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RBC Quant Desk Marks the Loonie to Vladdy Jr.’s On-Base Percentage

Cody Thompson
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RBC Quant Desk Marks the Loonie to Vladdy Jr.’s On-Base Percentage

TORONTO, ON — A six-person quantitative desk on the 38th floor of RBC Centre has spent the last nine days running a proprietary FX model that prices the Canadian dollar off Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s rolling on-base percentage, a strategy that bled $2.4 million Friday night when he flew out to deep center on a 2-2 slider the desk had assigned a base-rate weight of 0.71.

The model, internally codenamed MAPLE-3, treats every Blue Jays plate appearance as a discrete macro event and rebalances the desk’s loonie-dollar book in roughly 14-second windows, which is approximately the time it takes the bank’s risk dashboard to refresh and the time it takes lead quant Aamir Pelletier to finish a Harvey’s combo he describes, charitably, as “already cold by the third inning.”

“We’re not betting on the team. We’re betting on the team’s expected on-base contribution to consumer sentiment in the GTA, which feeds a four-factor model of cross-border tourism and Tim Hortons same-store traffic,” Pelletier said, gesturing at a 49-inch monitor where a candlestick chart of Guerrero’s last 38 at-bats sat beside a live FX feed. “It’s actually very rigorous. The Dell makes a sound when he strikes out. We didn’t program that, it just happens.”

According to a one-page strategy memo printed in Calibri 11 and stuck to a glass partition with a magnet shaped like a maple leaf, MAPLE-3 assigns the loonie an 18-basis-point tailwind for every Blue Jays win in a series the desk’s note refers to as “the Q4 Anglophone Catalyst.” The same memo prices a Dodgers sweep at “approximately one Bank of Canada surprise hold,” which is not a real unit of measurement.

The desk’s risk officer, a 34-year veteran named Linda Crozier who keeps a stress ball shaped like the CN Tower on her desk and a printed copy of the 1992 World Series box score in her bottom drawer, has formally objected to the strategy in three separate emails, each ending with the phrase “please advise” in a tone she describes as “increasingly Presbyterian.”

Senior management has declined to wind the position down, citing what one MD described over a cold espresso in the 41st-floor pantry as “the optics of pulling a Canadian-themed trade during Game 4 of a series we are statistically going to lose.” The MD added that the desk had already expensed a $312 catered platter from Pizzaiolo and that walking it back now would, in his words, “send a signal.”

The strategy hit a particularly rough patch in Game 3 when Guerrero drew a four-pitch walk that MAPLE-3 had assigned a 4% probability, triggering an automated buy order on the loonie that executed roughly 90 seconds before Mookie Betts singled him home and the model immediately executed the opposite trade. Net P&L on the inning was negative $186,000 and one half-eaten poutine.

A junior on the desk, who asked not to be named because his contract is up for review in November, said the team had recently begun feeding the model Bo Bichette’s spray-chart data as a hedge, but acknowledged that this had introduced what he called “a Bichette-shaped hole” in the variance assumptions. He was eating a granola bar.

As of Tuesday afternoon, MAPLE-3 was projecting a year-end loonie target of 1.388 against the dollar conditional on a Blue Jays Game 5 win, 1.392 conditional on a loss, and 1.390 in the event Guerrero is intentionally walked, which the desk’s note describes as “economically equivalent to a quarter-point cut by the Fed, but sadder.”

HOA Group Chat at 1,200 Messages Over 14-Year-Old Trick-or-Treaters

Tara Sparks
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HOA Group Chat at 1,200 Messages Over 14-Year-Old Trick-or-Treaters

WEXFORD, PA — The Maple Ridge Estates community group chat crossed its 1,200th message Sunday evening as residents entered the fourth consecutive day of a debate over whether teenagers showing up in a hoodie and a pillowcase technically constitute trick-or-treaters or, in the words of one homeowner, “freeloaders with a sugar agenda.”

The thread, originally started by a woman asking whether anyone had a spare bag of mini Twix, pivoted within twelve minutes into a referendum on the moral character of every adolescent who has ever rung a doorbell after 8 p.m.

“I have a list,” said Cathy Brennan, who runs the neighborhood Facebook page and has been awake since approximately Friday. “I have screenshots. I have a Google Doc titled ‘Cutoff Age Discussion (Rolling).’ I have asked four times for someone to bring this to the next HOA meeting and four times no one has had the courage.”

