March 18, 2026
The World Baseball Classic; St. Patrick’s Day
I like to start with good news, so let’s congratulate Venezuela on their victory in the World Baseball Classic. My first reaction to hearing it was, “What is the World Baseball Classic?” In 60 years of haphazard baseball watching, I never heard of this thing. So I did some research and it seems that it started in 2006. But I wasn’t aware of it. To give you a point of comparison, I was less aware of the World Baseball Classic than I was of the WNBA BC (Before Caitlin).
Now it’s become a legitimate news item. I think it has something to do with the fact that the huge US men’s hockey win evoked a true, grassroots surge of patriotism and the WBC piggybacked on that.
A little digression on the hockey win. When I heard that the men were playing Canada, I assumed they were going to lose, and even if they won, well, that’d be nice but I’m not going to get bent out of shape over it. I didn’t watch the game.
But then I came across Jack Hughes’s interview and I was so touched by it, I became a fan. It was so honest, so raw, so real, so unrehearsed, so boyish.
I said, “Who is this kid?” So I looked him up and I nearly squealed with delight when I learned this:
Although I swear, it was just icing on the cake. It wasn’t that big of a deal.1
A big country congratulates the winners, and for the most part, that’s all I’ve seen, Americans congratulating the winners — unlike the bitter, spiteful, ungracious Canadians.2
But I don’t mind them nearly as much as I hate the Stateside naysayers. I don’t like these people, a non-trivial segment of the population that just hates anything having to do with patriotism, masculinity, and national pride, and this brigade of wine moms and their male allies were out in spades after the hockey win.
They include an especially strange subset: influencers who are ostensibly heterosexual, even “girlie.” They’re obsessed with rough, violent team sports, yet their online persona consists of shrewishly trashing the very things that make rough, violent team sports so compelling: the joshing, the competition, the weird combination of ego suppression and egomania. They dedicate their lives to seeking out masculinity and stamping it out when they find it.
A prime example is this totally conventionally feminine witch, who she brags about her married name change. Your kind of gal, right guys? No. Look deeper. She’s a shrew nonetheless, and an anti-American Canadian who (of course) lives in New York.
Don’t be fooled by that cute little grin. She’s a “sports data nerd” and “content creator.” Want to justify your sports obsession and ruin your experience watching your fave teams? She’s your girl. She hates Americans too.3
So here’s the difference between Americans and Canadians and I think I do speak for most Americans.
The United States doesn’t base its national pride on a team win. I would have preferred the US baseball team to win, but the better team won, so let’s do better next time. Also: despite the fact that Venezuela won, aren’t the Japanese producing the best players on earth now?
That does make proud. The Japanese picked up baseball during an enlightened, benign occupation after the bitterest war imaginable.
They played pretty well for two generations but we always looked down on them. Actually, we patronized them. My father staunchly declared they would never be great baseball players. They didn’t have the size - and they didn’t have the spirit. They plugged away and now look at them.
They’re the best players on earth. Sorry, Dad. We’ll just have to pull up our stirrups and do better. That’s the American way, isn’t it? Whining, sorry, whingeing, is for Canadians.
This is what happens with some things. Ballet was invented in Italy, it migrated to France, to Denmark, then to Russia, and then to the US. It (and opera) will always have an Italian heart.
Same with baseball: these nodes pop up here and there (the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan). But its heart will always be American.
I’m really proud that the World Baseball Classic showed how popular baseball is in Latin America and Asia.
Venezuela, Japan, watch out. We’re coming to get you next time.
I have to say something about Mamdani’s St. Patrick’s speech.
I don’t write a lot about the situation in NYC. That’s misleading because I certainly do pay a lot of attention to it. I live it. Sometimes I think I should change my focus to NY-centrism and then I lose heart.
Because I’m heartsick over what’s happening here. It’s not just crime but it includes crime. Don’t let the left lie. Murders have gone down but felony assaults have gone up, and the general feeling of the city is unstable and ugly.
I got the stats from Gemini AI. We’re back to 1997-1998.
Anyway, Mamdani gave a St. Patrick’s Day speech that violated every norm of NYC politics: say nice things and move on. Must I link to it? I guess so, but I’m not embedding it. You can listen to it yourself. I cannot bring myself to sit through the whole thing. But I got the point. The Irish are the Palestinians, the Jews are the British, and Gaza is the Great Famine.
It’s a good practice not to let politicians jerk you around but we have to pay attention to the underlying reality: Zoran Mamdani was elected as a result of the massive demographic changes and these changes were welcomed by organized liberal Judaism in the US.
We can’t afford to indulge in self-censorship because we’re scared of groypers misusing the truth against us.
It’s a fact. The liberal Jewish establishment welcomed demographic change, and still, two years post October 7, is frantically trying to cover this up.
Here’s Jonathan Greenblatt with the party line:
The ADL welcomed the importation of populations viscerally hostile to America in general and to Jews in particular.
NYC is no longer New York. It’s a foreign outpost run by a foreign third world leftist. He doesn’t care about Irish New Yorkers, a shrunken, marginal group who no longer live in the city. They come from the ‘burbs to march once a year. They are a non-factor in the city.
He’s more interested in connecting with Ireland. This Ireland:
And that Ireland has more in common with his “Yemeni store owners” than they do with Jewish New Yorkers, another shrinking group, not exactly marginal yet, but becoming so.
For the record, Greenblatt isn’t wrong that most political violence in the US since 1994 (aside from 9/11, a rather big aside) has been right wing. There have been several racially motivated mass shootings — the real deal, not Jussie Smollett hoaxes since 1994. This is a big problem. But he uses it as a deflection.
He avoids the trend and origin of modern day Islamist/green antisemitism. We have home grown Antifa radicals, but the organization and the muscle is imported.
A close look at ANSWER’s operations reveals a demonstration-industrial complex—a coordinated ecosystem in which organizations lean into their respective strengths and complement others’ infrastructure, messaging, or reach. These organizations are, in turn, closely linked with hostile foreign actors, raising questions not only about their propriety, but their legality.
Legal residents like the terrorist who targeted pre-schoolers in Michigan, and first generation Americans like the two IED bomb throwers are a trend. Memri has dozens of videos about radical imams preaching Jew-hate, proclaiming that they have no intentions of assimilating: their goal is to take over the US.
I don’t think they can or will, but they can cause a lot of trouble.
Greenblatt doesn’t want to face that, because he’d be seeing his face in the mirror.
Lie. It was. I haven’t stopped kvelling.
Nor can we can’t ignore the fact that Piers Morgan, who makes a fuss over Muslim athletes, nagged us about noticing Jack’s Jewish background. Is he saying that Jews are “one of us” and thus don’t rate being singled out? Is that it? Look, it’s a simple fact that there haven’t been a lot of great Jewish athletes so the ones who come along will be singled out, although I think it should be done tastefully, not cringe, the way Tablet Magazine does.
Not all Canadians. Most of the commenters on YouTube have been gracious. It’s X that attracts the misfits.
She’s behind a sports betting platform. One of the most evil things in modern life is online sports betting. But don’t worry, one of the reasons she hates the US is that we’re mercenary. The U$A, you know?
One minor correction, Japan was into baseball long before the post WWII US occupation. It was taught and spread in Japan in the late q9th century by American Christian missionaries, and there were famous baseball exhibitions in Japan in which even Babe Ruth participated. I suggest reading the story of Moe Berg the Jewish American major league baseball player who spied for the United States on Japan on one such baseball tour in the 1930's and provided many of the targets used in the bombing Tokyo in WWII. It's an amazing story of baseball in Japan and this American hero who was a Jewish baseball player and Princeton grad.