05-04-2025
The Slow Progress of Baseball
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Baseball, perhaps fittingly for America's pastime, is a game of stubborn tradition and incremental change. This year, the Yankees will allow their players to don beards (and their fans to eat tiramisu out of little helmets). But women remain unable to play serious baseball, no matter how much they adore the sport. My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany asks in our April magazine issue: 'In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women's baseball?' Today's newsletter explores the changes to baseball in recent years, and what has stayed the same.
On Baseball
Why Aren't Women Allowed to Play Baseball?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
Women have always loved America's pastime. It has never loved them back.
Read the article.
Why Are Baseball Players Always Eating?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
America's pastime is a game of snacks.
Read the article.
Moneyball Broke Baseball
By Mark Leibovich
But now the whiz kids who nearly ruined the national pastime have returned to save it.
Still Curious?
Goodbye to baseball's most anachronistic rule: 'The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy,' Steve Rushin writes. 'Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation.'
: The iconic Yankees broadcaster John Sterling reminds us that what makes us human cannot be imitated, Yair Rosenberg wrote last year.
Other Diversions
P.S.
Each week, I ask readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. JK, 81, sent this photo taken in Maui in January.
I'll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