The flashpoint, by most accounts, occurred when resident Doug Heffler posted a photograph of two boys he estimated to be “between 13 and 27” loitering on his lawn last Halloween in what he described as “basically just letterman jackets and attitude.” Heffler said he gave them candy because he was scared, and has been processing it ever since.

By message 400, the chat had splintered into three factions: the Cutoff Hawks, who advocate for a strict 12-and-under policy enforced by visual ID; the Costume Originalists, who don’t care about age so long as “effort is visible”; and a small but vocal third group led by retired engineer Ron Petrosky, who has proposed a tiered candy distribution system involving zip codes and a clipboard.

The teenagers in question, reached via a Snapchat group their younger sibling forwarded to a parent, declined to comment beyond noting that they will, in fact, be coming, and that Mrs. Brennan hands out the good stuff because she’s scared of looking cheap.

At least nineteen husbands have muted the thread, including Brennan’s, who told reporters from his garage that he has not opened the chat since Thursday and intends to spend Halloween in the driveway with a folding chair, a bowl, and zero opinions about anything.

As of press time, the chat had reached message 1,247, with three new sub-threads forming around whether King-Size bars are “showing off,” a debate over the legitimacy of the 6 p.m. start time, and a single passive-aggressive poll that everyone has answered and no one will admit to creating.

Mic’d-Up World Series Umpire Spent Two Innings Plugging a Mattress

Duke Holloway
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Mic’d-Up World Series Umpire Spent Two Innings Plugging a Mattress

It was the bottom of the fourth, two outs, full count, and the home plate umpire rang up the leadoff hitter on a pitch that may or may not have caught the corner. I will never know if it caught the corner, because before the catcher could stand up, the umpire turned toward the FOX broadcast booth and said, in a voice clear enough to wake my dog, that he sleeps better than he ever has thanks to a queen-size foam mattress that ships in a box.

They mic’d up the umpire. They mic’d up the umpire of a World Series game and sold the audio rights to a bedding company. I watched it happen in my own living room, on my own couch, with my own bowl of pretzels, and I am telling you now that I have lived too long.

Coach DiMaggio used to say an umpire’s job was to be invisible until somebody yelled at him. He said it the way other men say grace. He believed an umpire who got noticed was an umpire who’d failed, and an umpire who talked was an umpire who ought to be selling insurance somewhere off the highway. I think about Coach DiMaggio a lot during October. I thought about him for the rest of the inning, while the umpire told America about cooling gel layers.

Then in the sixth, during a pitching change that already featured two commercial breaks and a graphic explaining what a slider is, the same umpire pivoted to a meal kit read. Fresh ingredients. Pre-portioned. Use code STRIKE3 for fifteen percent off your first order. I am not making any of this up. I wrote it on the back of a TV Guide because I knew nobody would believe me.

Ray Kowalczyk called during the seventh-inning stretch. Ray is sixty-eight and has not adjusted to anything since the introduction of the wild card. He didn’t say hello. He said, “Did the umpire just tell me where to buy chicken?” I said yes. He said, “I’m going to bed.” It was eight forty-five.

Here is what bothers me, and it isn’t really the mattress. The mattress is a symptom. Everybody on the field has a sponsor mouth now. The dugout has a sponsor. The replay booth has a sponsor. The little graphic that tells you how hard a pitch was thrown has a sponsor, and the little graphic that tells you how hard the bat hit the ball has a different sponsor, and somewhere in a conference room a man in a vest got promoted for thinking of it. The only person on the entire broadcast not currently reading ad copy is the guy operating the foul pole camera, and frankly I don’t trust him either.

Petey Corrigan umpired Little League in our town for about eleven years for forty bucks a game and a slice of pizza from the snack shack. Petey wore a chest protector older than my marriage and got yelled at by mothers who had not slept. Petey did not have a mattress sponsor. Petey had a bad knee and a thermos. If you’d told Petey he could be mic’d up during a game, he would have asked you to please leave him alone, and then he would have called a low strike on a kid who didn’t deserve it, and that would have been the end of the conversation.

The game itself, I should mention, was tremendous. Two-one in eleven, a leaping catch at the wall, a manager arguing about a check swing in a way that suggested he might actually mean it. Real baseball broke out around the advertising for almost three full hours. I caught most of it between reads. I am told the box score does not list the umpire’s commercial obligations, which seems generous.

