Suddenly, it just tumbled out: "Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say."

That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”

Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.

Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.

All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.

[Read: A parade of listless vessels ]

How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.

One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday... but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”

At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”

[Here it comes]

“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”

“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.

The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.

The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”

[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]

However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?

It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.

The sports star says his rumoured love interest's appearance at his game on Sunday was "awesome".

How Baseball Saved Itself

For the July/August 2023 issue, Mark Leibovich went inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance.

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.

David M. Carlson
Fountain Valley, Calif.

Baseball, the eternal game, shouldn’t be shortened—if anything, it ought to be lengthened, after the model of classical cricket. Live in the moment. Each pitch presents the entire history of the universe. The pitcher rotates the ball in his hand, feeling ever so sensitively for the contours, the stitching, the seams that might yield an advantage, before hurling it to the plate with the force of Zeus’s thunderbolt.

But how will the baseball travel? Will it sink or curve, go high or low, flutter in or out, changing speed as it continues to its destiny? Breathing in, the umpire concentrates on the ball speeding toward him. Breathing out, he calls a ball or a strike, with thousands of eyes cast upon him and his judgment. The loneliness of the umpire, the batter, and the pitcher sets them outside time. At that fateful moment of contact between ball and bat or mitt, all existence is suspended.

To shorten that momentary dance with eternity is to miss the meditative profundity of a baseball game. No, Mark, it is we who are at fault for wanting to speed up the game, with designated batters, virtual walks, limits on mound visits, pitch clocks, and rigid placement of the fielders.

David Glidden
Riverside, Calif.

I wanted to read Mark Leibovich’s article on baseball’s updated approach, but found it difficult when I ran across another dusty relic that needs to go: Red Sox worship among the media elites.

I grew up a Yankees fan, but somewhere along the line, sportswriters began looking at the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry as if it were the defining narrative of baseball. As they cast the Yankees as the bad guys who were always trying to buy the World Series, and the Red Sox as the good guys who represented the nobler, purer defenders of the sport, they seemed to forget that many people in other parts of the country don’t care for either team. If anything, they tend to hate both teams because the sports media spend too much time writing and talking about them. After all, other teams have equally storied pasts. Speeding up the game and giving the rules a hard look will certainly improve the experience for fans, as Leibovich writes. But it’s long past time for the sports media to recognize their part in holding the game back by ignoring more interesting narratives.

Eric Reichert
West Milford, N.J.

I share Mark Leibovich’s joy over the new baseball rules to speed up the game. But baseball isn’t that much slower than other sports. The average basketball game lasts anywhere from 135 to 150 minutes. There are constant interruptions precipitated by fouls, time-outs, and halftime. And the final two minutes on the clock can take 15 minutes.

Most unsettling for those of us who love baseball is the constant complaint from football fans that our sport is slow while football is fast. Their favored 60-minute romp takes more than 180 minutes to complete. And, as a wise observer once pointed out, to make matters worse, football combines two of the most detestable facets of American life—violence and committee meetings.

Perhaps someday the NBA and the NFL will take lessons from MLB and learn how to shorten their games.

Dennis Okholm
Costa Mesa, Calif.

I agree with Mark Leibovich’s conclusions regarding the benefits of baseball’s new pitch clock. The pitch clock is the greatest innovation the sport has seen in ages, and it may well save the game. But the gradual slowing-down of games was not the only thing that drove fans away from baseball.

Consider the 1994 strike, which canceled approximately a third of the season and the World Series and was seen by many as millionaires fighting over lucre, fans be damned. Or consider the over-the-top salaries, even for subpar players, as ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. Baseball once sold itself as the best buy for family entertainment in America—but it hasn’t been that for quite some time.

Finally, the cheating that has gone on for decades has put off many fans, and the lack of any meaningful accountability has surely only made it worse. Players who were known to use banned substances—Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa—still lead the league’s counts for most home runs in a single season, accolades that should have been expunged from the books. And Leibovich barely touches on perhaps the worst of these scofflaw violations: The Houston Astros were caught cheating in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, including the 2017 postseason, which netted the team a World Series victory. Nonetheless, they were permitted to keep the championship title, and none of the players who cheated was disciplined—they are still playing now. When several Chicago White Sox players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series, by contrast, they were barred from baseball forever. For some fans, these problems are more serious than the length of games.

