Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Sport

Baseball

BASEBALL IS HEALING:

One Grieving Mother, Two Mariners Tickets and a Season of New Friends (Tim Arango, Oct. 12, 2026, NY Times)


On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.

Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”

Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.

After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.

So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.

So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.

“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”


The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.

Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.

But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.

And a shared love of baseball.

“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”

“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”

Sport

SUITORS BEWARE:

Adventurer sets foot on British soil after 28-year walk home (Seren Hughes, October 06 2026, The Times)

For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot.

On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel.

Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea.

Soccer

IT’S A RICO CASE:

How drawn-out saga of Manchester City’s alleged cheating came to this (David Conn, 26 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.

There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”. […]

This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.

The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund. Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in.

It is the systemic nature of the violations that makes them so punishment-worthy.

Soccer

#FSGIN:

The damage of the Manchester City verdict runs deep. An era of Premier League history is tainted (Oliver Kay, Sept. 26, 2026, The Athletic)


This is what the Premier League has been up against since City’s reputation was shaken by a series of stories published by Germany magazine Der Spiegel in November 2018, where hacked emails indicated that the club had run a concerted and sustained campaign to circumvent financial regulations (an allegation that City have consistently and vehemently denied).

At various points over the past eight years, various people in the football industry have speculated about what a positive outcome for the Premier League might look like. The conclusion? There wasn’t one. Find City guilty on multiple counts? It would tell us that the league had allowed its rules to be flaunted for years, raising serious questions about the competition’s integrity over the period in question and its ability to regulate its clubs in future. The league’s brand, as well as that of its dominant club over the past decade, would be damaged.

But allow City to get off lightly, either with the charges not proven or with a lenient sanction? The league would risk anarchy, the rulebook found to be meaningless, and rival clubs would be furious. Nobody wants a league table pockmarked by asterisks and points deductions, but there is, as the Premier League’s frequently embattled chief executive Richard Masters told Sky Sports News in 2024, “no happy alternative to enforcing the rules”.

Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executiveCarl Recine/Getty Images
Win or lose, the reputational risk to the league threatened to be enormous. In recent months, it has already found Chelsea guilty of breaches of financial regulations relating to payments to agents and unregistered third parties between 2009 and 2022. To put it in context, an entire period of Premier League history — featuring multiple league titles for both City and Chelsea — has been tainted and compromised.

Sport

CAR-TOGRAPHERS:

The Strange Brain of an F1 Driver (Erik Vance, Sept. 4, 2026, NY Times)

The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not what distinguishes a truly elite driver.

“This is something that people don’t realize when they think of racing drivers living off their reflexes,” said Dr. Lappi, who studies eye movements of various types of athletes. “Most of their skill is anticipation. The anticipation is how the brain buys itself time.”

In other words, a great driver doesn’t react to the road, he predicts it. In many ways, this isn’t surprising because the entire brain is often said to be an elaborate prediction machine. But in Formula 1 drivers, this looks a little different.

There have been many studies of how regular people’s brains adapt to driving, but only a few have actually used elite drivers, because it is hard getting international celebrities to visit a neuroscience lab.

In two small, yet remarkable studies from 2014 and 2013, an Italian team compared 11 professional (including Formula 1) drivers with 11 normal ones. As one might expect, they found that elite drivers had good reaction and visuospatial skills. But the most interesting difference was in an area buried deep in the back of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, which acts as a hub connecting spatial reasoning and — crucially — memory.

Whereas other parts of the brain might allow you to navigate unfamiliar places, this is the part of the brain that connects where you are now to where you have been before (and was heavily used by London taxi drivers in a 2006 study). A person with a damaged retrosplenial cortex, say, from Alzheimer’s disease, might recognize their home, the corner store and a nearby school, but would have no idea how to use one to find another.

The Italian team found that elite racecar drivers had more densely packed cells in this region and more connectivity to other parts of the brain. In other words, they can make highly detailed spatial maps of places they have been and pull them up quickly. What’s more, among the 11 professional drivers, more density in that region meant more racing victories.

But it’s not just about how many brain cells you have, it’s also about how well you use them. The studies also suggested that elite drivers use far less of their brains while racing than regular drivers.

“This what we call neural efficiency,” said Pietro Pietrini, an author on the paper and a professor of neuroscience at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy. “So if you are very skilled, you rely on less brain.”

Dr. Lappi added that drivers in his studies will often look ahead around corners, even when they are completely hidden from view. The point is not to see the turn, but to see it in their mind’s eye.

Immigration Soccer

HOME:

How Mexico’s World Cup run brought a small Oregon town to life: The story of Woodburn, OR, is the story of the American dream. But can this town, with its vibrant soccer-loving Latino community, realize the potential afforded to so many other cities across the country? (Roberto Jose Andrade Franco, Jun 30, 2026, ESPN)

Across Oregon during World War II, people from small towns who weren’t drafted to fight in the European or Pacific fronts moved to cities where the defense industry flourished. Portland, a little over thirty miles north of Woodburn, became a hub for shipbuilding, while in Seattle, 175 miles further north, Boeing built bombers. That, combined with the forced internment of people of Japanese ancestry — including U.S. citizens, many of them agricultural workers — meant there weren’t enough laborers to pick the berries that grew there during the spring and summer. Woodburn has so many berries that it used to call itself the Berry Center of the World.

