No matter where you reside along the generational divide, last night provided an object, and in some cases abject, lesson for you and all your youth culture nonsense. The National Football League and Major League Baseball both took their places on America’s viewing devices of choice, and proceeded to spend several hours beating everyone over the head with the past. It was as if both leagues sensed that their target demographic is either dead, dying, or just sick of new stuff, and so delivered on the old by the dumpsterload.
The NFL’s Thursday night game was Pittsburgh at Cincinnati, or as we came to know it, the Gray Stubble-Off. It wound up being the only competitive sporting event of the evening, but it also blatantly slathered 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers and 40-year-old Joe Flacco upon your corneas in a three-hour homage to Why Young Quarterbacks Suck. They didn’t mean to put it quite that way, probably, but every added closeup of the dueling quarterbacks’ craggy and bewhiskered faces hammered home the fact that the NFL isn’t giving up its old demographic, what with all its disposable money for cruises and backyard grills and non-prescription drugs that help with freshly invented diseases and noted willingness to watch the Bengals on a school night, without a fight. It helped that the game itself was largely an advertisement for watching the old guys shred the children arrayed against them on defense, a back-and-forth 33-31 Bengals triumph that ended with a late field goal by relative infant Evan McPherson—was Jim Breech not picking up the phone?—and a majestic but incomplete Hail Mary attempt from Rodgers. Let’s see that embryo Baker Mayfield try that.
But MLB, in a more precarious cultural position, was having none of that. The Blue Jays and Mariners played a snoozy fourth game of the ALCS with the main theme of Hey, We Have AARP Kiosks, Too. The heavy lifting there was done by Max Scherzer, the Blue Jays starting pitcher who is 237 days younger than Rodgers but otherwise closer to retirement if you base it solely on his 2025 production. It was made clear several times during the early stages of the broadcast that Scherzer had been the worst pitcher in baseball down the stretch while his opponent, Seattle’s Luis M. Castillo, himself the Mariners’ oldest starting pitcher at age 32, had been the best. The broadcasters almost certainly wanted to veer toward another game-long homage to Cal Raleigh, who merely looks like a prototype of the oldest player in the game, but Scherzer would have none of it.
In what may be his last great game on a grand stage, Scherzer smothered the suddenly gassed Mariner hitters over 5.2 innings, allowing only Josh Naylor to annoy him and seeming as barking mad as ever as he led the Blue Jays to a turn-back-the-clock 8-2 victory. That win taught an ALCS home crowd another age-old lesson for the fourth straight game—you can’t always get what you want. The home team has lost every game of this series so far, and none of them have been particularly fraught with tension. As a result, a series that looked after the two games in Toronto as if it was primed for the Mariners to reach their first-ever World Series in 49 years of existence, suddenly looks one in which the Mariners will do no such thing, again for the 49th time in a row.
The third event in the evening’s cavalcade of calendar-burning was Brewers-Dodgers, and while there were no former goldpanners from the 1840s in either lineup, the Dodgers did field a lineup with only one player not in his 30s; that’s Andy Pages, the 24-year-old outfielder who is teaching us the sins of youth by hitting .094 in the postseason. Much has and will continue to be made of how expensive the Dodgers are, but what’s striking in watching them cruise toward a second straight World Series appearance is how recognizable they are; as team-building strategies go, “when in doubt, throw money at guys who have played long enough to have a recognizable agent” works if you grind at it. Confronted by a young, sprightly, weirdly accomplished Brewers team, the Dodgers have brought back a real fossil: the dead-ball era.
Over three games, the Dodger pitching monolith of Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and last night Tyler Glasnow have held the Brewers to one run per game and nine total hits across the three. Milwaukee’s penchant for bringing chaos has been perfectly invisible across the board, crushed by the gray order imposed by their elders both in age and historical achievement. Well, not exactly across the board—Caleb Durbin, Milwaukee’s 25-year-old minifridge of a third baseman, is doing the best he can, and has three of his team’s nine NLCS hits and half of their four extra-base hits. But even here, youth is being served lessons that taste of stewed turnips. Jackson Chourio, the 21-year-old outfielder and Milwaukee’s future, was removed from the game in the seventh after either cramping or re-mangling his hamstring (amateur internet doctors have yet provided a unified diagnosis), and may well miss the rest of the series. Another lesson learned—being young and able-bodied is clearly not the currency of the day.
The Brewers are now down to their last hope, a Game 4 in the bastardy Dodger Stadium twilight. Having taken the available hints, they are expected to go full bullpen game, entrusting the bulk of those innings to Jose Quintana, who at age 36 is the oldest Brewer by three full years; the Dodgers, as you may have heard, are pitching 31-year-old babyface Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani tripled to open Game 3 as an indication that his postseason doldrums may finally be ending, but it should be noted that the next hitter, Mookie Betts, doubled to score Ohtani and end the game almost before it began. Betts just turned 33, which apparently is the youngest you can be and still have fun playing sports. But don’t worry, kids. Your time will come—probably around the time your kids are your age.