Denise is bringing chili over for Game 3. She says she got the recipe from a podcast. I told her I don’t want to know which one.

Cleo’s Face Paint Says ‘Trace Heavy Metals’ and Marlene Calls That Minerals

Brooke Ellery
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Cleo’s Face Paint Says ‘Trace Heavy Metals’ and Marlene Calls That Minerals

I was standing in the Halloween aisle at Rite Aid holding a $2.49 tube of vampire-white face paint when I flipped it over and read the words “may contain trace heavy metals” printed on the back like it was a serving suggestion. Cleo, who had been quietly chewing the corner of a glow bracelet, looked up at me with her big trusting eyes and asked if she could be the kind of vampire that has a cape. I put the tube back. I picked it up. I put it back. A teenager restocking the shelf told me they all say that.

I want to be clear that I am not one of those moms. I let my kids have fun. Wyatt has worn a plastic Spider-Man mask for two consecutive Halloweens and I have made peace with that, because the mask is from before they started adding the soft-touch coating that smells like a yoga mat warehouse. But “trace heavy metals” is not a phrase I am prepared to smear onto a five-year-old’s cheekbones for the sake of a Marlene-approved porch photo.

Marlene, of course, said it was fine. Marlene said heavy metals are just minerals, and minerals are just earth, and earth is what we all came from, and “didn’t you tell me last spring you were eating sea moss off a spoon?” I tried to explain that sea moss is a plant and lead is an element on the periodic table that makes you forget your own zip code, and Marlene said her grandfather painted houses for forty years and lived to be ninety-one, which is the kind of evidence I cannot argue with because it makes no sense in any direction.

I posted in Clean Costume Co-Op (No Petro, No Phthalates, No Excuses) and within nine minutes had forty-seven replies, three voice memos, and one woman in Spokane who linked me to a 2014 cosmetic safety report so dense I had to ask Tessa what an oxide was. The consensus was that the cheap face paints are a soup of titanium dioxide, mineral oil, and what one mom in the group described, in all caps, as “WHATEVER THEY SCRAPED OFF THE FACTORY FLOOR IN GUANGZHOU.” That is not me saying that. That is Janelle in Spokane.

I called Renee, my husband’s sister, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Greenville and is basically a nurse at this point because she has been there nine years and has seen every kind of rash a child can produce. Renee said face paint is one of the top three things they get calls about every November. The other two are glow stick fluid in the eye and “unspecified candy reactions,” which I think we all know means red dye 40. Renee said if I was going to use it anyway, to do a patch test on the inside of Cleo’s wrist for forty-eight hours. I do not have forty-eight hours. Halloween is a week away.

So I made my own. I rendered down a half cup of grass-fed tallow my friend Adrienne traded me for two jars of fire cider, and I whipped it with a teaspoon of activated charcoal for the eye sockets and a tablespoon of beet powder for the bloody mouth effect. I added a pinch of pink Himalayan salt because Adrienne swears it stabilizes pigment, and even if it doesn’t, salt is a mineral, not an ingredient, and minerals are just earth, which is apparently the through-line of my entire month.

Cleo cried. She said she looked like a beet, which, fair. The beet powder, it turns out, does not stay where you put it. It migrated into her hairline and down her neck and onto the kitchen island and onto our white goldendoodle, Biscuit, who is now a faintly pink goldendoodle and may be one until Christmas. Tessa walked in, took one look, and said “Mom. Mom. The other moms use the tube,” in the voice she has started using lately that I do not love.

I caved on the white base. I bought a different brand at the natural grocery for $14.99 that lists nine ingredients, none of which require the word “trace,” and I am telling myself it was always the plan. The vampire cape is from Marlene’s attic and almost certainly off-gasses something, but I’m picking my battles, and tonight my battle is the witch hat from Dollar Tree that has been quarantined on the back porch for six days and still smells, faintly, like a brand-new car.

Third Connecticut Tour Bus This Month Stuck in Stark, NH Covered Bridge

Hal Cranston
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Third Connecticut Tour Bus This Month Stuck in Stark, NH Covered Bridge

STARK, N.H. — The third charter bus this month from the same senior living facility in Old Saybrook, Conn., became firmly wedged in the eastern truss of the 162-year-old Stark Covered Bridge shortly after 11 a.m. Friday, leaving 41 retirees and one activities coordinator to eat their pre-packed turkey wraps in folding chairs along the Upper Ammonoosuc while two volunteer firemen measured the clearance with a carpenter’s square and shook their heads.

