the match tilted heavily in Lyon's favor. The French team put their Spanish counterparts to the sword, dominating Barça in a way no opponent has probably since Lyon won this very matchup four years ago. Only great penalty-box defending and heroics from Cata Coll in goal kept Lyon from getting the go-ahead goal they by all rights deserved. On the other hand, if the present moment of European club soccer, and arguably women's soccer as a whole, could rightfully be described as the Barcelona era, it's because the Blaugrana has more exceptional players than anyone else, players with long histories of coming up big in the difficult, decisive moments that separate victory from defeat. From the second half's outset, Barça looked like a different team, one better equipped to escape the man-to-man press that had stymied them so thoroughly in the first 45 minutes. Where Lyon earlier had had its chances to convert its run-of-play superiority into a scoreboard lead but let them go begging, Barça was ruthless. In the 55th minute, Ewa Pajor put Barcelona ahead with the game's opening goal, and already it felt like the match had taken its final shape. A fatigued Lyon sought more open, direct attacks in an attempt to get back into the game, which only presented Barça more time and space in which to keep the ball and attack. Pajor struck again in the 69th minute, more or less putting the result out of Lyon's reach, and a pair of late strikes from Salma Paralluelo killed any chance of a comeback. The gaudy final scoreline might not have reflected the tension of the match, but did testify to the greater omnipotence this Barcelona team has demonstrated over and over for the better part of a decade now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yI9ng8Yp7A&t=1s&pp=ygUOYmFyY2Vsb25hIGx5b27SBwkJDQsBhyohjO8%3D

The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of all those grudges. They were highly and sometimes objectionably competitive men, and as such were held to be villains of a sort during their careers. In both cases, their brilliance became easier to acknowledge after the hesitations and qualifications related to all that were shocked back into perspective by their deaths. Busch died at age 41, due to sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That shockingly untimely death ended a nearly two-decade run as the driver who most, in the words of fellow driver Ryan Blaney, "made you feel inadequate, and [made] you feel talentless because you see him do these things, and it’s like, ‘I don’t know how he does it. I really don’t understand it.’" He was the hardest of chargers, a man who suffered competitors sporadically and fools not at all; before he died, Busch could be equally commodious and disputatious depending on the day. This was the result of the work he'd done and had to do, and his general mood. If that is villainy, then the world is full of them. Lemieux was equally notable on the merits. Over 21 years in hockey, he had compiled four Stanley Cups and 459 goals in combined regular seasons and playoffs; he ranked sixth overall in playoff goals with 80, and was regarded as one the game's elite defensive forwards. This was not what he was best known for, though. He was best known for the vicious hit he put on Detroit's Kris Draper that was so egregious—Lemieux checked Draper from behind into the boards during the 1996 Western Conference final, breaking Draper’s jaw, nose, and cheekbone—that it sparked not just a brawl in that game but a rivalry between the Red Wings and Lemieux's Colorado Avalanche that lasted until well after Lemieux left the Avs and the Wings had turned over their management and roster. ESPN made a documentary about the rivalry, back when documentaries were actually documents rather than self-preening projects. The sentence "You hated his guts until he was on your team" was invoked so often in Lemieux's case that, had it come with a price tag per use, his family would have enjoyed generational wealth through the remainder of this century.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is making big moves. This week, she declined to renew the contract of 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on the hellish conditions at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was pulled off the air last December for not offering enough deference to the Trump administration; Alfonsi was one of three departures from the program. Weiss also installed Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of her network's flagship newsmagazine program. If you're having trouble remembering who Bilton is, that's because he's a specific type of dolt from a bygone era. There was a moment in the media industry in which one could build a lucrative career by being a guy with glasses and branding oneself as a tech reporter who "covers the intersection of technology and culture." Bilton spent many years executing this maneuver at The New York Times, where he edged out some stiff competition to briefly claim the title of the paper's worst columnist. His greatest hits include a column about the time he couldn't find a pen, and one about the cancer risks presented by wearable technology that was so factually fucked, it now contains a 203-word editor's note and a 98-word correction. Bilton eventually left the Times for Vanity Fair, where he got busy pretending like he was the one who'd owned the Theranos story and getting all googly-eyed over the Apple Vision Pro, which he promised was "taking us into the future, into a new era of computing." I guess technically the jury's still out on that one.