It happened fast. Almost as soon as Hurricane Milton bore down on South Florida last month, high winds began shredding the roof of Tropicana Field, home for 26 years to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Gigantic segments of Teflon-coated fiberglass flapped in the wind, then sheared off entirely. In the end, it took only a few hours for the Trop to lose most of its roof'a roof that was built to withstand high winds; a roof that was necessary because it exists in a place where people can no longer sit outside in the summer; a roof that was supposed to be the solution. The problem, of course, is the weather. Of America's four major professional sports, baseball is uniquely vulnerable to climate change in that it is typically played outside, often during the day, for a long, unrelenting season: six games a week per team, from March to October, which incidentally is when the Northern Hemisphere gets steamy and unpredictable, more so every year. In 1869, when the first professional baseball club was formed, the average July temperature in New York City's Central Park was 72.8 degrees. In 2023, it was 79. By 2100, it could be as much as 13.5 degrees hotter, according to recent projections, hot enough to make sitting in the sunshine for a few hours unpleasant at best and hazardous at worst. In June, four Kansas City Royals fans were hospitalized for heat illness during an afternoon home game. On a muggy day four seasons ago, Los Angeles Angels starting pitcher Dylan Bundy began sweating so much, you could see it on TV. He then took a dainty puke behind the mound and exited the game with heat exhaustion....

The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1. The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, 'That's weird.' Baseball fans respond to it by saying, 'That's just how it is in baseball.' And both statements are true. The chewing isn't happening only during downtime in the dugout. Players with pizzazz blow bubbles while catching fly balls or hitting home runs. Outfielders are the most frequent chompers, but even players in the much-busier infield will sometimes spit out a shell in the middle of the action, or gnaw on a toothpick. Once in a while a player will even be tempted by the ballpark snacks that fans are eating in the stands. My question is, Why'...

Thank you for the fantastic article on baseball. During the 1960s, I was a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. About the time baseball season began one year, I participated in a robust argument over America's favorite pastime with my colleagues. I felt that it was an incredibly boring way to spend time, and I wanted to debate the subject with empirical evidence. As engineers, we agreed to define 'action' as any time the ball or a player was moving. I then used a stopwatch to determine the ratio between 'elapsed time' and 'action' in a typical game. I applied this definition to a game the following Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the ratio was 20 to 1'for every hour of elapsed time, one would see just three minutes of action. Professional football and basketball have far more action per hour than baseball under the same definition, which I think explains their relative popularity. It wasn't solely the analytics revolution that slowed down the sport'baseball's always been like that! The question now is whether I should analyze another game to determine if the new rules changed it for the better....

In July 1918, shortly after American troops won their first major battle of World War I, in northern France, W. E. B. Du Bois published a contentious editorial in The Crisis, the NAACP-affiliated magazine he founded as a 'record of the darker races.' Du Bois, who hoped that African Americans' support for militarism abroad might lead to more democratic treatment at home, urged readers to 'forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.' But rather than ushering in the era of racial harmony that Du Bois imagined, the end of World War I saw a vicious backlash to wartime integration efforts: The next year, Black servicemen and civilians alike faced extraordinary racist violence across the United States. As Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, explains in the new documentary The League, 'It convinced a lot of Black people all the more that we need to close ranks in another kind of way'to build our own institutions.'...