Allen J. Wiener
Clearwater Beach, Fla.

Mark Leibovich Replies:

Thanks to all those who took the time to reply to my article; I hope it was at least more engaging than the baseball of years past. Major League Baseball certainly has no monopoly on potentially league-destroying scandals. Each major sport has faced its share of drug, gambling, and cheating catastrophes over the years, and no league has cornered the market on bad leaders, clueless commissioners, or idiotic owners either. Sports fans have shown themselves to be willing to forgive a lot—but not necessarily boredom. Of all the sports, baseball is uniquely slow. No matter how many stoppages there might be at the end of a basketball game, the clock guarantees that very few NBA contests surpass two hours and 30 minutes. Football games rarely take more than 3:20, and the fact that teams play only once a week buys a great deal of spectator leeway. Last, I’ll apologize for indulging my Red Sox compulsion. I’ve always assumed that the Sox-Yanks thing was off-putting to nonpartisans, even when the rivalry was at its most compelling (not recently, in other words, unless you count this season’s epic battle for last place in the American League East). In the spirit of fellowship, I’ll concede that some of my favorite baseball friends are Yankees fans. We are more alike than not—beyond just insufferable.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts reflects on how her mother’s addiction shaped her childhood in Lexington. She describes finding escape and empowerment in literature and narrates her struggles as a young writer and editor in New York, determined to hide her past. Our cover image is a portrait of her painted by the Ivorian artist Didier Viodé. With a minimalistic color palette and broad, acrylic brushstrokes characteristic of his style, Viodé strove to capture Jenisha’s self-possession.

— Elizabeth Hart, Art Director

Corrections

“The Resilience Gap” (September) misidentified Richard Friedman as the former coordinator of Cornell’s mental-health program instead of its former medical director. After publication, “Killer Apps” (September) was updated online to clarify YouTube’s policy for removing videos, which excepts artistic content such as music videos from its prohibition on harassment.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

The Denver Broncos pull off a "Hail Mary" play alongside the rest of the NFL plays of the week from the second round of games.

Patrick Mahomes wins on his birthday as the Kansas City Chiefs bounce back with a win while the Dallas Cowboys' defence dominated again and the Cincinnati Bengals slipped to 0-2.

At every turn, the NFL portrays itself as being deeply committed to racial progress. It has a $250 million social-justice fund. It created and then expanded a rule designed to give candidates of color a shot at leadership roles. The league even had “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn often described as the Black national anthem, performed alongside “The Star-Spangled Banner” during kickoff weekend. But a contrasting picture of how the league really views matters of racial justice keeps coming into clearer focus.

Earlier this week, the former NFL Network reporter Jim Trotter, who is Black, sued the league, accusing it of retaliation. The journalist alleges that the network, which is owned by the NFL, didn’t renew his contract because he publicly challenged Roger Goodell about the league’s poor diversity record during the commissioner’s Super Bowl press conference the past two years.

Trotter’s lengthy filing describes a league that, behind the scenes, regularly shrugs off calls for greater racial equity. Trotter alleges that when he asked Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones at the 2021 Pro Football Hall of Fame exhibition game between the Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers why the NFL didn’t have more Black people in positions of power, Jones responded, “If Blacks feel some kind of way, they should buy their own team and hire who they want to hire.” In his legal filing, Trotter said his superiors told him not to report Jones’s comments.

[Jemele Hill: The NFL is suddenly worried about Black lives]

Trotter’s lawsuit also asserts that, during a September 2020 Zoom call that involved several NFL Media newsroom employees, one participant cited remarks that the Buffalo Bills’ owner, Terry Pegula, had made in a previous conversation about some NFL players’ social-justice activism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. According to Trotter’s account, this colleague heard Pegula say, “If the Black players don’t like it here, they should go back to Africa and see how bad it is.”

Trotter does not name the colleague, nor does he claim to have heard the alleged comment by the Bills owner firsthand. Jones and Pegula have both emphatically denied making the statements attributed to them. Pegula called Trotter’s accusations “absolutely false.” In a statement, Jones said: “Diversity and inclusion are extremely important to me personally and to the NFL. The representation made by Jim Trotter … is simply not accurate.”

In an appearance Wednesday on ESPN’s popular debate show First Take, Goodell minimized Trotter’s accusations.

