I read this story this morning in the Washington Post. Here’s the lede:
Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.
The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
I’m considering writing a letter. Not an email, but a letter that goes into an envelope with a stamp, hand-addressed to Major League Baseball, Office of the Commissioner, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. It will read:
Dear Commissioner Manfred,
As you are obviously a powerful man surrounded by toadies who never tell you anything you don’t want to hear, I’m going to talk to you like your mother, regarding this idea of staging an MLB game in Grand Teton National Park, or any national park. Ready? Here it is: You should be ashamed of yourself. Read that sentence anywhere from twice to 20,000 times until it sinks in. You are pursuing a shameful goal. In a more just world, you’d spend the rest of your life in atonement. But we are where we are, and all I can say is, if your league is successful in this mission, and a thousand monkey-wrenching eco-terrorists responded by planting explosives at Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and any of the other so-called cathedrals of baseball, I would contribute to their defense funds. Because even violence isn’t as terrible as what your league is exploring.
Sorry to say it, but there it is.
Sincerely, etc.
I’ve always thought the open letter is the lowest form of column-writing, followed closely by The Speech He Should Have Given, but this isn’t a column and it’s not an open letter, just the current contents of my troubled head, so whatever.
I don’t want to be too much of a doomer about our current situation, but when I read stuff like this — and I hate everything about this story, including the obligatory quote from some national park advocacy group pointing out the obvious — I think we’ve gone around a corner that we won’t be coming back from. This is what happens when you stage a fucking MMA fight on the White House lawn. Every sport is going to want a piece of the action. One man, one man and his 70 million followers, every one of whom can eat a bag of dicks and then jump out a high window, brought this on. They broke this country. Who knew our big strong country was this fragile? Not I.
And don’t tell me this would be a temporary baseball stadium, to be disassembled afterward and the ground “restored,” or whatever. It crosses a line that says nothing in this country is as important as stupid spectacle, staged for rubes by despoiling something that was once thought sacred, or if not sacred, too important for this sort of thing. And to think, these are by and large the same people who had a stroke over Robert Mapplethorpe sticking a bullwhip up his ass.
I mean, in 18 months one man managed to ruin the premiere public-health agency in the world.
Measles is killing Amish children, but no matter — if they don’t survive, they weren’t strong enough to begin with, according to Bobby.
It turns out it’s easy work, destroying something that took decades, even centuries, to build. Just add Trump.
It’s been a quiet weekend. Cleaned bathrooms, swam, rode my bike down to the Ford House for their annual harvest fest, a big snooze unless you were in the market for trinkets, jewelry made from reclaimed tin, tea towels with the Detroit Lions logo or other crap. I spotted a local orchard’s cider-and-donuts stand and asked for one glass and one donut. “We’re only selling donuts in half-dozens, and cider by the gallon,” I was told. I guess the calories burned and sunshine enjoyed counted for something. Watched “Slow Horses.” Went to bed.
I hope yours was more exciting.
Deborah said on September 27, 2026 at 5:17 pm
When I first read about the Grand Teton Natl Park MLB story, I figured it was a way to get people used to using our fabulous national parks for rich people to make more billions. They want to rape those places so bad, to squeeze out their natural resources to line their pockets, those rare minerals aren’t going to mine themselves you know. They’ve got to own them so they can sell them to the highest bidders, forget those mom and pops hiking and camping with their kids, there’s money to be made.
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Jeff Borden said on September 27, 2026 at 5:40 pm
Who knew it would be our generation to initiate the end the American empire?
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Sherri said on September 27, 2026 at 6:15 pm
Manfred is desperate for distractions, because MLB will lock the players out when the CBA expires in December. The owners are desperate to break the union, because they see those skyrocketing franchise valuations in other sports and want a salary cap like those other sports to control their expenses.
Never mind that you’ve got a degree of revenue sharing that make it possible to make money with a franchise without ever trying to win, because ticket sales aren’t as big a deal anymore. We’re almost guaranteed to lose at least two months of the season next year, because it’s only after 60 days that the owners face any real difficulties. (If the lockout goes more than 60 days into the season, they’ll have to stick with their current TV contracts for an additional year, rather than upping that sweet TV money.)
If you must do a gimmick game, play one at a military base. Not that I want to promote the links between sports and the military more than they already exist, but at least the impact wouldn’t be so destructive.
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Jessica W said on September 27, 2026 at 6:28 pm
I love baseball, to the point where I just finished watching the last 3 games of the season at a drizzly chilly Nationals Park. But I loathe MLB and the owners.
Maybe, just maybe, this ludicrous idea will fall of its own weight. Or maybe, just maybe, the owners and the players will remember how hard it was for the reputation of the sport to come back after the last lockout/strike/whatever, and figure something out quickly.
At least they aren’t talking about building the stadium at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
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Mark P said on September 27, 2026 at 9:47 pm
“Truth is stranger than fiction”? That just doesn’t capture the world we live in today.
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Peter said on September 27, 2026 at 10:15 pm
“At least they aren’t talking about building the stadium at the bottom of the Grand Canyon”
Give them a week or two tops, Jessica, and they will.
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David C said on September 28, 2026 at 5:43 am
Bulldoze Mar-a-lago, put up t-ball fields, and televise the games during the lockout. I’d watch.
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nancy said on September 28, 2026 at 7:27 am
A friend, a retired sportswriter, left this on our group chat:
It’s such a stupid fucking idea. As a rule, MLB is the worst of the four major pro sport leagues. It’s lawyered up and full of Machiavellian fuckers who never saw any part of a soulful sport they couldn’t monetize.
