There's a modest amount of sports in this week's installment of the newsletter — or at least, it's sports-adjacent. I don't know how you feel about that, but would you rather I talk about global events? Yeah, me neither.

We are not even a month into the new baseball season, which means teams are still working out the off-season rust and fans are left trying to figure out if the next six months are going to bring joy and despair. (Bet on the latter, particularly if you’re a Mets fan.) But one thing is already in midseason form: the calorie-spiking ballpark snacks being assembled at stadium concession stands in defiance of sound culinary practice and simple good taste.

Perhaps you would like to sample the DC Monument Chicken Tower at your next Washington Nationals game, featuring grilled chicken, bacon, mixed greens, gruyere and pickles stacked so haphazardly on a pretzel bun that you need a giant toothpick to hold it all together. The Colorado Rockies sell pizza donuts — they are what it says on the label — while the Miami Marlins' Machette takes the perfectly acceptable concept of a carne asada quesadilla and extends it into a two-foot-long example of too much of a good thing. The less said about the Take Me Out to the Ballgame shake at Arizona Diamondback games, the better, particularly if you're looking to avoid adult-onset diabetes.

Baseball teams are not putting these items on the menu in hopes of winning that elusive Michelin star. They're creating ballpark snacks featuring goo stacked upon more goo because it grabs eyeballs, and in the attention economy, that's the ultimate transaction. 

People chatter about your weird concession offerings online. They take pictures for Instagram. Some, after consulting with their loan officer, may even flash the cash to purchase a 2-foot-long quesadilla. There is no downside for the baseball team operator at all — they certainly won't be there at 2 a.m. when the Beef Wellington-style hot dog you wolfed down earlier is demanding egress from your body, no matter the exit point.

I admit that I can be a stick in the mud about these sorts of things (At A's games, I either cut a path straight to the late, lamented Saag's Sausage stand for its grilled peppers and onions offering, or to the one place in the Coliseum that sold a rather credible Philly cheesesteak.) I recognize that other people prefer a wilder experience at the ballpark, and if that means consuming foodstuffs not otherwise found in nature, then who am I to yuck their alleged yum?

But then I saw the Bat Flip, which is now offered at Atlanta Braves games, and it helped crystallize my thoughts on grotesque ballpark food as solidly as it's going to clog the arteries of anyone who orders one. Quite simply: How in the hell are you supposed to eat this thing?

According to the press notes accompanying the Bat Flip, this is a burger measuring 7 inches in height, highlighted by two pounds' worth of beef patties, braised short ribs, pork belly, cheese, onions, lettuce, tomato and a fried egg, along with the requisite squirt of drippy sauces. There is no mention of the sherpa required to help you mount the sandwich.

Friends, I know my way around eating things at a ballpark. And it is my conservative estimate that only about 40% of the Bat Flip is going to make it into your mouth. The other portion is going to wind up mostly on your clothing, with the rest confined to a 3-foot blast radius around you and your seat.

Ballpark concessions need to be assembled with the knowledge that they are not going to be eaten with the benefit of a table or an adequate supply of utensils and napkins. The modern stadium does not leave much in the way of personal space, especially for the zaftig fan. Everything you eat is going to need to be held in one hand and consumable as you're hunched over a small basket. If the monstrous sandwich you've designed cannot fulfill that brief, you have failed at the concept level.

I know of what I speak: The Coliseum used to have a BBQ stand in the left field corner — a good one, too! And I once ordered a combo platter that contained some serving of smoked meat and a couple of sides. Which is when I realized, teeny-tiny stadium napkins are ill-equipped to mop up any stray sauce from pulled pork or barbecued ribs or what have you. I spent that game looking like I had been splattered after murdering a hickory-smoked drifter.

Baseball fans, do not make the mistakes I have made. Order only food you can responsibly consume. And ballpark operators, do not tempt your patrons by offering them food they cannot reasonably expect to eat without covering themselves in condiments from head to toe. Not until you offer an in-game laundry service, at any rate.

When I attended the University of California, San Diego, the student center's food court had scanty options. There was a Mexican fast food restaurant alongside a Chinese one, both owned and operated by the same person and both sharing a kitchen, with predictable culinary results. The sandwich counter had a few good offerings, but an off-putting name — Zip's Tummy Buster — that suggested horrifying consequences for consuming too many of their sandwiches. The other outpost was a Wendy's.

As a result, my main impression of the Wendy's fast food chain is that it is present, not necessarily that it is a place you patronize on purpose. I the choice is between a burger and no burger at all, then a Wendy's will do. I don't mind the Baconator. Getting a baked potato every now and again is a good way to mix things up.

However, a report in Slate suggests that for an increasing number of people, Wendy's won't do at all. Same-store sales have dropped, and Wendy's is shuttering some 300 of its locations. While things are tough all over for the fast-food industry, it's been a particularly bleak time for the one-time apple of Dave Thomas' eye. 