“They’re allegations,” Goodell said. “Our job is to make sure that they’re factual. These are not new charges. They’re actually a couple of years old. They’ve been looked into. You’ve heard the strong denials. There’s litigation ongoing now.” The commissioner also reaffirmed the league’s commitment to diversity. “We know the importance of progress in diversity and we’re working very hard at it,” he said. “Is progress where we want it to be? No, it’s always slower than you want it to be, but I’m confident we’re moving in the right direction.”

Trotter is one of the most respected reporters covering professional football. If the NFL’s expectation was that Trotter wouldn’t hold the league accountable for its record, then it clearly wasn’t aware of Trotter’s reputation in the media industry. I have known him personally for years and consider him trustworthy. But Trotter’s word is not the only bit of evidence before us. Leaked emails, legal findings, and statistical analyses all point toward the conclusion that, for all the league’s public spin, powerful figures throughout the NFL ignore the contributions and concerns of Black players and coaches when the cameras and microphones are off.

In 2021, the Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden resigned after emails surfaced in which he made racist, homophobic, and misogynistic statements. In 2022, the former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three teams, claiming that the league was “rife with racism.” Earlier this year, a federal judge allowed his lawsuit to proceed. Flores, now the defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings, alleged that the NFL had frozen Black candidates out of key positions such as head coach, offensive and defensive coordinator, quarterbacks coach, and general manager.

That NFL teams have struggled to hire and retain Black coaches is no secret; the league’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview diverse candidates for major coaching and front-office positions, has yielded little progress in the face of owners’ unwillingness to hire nonwhite head coaches and general managers. When Flores filed his lawsuit, there was only one Black head coach among the NFL’s 32 teams—an embarrassing statistic for a league in which a majority of the players are Black. This season, the NFL has a total of six coaches of color, just three of whom are Black. Trotter himself pointed out last year that nearly half of the league’s teams had never had a Black non-interim head coach. That list includes Jerry Jones’s team, the Cowboys.

[Jemele Hill: What the Jerry Jones photo reveals about the NFL]

NFL owners’ reluctance to put Black men in decision-making roles extends to their choices about which players to draft. Earlier this week, the news website SFGATE reported that Black quarterbacks are being systematically underrated in the NFL draft; those who are chosen measurably outperform white peers who were picked in the same round. What this means in practice is simple: Teams are missing out on wins because they underestimate how well Black quarterbacks can play.

That report is in line with an ugly historical trend: teams’ refusal to consider Black players as quarterbacks out of the racist belief that they lacked the intelligence and leadership ability to perform in the position. In 1923, Fritz Pollard became the first Black man to play quarterback in American professional football. Ten years later, George Preston Marshall, the owner of Washington, D.C.’s football team, instigated a ban on all Black players that lasted through 1945. It took another 23 years for Marlin Briscoe to become the first Black quarterback to start for an NFL team in the modern Super Bowl era.

You would think that in a league as competitive as the NFL, owners and coaches would have an earnest desire to find the best possible play callers, regardless of their race. The private comments allegedly being made by some of the NFL’s most powerful people would help explain why the league seems intent, when any race-related controversy arises, on doing the barest minimum necessary to make the bad publicity go away.

In 2018, a number of owners, players, and league executives met for several hours at the NFL headquarters in New York to discuss how to handle social-justice protests during the national anthem. The New York Times obtained audio from that conversation. During the meeting, Terry Pegula suggested that the NFL needed a Black spokesperson to highlight how the players and owners were working together. As a precedent, he approvingly cited the actor Charlton Heston’s role for many years as “a figurehead” for the National Rifle Association. “For us to have a face, as an African American, at least a face that could be in the media,” Pegula said in the meeting, “we could fall in behind that.”

Pegula’s suggestion that a Black spokesperson could provide cover for a mostly white group of owners who did not want to deal with the backlash to the protests was cringeworthy. It also was sadly unsurprising. Considerable evidence shows that the NFL isn’t truly committed to addressing the issues that Trotter presented in his lawsuit. The league would instead rather cultivate an inclusive public image that doesn’t jibe with what’s really happening in secret.

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Move over, Glassdoor. There’s a new workplace scoring system, and it’s aimed at an unlikely industry: US football.

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Over a third of the 153 major professional men’s sports teams in the US— those comprising the MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL, and NHL—are partly owned by private equity groups, according to a new report from Pitchbook. 

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