The bus, operated by Sunshine Coach Lines of West Hartford, is the same model and, in two of the three cases, the same vehicle that has now arrived at the bridge’s posted 9-foot, 4-inch clearance and proceeded anyway, citing what driver Dale Furmano described to Coos County deputies as “a real strong feeling we’d make it this time.”

“We put up the sign. We put up a second sign. We put up a sign before the second sign warning about the second sign,” said Lorraine Picard, who has chaired the Stark Covered Bridge Advisory Committee for nineteen years and is, by her own description, out of sign ideas.

Picard noted that Friday’s incident was the first to coincide with what locals consider true peak — a 36-hour window in which the maples behind the Methodist church turn a color residents agree no one has yet successfully photographed. The trapped retirees, she added, were “actually getting a real nice view of it, all things considered.”

Inside the bus, several passengers were heard to express mild satisfaction at the development. “We were going to stop here anyway,” said Eleanor Dwight, 78, who had pre-purchased a four-ounce bottle of locally bottled syrup at a rest area outside Lancaster and was now eating it directly with a plastic spoon. “Frankly the schedule was very tight.”

Furmano, who has driven the Old Saybrook foliage route for eleven years, declined to comment beyond noting that the bridge “looked taller from the parking lot” and that his employer-issued GPS had specifically recommended the route as “scenic.” Asked whether he recognized the bridge from his two previous incidents, he indicated that he did, but that something about the angle of approach was different each time.

A flatbed from a wrecker service in Lancaster was expected within the hour, though Stark Fire Chief Merle Tibbets said the more pressing question was what to do about the fourth Sunshine Coach Lines bus, currently 22 miles south on Route 110 and, according to its tracker, making good time.

Picard, asked whether the committee planned to lower the posted clearance or raise the bridge, said the committee planned to do neither. “It’s a covered bridge,” she said. “It’s been the same height since 1862. The buses are the part that keeps changing.”

Lyndonville Trick-or-Treat Hours Set at 5:47–7:13, Fire Marshal Won’t Explain

Hal Cranston
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Lyndonville Trick-or-Treat Hours Set at 5:47–7:13, Fire Marshal Won’t Explain

LYNDONVILLE, VT — At a special session Tuesday night that ran fourteen minutes past its scheduled close, Caledonia County Fire Marshal Russell Tibbets announced that trick-or-treat in Lyndonville would this year run from 5:47 p.m. to 7:13 p.m., declined to take questions, and exited through a side door that has been locked since 2019.

Tibbets, who has held the post for eleven years and previously approved hours on round numbers like a reasonable person, offered no rationale for the eighty-six-minute window or its peculiar edges. The hours were final, he said, and would not be revisited “regardless of weather, daylight savings, or what any of you think you know about the moon.”

Donna Beasley, who teaches fourth grade at Lyndon Town School and has handed out candy in the same Bigfoot costume for nine consecutive Halloweens, said she stopped Tibbets in the parking lot to ask whether 7:15 might work better, given how the porch lights line up. Tibbets reportedly looked at her for a full eight seconds before answering. “It’s 7:13.”

The hours have already complicated logistics across town. Several parents noted that the recommended walking route from Park Avenue to the Methodist church takes roughly seventeen minutes, which leaves a household budget of either too few houses or two extra Reese’s per stop, depending on pace. A printed schedule from the Selectboard, distributed Wednesday, includes a single footnote reading: “Do not contact the Fire Marshal.”

Tibbets’s only public comment came Wednesday afternoon outside Powers Market, where he was buying a single banana. Pressed once more on the specific minutes, he told a reporter, “I have my reasons. They are good ones. They are not yours.” He then drove off in a department pickup that idled at the stop sign for several seconds longer than seemed strictly necessary.

Some residents have quietly speculated about an obscure fire-code subclause involving sunset angles; others believe Tibbets is simply tired. Mrs. Hennigan, who lives across from the firehouse, said her husband Earl thinks it has something to do with the eclipse, “though Earl thinks a lot of things have to do with the eclipse.”

At the Caledonia County offices Thursday morning, a deputy clerk confirmed that no formal grievance procedure exists for challenging a fire marshal’s holiday hours, and added, with a sympathy that read as practiced, that a woman from Pinehurst Street had already asked.