(That's Dave Thomas, the late Wendy's founder, not Dave Thomas, the former SCTV performer. As a comedy nerd, I feel I have to specify.)

Wendy's problems hit warp speed about two years ago when the newish CEO floated the idea of surge pricing for menu items, because who doesn't love the idea of watching Frosty prices fluctuate like you're buying crude oil futures. With consumers already grumbling about inflation in 2024, Slate's Adam Chandler posits, the prospect of getting soaked by your neighborhood burger purveyor chased away customers — a predictable outcome since it's not like we're exactly hurting for fast-food chains in this country. It will not shock you to learn that the newish CEO quickly made himself into the ex-CEO.

There are other problems, Slate points out. The Wendy's menu is no longer simple to navigate, once a big differentiator for the chain. The branding message is all over the shop. Basically, the things that people liked about Wendy's seem to have faded into the background, as the folks running the company try to squeeze out every last cent of profit to keep the shareholders at bay.

I'm not sure that approach is going to fly anymore, certainly not in the world of fast food, where alternatives abound. For a chain like Wendy's to thrive, it needs to offer something unique — whether that's the food, the service, or the overall vibe. Failing to deliver that while making your customers feel like they're being shorted is a strategy for going bust — and not the fun kind of tummy-busting from my college's poorly named sandwich shop, either.

To call me a fan of the Bundesliga would be stretching the definition of 'a fan' a bit. I follow a fair amount of soccer — primarily, the Chelsea men's team, the Portland Thorns and the Oakland Roots — and that takes up the vast majority of mental space I can allot to one particular sport. But Germany's top league is on the periphery of things I pay attention to, and if there's a Bundesliga team I pull for, it's probably Union Berlin.

It comes down mostly to the fact that I've actually been to Berlin a few times. Also, Union Berlin has an interesting story — they were the first team from East Berlin to win promotion to the Bundesliga after reunification and only the sixth former East German Club overall to reach the top tier. During the bad old days, since their arch-rival was a team backed by the Stasi, rooting for Union became a safe way to surreptitiously oppose the East German regime. 

When Union played its first home match in the Bundesliga, the official attendance exceeded the actual stadium capacity by 455 — it was the club's way of recognizing supporters who had died before Union had reached the top tier of German football. In the past, fans have volunteered to rebuild the stadium to help the club save money. They like to say they've literally bled for the team, as they held a blood drive to raise money when Union Berlin was courting bankruptcy. 

The Union Berlin lore adds another chapter this coming weekend when Marie-Louise Eta takes charge of the club. She'll be the first woman to manage a top-division team in one of Europe's five major soccer leagues.

I have no idea how she'll do seeing out the season, but I'll certainly be paying more attention to the Bundesliga than I normally do to find out.

Enough of my yammering: here's yammering from some other people.

If you asked me to rank my favorite Stephen Sondheim musicals — and you should — Merrily We Roll Along wouldn't crack the top 5. It might struggle to make the top 10, depending on how you feel about the work-for-hire he did on Gypsy.

Audiences of the initial production would echo that sentiment. In its original incarnation, Merrily We Roll Along ran for just 16 performances (though 44 previews, as Sondheim and Hal Prince tried to work out the kinks.) Frank Rich's New York Times review called the production "a shambles."

The show has fared better in subsequent iterations, with a 2023 revival held in pretty high regard. That version — starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez — was filmed in 2024 and released theatrically last year; it's now streaming on Netflix. And I gave the Merrily We Roll Along film a watch this past weekend.

If you're not familiar with the plot, Merrily We Roll Along focuses on a trio of friends, two of whom have a composer/lyricist partnership,  and how their relationship evolves over the years. The twist with Merrily is that the show moves backward in time, starting at the point where the relationships have unraveled and then depicting the choices, slights and actions that brought each of the characters to the ending-cum-beginning of the story.

As you might expect, the show lands differently when you watch it in your 50s and reflect back on your own path. For example, on its own, Sondheim's "Our Time" is a fine, if not particularly weighty song about hope and optimism for a shared journey of limitless possibilities. Viewed as the closing number in Merrily We Roll Along, it's more of a gut punch hearing three people sing about their hopes for a shared future that the audience now realizes are not going to work out.

If that's not something that draws you in — and believe me, you wouldn't be the first to give Merrily We Roll Along a pass — this version is worth watching for Daniel Radcliffe alone. It should be no surprise that he's an excellent song-and-dance man, as he killed it in a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying about 15 years ago. Since outgrowing his role in the Harry Potter franchise, Radcliffe has pursued all manner of roles — comedy, drama, stage, screen — and he's delivered in just about all of them. When I'm not watching in Sondheim revivals, I've been enjoying his comedic turn as a disgraced documentarian in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins. I'll never look at tennis balls in the same way again.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. If you followed the Merrily We Roll Along format, you would have started reading here and then gone backward to see how the newsletter unraveled. Hum the tune of your choice while you do.