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October 31, 2025

By Stephen Collinson

Shohei Ohtani, #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers, rounds the bases after hitting a home run during the seventh inning against the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 3 of the 2025 World Series at Dodger Stadium on October 27, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Luke Hales/Getty Images)

What in the world is going on with baseball?

It’s the hate-America crowd’s favorite jab.

Why do US sports fans call their title-winning baseball team the world champions when theirs is the only country that plays the game?

This rhetorical grand slam has always been misleading — not least because baseball is a feature across the Western Hemisphere and in Asia and Australia. But it’s not as ingrained in any other national culture as it is in the United States — with the possible and ironic exception of Uncle Sam’s arch-antagonist, Cuba.

But this year’s internationally flavored World Series — the final playoff games for the Major League Baseball championship — should dismantle the trope for good. The showdown also comes with intriguing political overtones.

The compelling matchup is between the, ahem, World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers and the upstart Toronto Blue Jays. The Dodgers are led by possibly the greatest baseball player of all time — and he’s Japanese — Shohei Ohtani.

But we could have a champion team in America's game that is not American at all. The Jays united all of Canada behind a fairy-tale post-season. Their talisman is a Dominican Canadian born in Montreal who has a Russian name: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 

The underdogs lead the seven-game series 3-2 and could win it all on Friday night in Toronto — where anticipation is at fever pitch as fans celebrate their best team since the World Series-winning Jays of 1992 and 1993.

The Dodgers are massive news, not just in the US, drawing a huge media contingent from Japan to watch the megastar Ohtani’s every move. The 31-year-old is a genuine sporting freak, since he’s not only a world-class, flame-throwing pitcher but crashes home runs as one of the league’s premier hitters as well. Almost every player these days only excels in either discipline. Ohtani is the closest we’ve seen to George Herman “Babe” Ruth, aka “the Bambino” and the “Sultan of Swat,” a record-breaking pitcher and iconic hitter of the early 20th century. But Ohtani put the Babe in the shade in the last round of the playoffs, putting up probably the greatest game in history, hitting three home runs and pitching six scoreless innings while striking out 10 batters.

It’s impossible to watch the Blue Jays without thinking of boiling tensions across the border caused by President Donald Trump’s trade war and calls for Canada to become the 51st state. Ill-feeling flared again during the World Series when Ontario’s Trump-style populist premier Doug Ford paid for a viral ad on US TV stations attacking Trump and using a speech by Republican President Ronald Reagan. The current commander-in-chief erupted and promptly ordered new tariffs.

This is hardly Trump’s preferred World Series matchup. It would infuriate him if a team playing under the Maple Leaf wins — even if almost all its players are Americans. And the LA Dodgers have been caught in Trump’s mass deportation drive since its fan base includes millions of Latinos. Many fans felt their team showed insufficient empathy to their trauma.

Will either team get the traditional champions’ visit to the White House to meet the president? Who knows. Still, the World Series has unfolded on a hopeful note. There’s been none of the booing of national anthems that occurred earlier this year at the height of the cross-border acrimony at NHL ice hockey games. 

Now, about that name  — world champions. There was a long-held theory that the series was so called because it was once sponsored by the now-defunct New York World newspaper. But Major League Baseball says it has less to do with American hubris than another national trait — the search for a quick buck. Promotors of early games dialed up the hype to sell more seats, so they billed them as a global extravaganza.

Baseball might not be the force it once was, with NFL football now America’s favorite sport. But its players are finally putting the “world” in “World Series.” 

Shutdown showdown

Ouch.

The fierce Washington duel over the government shutdown — which could become the longest-ever next week — is getting nasty.

The Democratic leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, on Thursday accused the Trump administration of “policy violence” for offering a $20 billion bailout to Argentina while refusing to extend enhanced health-care subsidies for Americans.

And his Democratic equivalent in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, lashed out at Trump after his administration said it couldn’t reallocate funds to pay for vital nutrition assistance to 40 million needy Americans. “Donald Trump is picking politics over the lives of hungry kids. He is weaponizing hunger, turning millions of children, seniors, and veterans into political pawns to score points in his shutdown fight,” Schumer said. “Donald Trump is a vindictive politician and a heartless politician and a heartless man, and that's why he doesn't care about cutting off food aid to hungry kids.”

You’d struggle to find a cooler cat than Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune. But even the suave South Dakotan lost it with one of his Democratic colleagues. “This isn’t a political game … these are real people’s lives that we’re talking about. And you all just figured out, 29 days in, that, oh, there might be some consequences.”

The shutdown started because Democrats refused to vote for a new government funding bill unless Republicans agreed to extend the expiring enhanced health subsidies, without which the cost of Obamacare will go shooting up. Republicans say they’ll talk about the issue, but only when Democrats agree to open up the government. 

There’s no sign of when the stalemate will end. Trump is back from Asia, where he was showered in gifts and praise. Perhaps now he’ll get over his stunning indifference to the shuttered government he’s supposed to run.

Voters cast their ballots at a polling station on the first day of early voting for the mayoral election in Brooklyn, New York City, on October 25, 2025. (REUTERS/Angelina Katsanis)

What to watch next week:

Americans are voting again 

The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November means one thing in America — Election Day.

Some voters will get to weigh in on the first elections of national significance since Trump launched his massively disruptive second term.

Voting for new governors in Virginia and New Jersey is always seen as an early referendum on a new president. Polls show that Democrats are favored in both states.

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, is seeking to take back the governor’s mansion from the GOP in a state that has been a Democratic stronghold in recent presidential elections. Both she and the Democratic hopeful in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, are at the vanguard of a new wave of centrist female leaders their party hopes will lead them back to power. Sherrill’s race will be a cry for change whatever happens — whether it’s from voters fed up with an unpopular Democratic governor in the Garden State or those fed up with Trump. 

The president is meanwhile salivating over the New York City mayor’s race, which is offering Democrats another potential template as they reinvent their party.

Zohran Mamdani, an ultra-progressive, Ugandan-born political rising star and democratic socialist, is the frontrunner who came from almost nowhere, and is proposing free buses, universal childcare and publicly run grocery stores that his rivals say the city can’t afford.

Trump is already trying to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, blasting him as a “communist.” This is an absurd claim to anyone who's experienced communist rule. But it might resonate with millions of conservative Americans anyway.