As of Thursday afternoon, three houses on Pinehurst had taped the times to their storm doors in 48-point font. The rest of town has quietly decided that 5:47 means 5:47, and that whatever Russell Tibbets knows about the night of October 31st, he is keeping for himself.

OpenAI’s Atlas Browser Will Read the AI-Written Web So You Don’t Have To

Lena Wexler
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OpenAI’s Atlas Browser Will Read the AI-Written Web So You Don’t Have To

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI on Wednesday unveiled Atlas, a ChatGPT-powered web browser that promises to summarize, navigate, and emotionally process the internet on the user’s behalf, completing what analysts describe as a ‘closed loop’ in which AI-generated content is now consumed by AI on a human’s vague, half-remembered orders.

The browser, available in early access for $20 a month plus the cost of having ever asked for it, opens to a blank prompt instead of a homepage. Users are encouraged to type what they ‘broadly want from the internet today,’ after which Atlas visits an undisclosed number of websites, reads them, decides which parts mattered, and returns a tidy paragraph that begins with the word ‘Certainly.’

Demonstrating the product onstage, an OpenAI engineer asked Atlas to ‘find a good roast chicken recipe,’ and the browser silently consumed 41 food blogs — each containing a 2,200-word personal essay about a grandmother — before producing a recipe that was, by all available evidence, the same recipe.

‘Atlas represents a fundamental rethinking of what a browser is for,’ said Priya Vahn, a partner at the technology research firm Northwall, who clarified that she had not personally read OpenAI’s announcement and had instead asked Atlas to read it for her. ‘It’s elegant. The web visits itself now. We’re freed up.’

Internal documentation reviewed by reporters indicates that Atlas will, by default, accept every cookie banner, dismiss every newsletter pop-up, agree to every terms-of-service update, and — in a feature OpenAI describes as ‘courtesy mode’ — leave a polite five-star review on any small business it visits, regardless of whether a transaction occurred.

Publishers reacted with the measured calm of people who have already been through this four times. ‘They scraped us to train it, then they built a browser that visits us instead of us, and now the browser writes a summary so the user never lands on the page,’ said the operator of a mid-sized recipe site, who added that her traffic was down 71 percent and that Atlas had recently left her a thoughtful comment praising her grandmother’s cardigan. ‘I don’t have a grandmother on the site. I never wrote about a cardigan.’

The browser’s most-discussed feature, an ‘agent mode’ that allows Atlas to complete multi-step tasks such as booking flights or canceling subscriptions, was demonstrated successfully on a controlled test environment and then, in a live demo, purchased four identical washing machines and scheduled them for delivery to a Wendy’s in Tulsa. OpenAI characterized the result as ‘within expected ranges’ and noted that the washing machines had been routed through Atlas’s optional carbon-offset partner, which plants a tree somewhere for every decision the AI later regrets.

Environmental researchers were quick to point out that each Atlas query consumes roughly the energy of opening a tab and reading the website yourself, except routed first through a data center in central Iowa that is currently negotiating with the local utility for permission to run the air conditioning. ‘It is genuinely faster to walk to the library,’ said Dr. Henrik Olufsen of the Atlantic Heartland Project, who acknowledged that no one would.

Asked at a press briefing whether Atlas posed any risk of accelerating the collapse of the open web by removing the last incentive for humans to visit the websites that fund the journalism, recipes, and reference material that ChatGPT was trained on in the first place, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company was ‘aware of the feedback’ and had asked Atlas to summarize it.

The browser will be free for the first 30 days, after which users will be charged whether or not they remember signing up, a policy Atlas itself agreed to on their behalf during onboarding.

Quant Fund Pays Ohio Retiree $60 a Week to Text Egg Prices, Calls It CPI

Cody Thompson
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Quant Fund Pays Ohio Retiree $60 a Week to Text Egg Prices, Calls It CPI

STAMFORD, CT — Three weeks into the federal shutdown, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics dark and no Consumer Price Index release in sight, the alt-data desk at Crestmount Strategic Capital has settled on a replacement: Don Pavlik, a 71-year-old retired letter carrier in Wadsworth, Ohio, who texts the price of a dozen large brown eggs every Sunday at 6 p.m. for $60 a week and a $20 Cracker Barrel gift card at Christmas.