I think it’s [other guy on the chat]’s favorite sport for all the reasons “Terrence Mann” and George Will and Daniel Okrent and the rest of the baseball poets have always sung about. But the organization that runs it at its highest level is as soulless as they come.
They would never see the obscenity of putting a ballpark at Grand Teton.
But in case you haven’t noticed, MT and WY and ID are being overrun with 1%ers, a lot of them rightwingers building palatial retreats, hunting lodges, etc.
This only would fit into their niche.
James Watt would’ve approved. Remember him?
This would be sold to said 1%ers for some exorbitant 5-figure fee as the Teton Game Experience
It would include a 5-star lodge and spa, meet and greets for their snotty little kids with Bryce Harper and Pete Crow-Armstrong, a round of golf with Bryson DeChambeau, etc
This is where all the pro sports are going
Then they can go brag to their friends about being there and convince themselves around their cigar humidors they’ve filled their hollow lives.
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Jeff Gill said on September 28, 2026 at 8:43 am
Just finished Keith O’Brien’s “Heartland” about Larry Bird and the run at the national championship for Indiana State basketball in what was becoming “March Madness” in 1979. It came out last year, and that was on top of his “Charlie Hustle” the year before about you-know-who.
O’Brien is clear-eyed but not hand-wringingly so about the changes in college basketball & baseball since the days of Pete Rose & Bird & Magic. Along with the human stories he tells very well, he sketches out how the sky boxes and ownership maneuvering and TV contracts changed everything with cable and championship series timing and selection shows to kick it all off. Not to mention the oblique discussions we’re going to have all over this coming year with Charlie Hustle in the Baseball Hall of Fame decision making (having been “posthumously reinstated” in no small part due to Trump leaning on Manfred), and the question of how we feel about sports gambling now that everyone can do it, and more young adult males have revolving accounts on a betting app than savings. Pete was ahead of his time, or the beginning of the end…? Either way, read “Charlie Hustle” before the HoF debates begin. And “Heartland” is pretty good journalism and cultural history, too.
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Sherri said on September 28, 2026 at 11:28 am
Does O’Brien write about Pete’s relationship with an underage girl?
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Suzanne said on September 28, 2026 at 1:53 pm
This era has brought to the forefront the wisdom that the good book gave us centuries ago that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” It appears that the Christian Nationalists in power have excised 1 Timothy 6:10 from their scriptures.
I too am reading “Heartland” and learning so much about Larry Bird’s miserable upbringing. His life could have completely gone off the rails in so many ways. All the sports betting has pretty much ruined sports, in my opinion. I can’t watch without wondering who on the field is compromised because my guess is that many of them are.
I am just sick of everything being about money, always about money.
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nancy said on September 28, 2026 at 3:40 pm
Larry Bird may well have had a miserable upbringing, although I know little about it; I’ll have to read the book. He certainly inflicted misery on the people in his life, including his born-out-of-wedlock daughter. He finally came around, but for years he denied her, despite her carrying a virtual carbon copy of his face on her own skull.
But one thing I learned in Indiana — there are people there who think that is *exactly* the upbringing young people should get, to toughen them up, etc. It’s reflected in the hero worship of Bob Knight.
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David C said on September 28, 2026 at 7:40 pm
Big day today. I was approved for Social Security, they back dated me to my full retirement age, so my first check is a big one, and our ballots were received in the mail, they’re filled out, and safely in the drop box.
The sour to go with the sweet. Our Part D insurance told us how bad we were fucked over by the Republicans’ godawful bill. Pretty badly, I’m afraid.
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Cheez Whiz said on September 28, 2026 at 8:42 pm
There’s a hope on “both sides of the aisle” as they used to say, that once Trump is gone (by whatever divine purpose) everything will go back to “normal” as if the last 10 years can be retconned by a reboot.
I don’t see how or why that would happen. History shows the Republican party locking in their gains from each season of controlling the federal government as the new normal, the baseline all discussion and negotiation starts from. Trump will become a faded figure of legend like Reagan and Bush before him and the looting will continue until morale improves.
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Jeff Gill said on September 29, 2026 at 8:15 am
Yes, O’Brien writes about Pete and the underage girl (his quote on being challenged directly on the events: “That was 55 years ago, honey”), and also about Bird and his long-unacknowledged child. Both books are worth your time.
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Julie Robinson said on September 29, 2026 at 5:10 pm
Day eight of trying to get treatment for my broken shoulder…yesterday I called again, and at then end of the day got a message from the doctor to go to ER…what? If I’m not bleeding, convulsing, or having a heart attack, how long will that wait be, and what will it accomplish?
I wrote back and said I didn’t think that was the appropriate path, could I please just have a referral to an orthopedist? I also repeated the whole saga and said I didn’t feel cared for.
Well, I just got a phone call from the orthopedic scheduling department offering me an appointment on December 1. Perhaps the message didn’t get through to them that I have multiple, acute breaks? Oh well, then, they can get me in on October 19.
Um,no, I said I can’t wait three weeks. Then she tells me they have a walk-in clinic. Why didn’t anyone else tell me this? I’ll be heading there tomorrow morning.
And I will probably be looking for a new doctor.
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ROGirl said on September 29, 2026 at 5:47 pm
Julie, find a new doctor. I was referred to an endocrinologist and went through so much crap trying to deal with someone in her office who wouldn’t provide prior authorization for a shot I had to get at an infusion center. She actually called me a few times and berated me because someone from the infusion center called me to let me know what the doctor’s office was supposed to do. I found another endocronologist myself.
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