This fall, in my opinion, is the very best Postseason Wild Card series for Major League Baseball that has coalesced in ages. So many amazing rivals playing against each other with the stakes at the very highest they can be.
It’s so exciting.
Cincinnati Reds (my grandpa’s favorite team and the greatest underdogs in the Postseason) playing against the LA Dodgers (probably the most scary, dominant team).
Cleveland Indians playing against the Detroit Tigers (Natural rivals because of their close geographic locations.)
Boston Red Sox playing against the evil empire (The New York Yankees). The Red Sox won the first game tonight of three. Inarguably the greatest sports rivals in sports history.
The San Diego Padres playing against the Chicago Cubbies.
Whoever wins the Cincinnati Reds/LA Dodgers series will square up against the Philadelphia Phillies.
The whole thing is absolutely electric.
Imagine this: It is possible that the Phillies and the Red Sox - my two favorite teams could end up playing against each other in the World Series!
Or imagine this: Two Ohio teams could end up playing against each other in the World Series: The Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians (Guardians)!
There are so many reasons to be excited about baseball this fall! For those interested, here is tomorrow (Wednesday’s) matchups!
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