Don’s most recent reading was $4.79, sent at 6:04 p.m. from a Samsung A14 in the parking lot of a Giant Eagle. Crestmount’s October inflation print, derived from this data point and a smoothing algorithm, is 2.3%, which the firm has begun distributing to clients in a one-page PDF titled “Pavlik Index — Preliminary.”

“Look, BLS is gone, the Cleveland Fed Nowcast is gone, even the ADP guys are dragging their feet,” said Larry Brennick, the senior alt-data analyst who personally onboarded Don in early October over a 14-minute phone call. “Don is reliable. Don has a Costco card. Don has opinions about Sysco beef that I think the buy-side will eventually want to hear.”

The desk has since expanded the program. A retired HVAC tech in Altoona reports ground-beef prices on Tuesdays. A widow in Mesa texts a screenshot of the Circle K pump every other Friday. An on-leave substitute teacher in Asheville is being paid $35 a week to walk through a Publix and “just sort of describe the vibe,” per the Slack channel where these arrangements are coordinated.

Crestmount’s compliance officer, who keeps a small ceramic owl on her desk that one analyst described as “watching us all the time, frankly,” has so far signed off on the structure as “survey research,” though an internal memo in 11-point Calibri notes that several of the contributors have not been told the data is being used to inform an $84 million long-short equity book.

Don, reached by phone Monday afternoon while taking the trash to the curb, said he assumed Larry was “a guy doing some kind of college project” and was surprised to learn the texts were affecting trades on Kraft Heinz. He added that the eggs at Aldi this week were $4.39 but he hadn’t reported that because Larry had been clear, in their first conversation, that the program was Giant Eagle only.

Rival firms have noticed. A trader at a Greenwich macro fund, eating a turkey wrap over a Bloomberg terminal that has displayed the same stale September retail-sales print for 21 days, said his shop is now “three days into a bake-off” between two retired women in Tampa and a man in Boise who works at a NAPA Auto Parts. The Boise man is winning, he said, because he answers texts within four minutes.

Crestmount’s October flash estimate of 2.3% inflation will be revised next Sunday, Brennick confirmed, pending Don’s next message and whether his daughter is in town, in which case Don sometimes shops at a different store and the print becomes, in Brennick’s phrasing, “noisier than we’d like.”

The fund is up 1.4% on the month.

Game 3 of the ALCS Opened With 400 Drones and a DJ Set

Duke Holloway
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Game 3 of the ALCS Opened With 400 Drones and a DJ Set

I sat down on the couch at 8:04 p.m. on Saturday expecting baseball. At 8:18 there were drones. Four hundred of them, according to the graphic Fox put up, arranging themselves over the outfield into a glove, then a baseball, then the team logo, then — and this is real — a QR code. I’m seventy-one years old. I am not scanning a sky.

First pitch was at 8:31. I want that on the record. Twenty-seven minutes between me sitting down with a beer and a man on a mound throwing a baseball, and most of those minutes were spent watching little blinking dots pretend to be a glove.

Behind home plate they had built a riser. On the riser was a DJ. I do not know his name and I refuse to learn it. He was wearing sunglasses indoors at night, which is a tell. He spun something before the anthem, spun something else after it, and at one point during the seventh-inning stretch the camera cut to him nodding with his eyes closed like he had just discovered fire.

I called Ray Kowalczyk at the second commercial break. Ray played outfield at Bucknell in 1974 and has held a grudge against every change to the sport since the designated hitter. Ray said, and I am cleaning this up considerably, that the postseason has become “a rave for billionaires with a baseball game breaking out in the middle.” Ray said he muted his TV at 8:09 and only unmuted it for at-bats. Ray is, as usual, ahead of the curve.

Coach DiMaggio, who ran my high school football program for twenty-six years and who watched exactly one inning of baseball with me in his life, used to say the only pregame ceremony a man needed was the umpire walking out from the tunnel. He said when the umpire showed up, the game started. Coach died in 2003. I am glad, on his behalf, that he did not see a drone form the shape of a foam finger over center field in the middle of October.

My neighbor Petey Corrigan flew to Game 3. Don’t ask. Petey paid $1,800 for a seat in the upper deck and another $46 for a hot dog and a beer described on the menu as “craft-forward.” Petey is sixty-eight and works part-time at the Ace Hardware. He told me when he got home that the stadium had a “curated speakeasy concourse” with a velvet rope, that the bathroom had ambient music, and that a man in a vest tried to sell him an NFT of his ticket stub. Petey came home with a sunburn and what he described as “a feeling of having been swindled in a new and creative way.”