“My grandparents are from Coahuila, Mexico,” Anthony says. “They arrived here in 1943.” They were among the laborers who came to the northwest as part of a 1942 binational agreement between Mexico and the United States called the Bracero Program. More than four million Mexican men, across 24 states, came to help the country’s agricultural industry survive.

“We now have five, six generations of Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, Latinos,” Anthony says of Woodburn. Over time, the laborers’ personal roots grew into Woodburn’s fertile soil. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but many Mexican workers remained, or returned with their families, ready to make home and community out of a place that needed them. Today, 61.4% of the town’s 31,000-plus residents are Latino.

From the beginning, the Braceros played soccer when they weren’t working in fields and forests. It helped close the distance between their new home and the one they left behind.

Sport

NO, THANKS:

Deep in the Grand Canyon, the rain left them nowhere to go: Hikers thought they’d prepared for the reality of a flash flood, but they never imagined that they’d be trapped in the deepest, narrowest part of the canyon. (Brianna Sacks, N. Kirkpatrick and Dylan Moriarty, September 2, 2026, Washington Post)

Buscher, a 40-year-old preschool teacher from Sherwood, Oregon, was on a long-planned trip at the iconic national park with her younger sister and their friend, when a flash flood swept through, killing at least two people. They were among dozens who were rescued throughout the weekend, as walls of water and debris rushed through canyons and down steep terrain.

Buscher, who loves the outdoors and camps frequently, hadn’t done a big adventure since having kids. But game for anything, and wanting to spend time with her younger sister, she agreed to take on the Grand Canyon’s Rim to Rim, a strenuous 24-mile excursion that usually starts on the park’s North Rim. The route drops 6,000 feet over 14.3 miles to the Colorado River and heart of the canyon, then snakes back up the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim, a nearly 10-mile climb with 4,500 feet of elevation gain.

The Rim to Rim path, part of the Kaibab trail, sits in the center of the Grand Canyon, and was only recently re-opened after a year of repairs after a large wildfire had burned the trailhead.

But about halfway in, a torrent of water rushed toward them, coming up over the trail that was supposed to lead them away from it. The sisters’ friend had disappeared around the corner; the last thing they heard her yell was “You need to hold on to something!”

They thought they’d prepared for the reality of a flash flood, but they never imagined that they’d be trapped in the deepest, narrowest part of the canyon, enclosed in what the National Park Service calls “one of the most notorious sections.”

Soccer

GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

Football Conquered the United States. Now It Wants to Conquer Global Football: Can the U.S. ambition to conquer football on a global scale and to remake the game in American style be stopped? (George Courmouzis and Stephan Richter, 8/30/26, The Globalist)

The U.S. has done something similar, and arguably better, on the women’s side. It was essentially the key driver of the launch of women’s soccer.

U.S. universities’ varsity teams played a major role in bringing women’s soccer from a total sideshow to a significant sports activity, first nationally and then globally.

Spain may currently hold the World Cup in both the men’s and women’s game, but the U.S. tops the all-time list on the women’s side, with four Women’s World Cups.

And it is the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) that has turned that record into the world’s most valuable platform for the women’s professional game.

Just consider that Denver’s 2026 home opener drew over 63,000 fans, a number few European women’s clubs could dream of.

Whatever else the info of American money may do to football, it has done more than any other market to make the women’s professional game a going financial concern.

The game is only understood because American sabremetrics have been applied to it.

Baseball

THE WEAVING:

How Baseball Marks the Time: The seasons change. Children grow up. Years fly by. Yet somehow you can still remember exactly where you were when the ball cleared the wall. (Mark Hertling, 8/17/26, The Bulwark)

I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I was a boy, and when I think about my life, I can mark parts of it by home runs.

I was listening on KMOX radio as a boy of 11 in 1964 when Ken Boyer hit his grand slam against the Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series, turning a 3–0 deficit into a 4–3 Cardinals victory. Three years later, Bob Gibson—my boyhood hero—did something that somehow seemed perfectly normal for Bob Gibson: He pitched a complete-game victory in Game 7 of the World Series at Fenway Park, struck out ten, and hit a home run, too.

By 1982, I was an Army officer, married with children, when rookie Willie McGee hit two home runs in Game 3 of the World Series—and robbed Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas of one. Baseball had marked the time.

Baseball

WE DID:

‘Ya Gotta Believe,’ Revisited: From the depths of despair to the height of elation and back, the 1973 Mets took the “Flushing Faithful” on the kind of roller-coaster ride that is looking all too familiar. (Charlie Vascellaro, June 11, 2023, Village Voice)

In the formative years of my baseball fandom, I spent a lot of time listening to Mets games on a transistor radio tucked under my pillow. Extending my bedtimes were the voices of the Mets’ mighty broadcasting triumvirate of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, and Lindsey Nelson. It was music to my ears. And now, in the gift shop, I could barely believe my eyes. There in front of me was an album cover bearing big yellow letters reading “Ya Gotta Believe.” Underneath, smaller type promised “all the exciting play-by-play action highlights and interviews of the amazin’ Mets 1973 end of season play-offs and World Series Championship Games.”

I had struck gold. “Ya Gotta Believe” was the battle cry of the 1973 Mets. The memories of that season were still fresh in my head — what an opportunity to relive the favorite year of my so-far brief life. If I could have traveled back to any year back then, or even now, it would have to be 1973, the defining season of my life as a Mets fan.

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