The game itself, for the record, was actually pretty good. There was a 4-3 lead that turned into a 4-4 tie that turned into a 6-4 win in the bottom of the ninth. A reliever struck out the side in the eighth on twelve pitches. A second baseman made a play in the hole that I’d watch ten times in a row. None of it is what anyone is going to remember. They’re going to remember the drones, and the DJ, and the QR code, because that’s what the broadcast spent forty-three minutes on.

Somewhere along the way the postseason stopped being a baseball tournament and became a content event with baseball garnish. The sport is the parsley now. The drones are the steak. I don’t know when this happened. I suspect it happened the same week somebody decided a mascot needed a Twitch stream, and I missed the memo because I was watching baseball.

Game ended at 12:47 a.m. Eastern. I was awake for it because I am a professional and because Ray called back at 11:50 to tell me the DJ had played a snippet of “Sweet Caroline” between innings and he wanted me to know in real time. We sat on the phone, two old men, listening to each other not say anything, while a stadium two states over played a Neil Diamond remix at people who had paid $1,800 to be there.

Denise is bringing chili tonight for Game 4. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to eat it and I’m going to mute the pregame, and somewhere up there Coach DiMaggio is going to nod once, which is all the credit he ever gave anybody.

Groomsman Streaming NLCS From Bathroom Stall, Calls Bride’s Vows ‘Solid’

Tara Sparks
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Groomsman Streaming NLCS From Bathroom Stall, Calls Bride’s Vows ‘Solid’

COLUMBUS, OH — Wedding guests at the Saturday evening reception of Megan and Tyler Hanrahan reported that groomsman Brad Pesch spent the entirety of the ceremony locked in a stall of the Sheraton Capitol Square men’s room, watching NLCS Game 6 on a cracked iPhone propped against a roll of toilet paper, emerging only to deliver a thumbs-up and the verdict that the bride’s vows were ‘solid, really solid, top three vows I’ve heard this year.’

Pesch, 34, who served as Tyler’s roommate at Ohio State and was originally tasked with holding the rings, allegedly handed them off to a flower girl at 6:42 p.m. with the instruction ‘don’t lose these, the Dodgers have runners on the corners.’

‘He came back at one point to do the toast and just kept saying he was ‘monitoring a developing situation,” said Aunt Diane Mercer, who had driven in from Mansfield. ‘Then he held up his glass and said ‘to Megan, to Tyler, and to Mookie Betts.’ Megan’s mother started crying, but not in the good way.’

Sources at the open bar confirmed that Pesch returned to the stall during the father-daughter dance, the cake cutting, and a slideshow set to a Dave Matthews Band song that Tyler had personally selected, only re-emerging during the bouquet toss because he heard cheering and assumed someone had homered.

By the seventh inning, three additional groomsmen had joined Pesch in the bathroom, where they had constructed a viewing arrangement using a folding chair stolen from the coat check and a phone charger borrowed from the venue’s wedding coordinator, who described the setup as ‘the saddest thing I have witnessed in eleven years of weddings, and I worked the one where the DJ had a stroke.’

The bride, reached for comment near the dessert table, said she had made peace with the situation around the time Pesch missed the first dance to scream ‘GET DOWN’ at his phone loud enough that her 89-year-old grandmother asked if there was a gunman. ‘Tyler warned me,’ Megan said, sliding a piece of fondant across her plate. ‘He said baseball season ends in November and our marriage will hopefully last longer than that. So.’

Pesch’s girlfriend Karlie Voss, who attended as his plus-one, spent most of the reception alone at table 14 next to a woman she had never met, a retired oral surgeon named Pat. The two reportedly bonded over Aperol spritzes and a shared belief that ‘this is what they always do.’ Pat had attended four weddings this October. Three of them had a Brad.

Pesch declined to be interviewed during the reception, citing ‘a leverage situation,’ but did pause briefly to inform a reporter that he would absolutely be available to speak after the game, the postgame, the postgame analysis, and a podcast he likes to listen to on the drive home.

The Dodgers won 4-3. Pesch hugged the groom for a long time. The groom said it was the most emotion he had seen from Brad in fifteen years of friendship, and that he was a little jealous.

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