PUT A PIN IN IT.

No sooner has the World Series beer been drunk than free agency begins.

The 2026 World Series was a long time coming for Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy. The 67-year-old got his start as a baseball coach in 1982 and didn't get a full-time managerial gig in the majors until 2023.

After such a lengthy climb to reach the pinnacle of the sport, Murphy was — understandably — a bit more willing to let loose following the Brewers' championship-clinching win in Game 5 on Wednesday.

He got that opportunity — and didn't disappoint — upon being presented with the final-out baseball from Game 5. That moment was captured on video, as Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers walked over to Murphy and gave the manager the baseball that secured the last out of the 2026 World Series.

Murphy embraced Bauers for the gesture, and then delivered one more piece of sage advice to his first baseman, one that came at the expense of the New York Yankees.

Jake Bauers, who went from baseball obscurity to most valuable player in the National League championships is a free agent as of right now, with a qualifying offer from the Brewers to consider, and his manager was his authentic self.  "You're going to be a rich f***er. Just remember when you're on that horses*** Yankees team and you're all playing for yourselves, just remember this is the way we used to do it."  Why the Yankees?  "The club could be in the market for a first baseman this offseason, especially one who can take advantage of the team's short porch in left field."

THE POWER OF COMPOUND INTEREST.

During the World Series, Capital One called up a commercial that I have long enjoyed.

It touches on two of my pet themes, financial fitness and life after college being the revenge of the nerds.  Even when the kiddos don't call on the astronaut.  Stay in school.

That's all for this month.  The Packers didn't get the most satisfying win on Thursday, but football on any Thursday that isn't Thanksgiving is a foolish idea anyway, and they have work to do, win or not.  Safety Xavier McKinney did get fined by the league for criticizing the officiating in Detroit and Packer spokesman Wes Hodkiewicz, who, note, speaks for the Packer organization, noted "McKinney spoke the truth, and his words were worth every cent it may cost him."  The officiating crew in question have been exiled, if not to Siberia, from Sunday prime time to a game between New England and Miami.  "If this reassignment is actually a sign that the league is finally taking those complaints seriously, great. But if it's just an attempt to keep bad officiating out of the primetime spotlight, fans aren't likely to be all that impressed."

So mote it be.  Yes, there is a fraught election coming up, yes, people continue to write foolish things on Common Dreams, and yes, higher education continues to be run by terminally stupid people.  Those things will still be true come November.

Enjoy your Hallowe'en, and your World Champion Milwaukee Brewers.

YOU'RE AN INTERIM COACH WHETHER THE JOB TITLE SAYS "INTERIM" OR NOT.

Fourteen years ago, North Carolina State recruited Northern Illinois head football coach Dave Doeren right in the middle of Northern Illinois earning an invitation to play in the Orange Bowl.  "North Carolina State created the vacancy late last week, under circumstances that prompted Jane Shaw at Phi Beta Cons [the link is long dead — Ed.] to make invidious comparisons between the sacking of coaches and the sacking, or not, of professors."

North Carolina State University just fired its football coach. Tom O’Brien had a winning record over six seasons (but not in the school’s conference, the ACC). He had taken the team to four bowl games, and his team had beaten its chief rival, UNC–Chapel Hill, five times. But the athletic director, Debbie Yow, wants more “aggressive” recruiting. As one fan said, O’Brien was “pretty good,” just not good enough.

Nothing changes in Raleigh.  "NC State's McMurray Family Director of Athletics Boo Corrigan has announced that Wolfpack head football coach Dave Doeren has been relieved of his duties effective immediately."

REPLAY REVIEW MAKES THE REFEREEING WORSE.

Red State's Kyle Becker calls attention.  "Something Feels Very 'Wrong' About the NFL. Fans Are Noticing."

At one point, if you looked up at the myriad of big screen television sets one could see what can only be described as a herd of zebras.

On every set, a referee, calling a holding penalty on this play, but not on the fifty plays before where the exact same thing happened.

Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that sports gambling is "ruining" the sport, it has become undeniable that NFL games are being decided as much by the referees as the players.

If football is a game of inches, then you could say that is now 13.5". That is the length of an official NFL penalty flag.

The impossible has happened: NFL officiating is getting worse. A recent analysis by Warren Sharp drives home that this is not your typical season for bad officiating.

During the corona shutdowns, Dave Barry anticipated the phenomenon.  “We’re thinking of just showing 60 minutes of referees throwing penalty flags and peering at replay monitors.”  That was supposed to be a humor columnist calling attention to a bad situation in a humorous way.

The problem is the replay technology.  "Expect the officials to do their job, and they'll likely do a better job than they do now, when they can make mistakes and have them corrected by Mission Control."  There's less reason for a professional to do a professional job when there's a second-guesser ready to guess.  "What incentive, other than pride, does an official have to get a close call right as the half or the game ends, when there's always the eye in the sky to issue the corrections?"

THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

That's the title of a post from a summer ago, when the Milwaukee Brewers swept the Dodgers during regular season play, and Reason's Jason Russell, contemplating some sort of job action in organized baseball, engages the argument in "MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn't About Competitive Balance, It's About Limiting Labor Costs."

In 2025, baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, were rooting for the small market, small payroll Milwaukee Brewers to beat the goliath Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series (NLCS). The Brewers got swept. Now it's 2026, and guess what? Baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, are rooting for the small market, small payroll Brewers to beat the goliath Dodgers in the NLCS. (At least the Brewers aren't getting swept this time!)

But what if none of that matters at all to the salary cap fight?

A small market World Series victory for the Brewers (19th in MLB payroll), the Tampa Bay Rays (28th), or, yuck, the Cleveland Guardians (30th) helps boost the theoretical argument that MLB doesn't need a salary cap for small market teams to succeed. But labor negotiations are not decided by debate club rules—you don't win with a better policy argument. It's all about the power dynamics and leverage of what is essentially a business negotiation between employees and employers. The policy argument might matter to public opinion, but it makes hardly any difference to leverage.

Competitive balance may not matter to the owners at all (in fact, some studies have found that salary caps don't create more balance, but revenue sharing does). The owners are almost certainly focused on keeping down their labor costs. A salary cap would likely give an immediate boost to team values—when Formula 1 teams recently agreed to a broad cap on their expenses, valuations shot up.

Tampa Bay will play the first two games of the World Series in Milwaukee, after Milwaukee returned the favor to the Dodgers.  The scholarly findings don't surprise me: a salary cap constrains the bidding for a productive resource, the players, and ceteris paribus the residual claimant, the owner, stands to do better; on the other hand, revenue sharing changes the bidding thinking of an owner, who now bids against other owners whose budget constraints might have been loosened.

I KNEW SOMEBODY WOULD GO THERE.

Somebody did.  "Brewers Playoff Hero Jake Bauers Makes Accidental Case for Medicare for All."

There's nothing like a Common Dreams contributor to turn a feel-good story about a nearly accidental most valuable player in the league championship series into tendentious leftist propaganda.

While generating headlines throughout the pennant race due to his outstanding hitting and field play, Bauers journey to the top of Major League Baseball has Cinderella elements. Just two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Bauers was ready to retire from the sport’s highest level.

“He had been playing professional baseball since he was just 17, spending more than a decade bouncing across seven different organizations with little success,” the paper reported. “After batting .199 for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2024, he was frustrated, burned out, and ready to move on.”

Life outside baseball intervened, but in a way familiar to millions of American families, not just pro athletes who can earn millions in lucrative contracts and endorsement deals.

“Bauers’ wife, Lauren, learned she was pregnant with the couple’s second child,” the WSJ explained. “Suddenly, Jake’s plan to become a stay-at-home dad while Lauren returned to her teaching job no longer seemed viable. They needed health insurance—so Bauers begrudgingly decided to give his floundering athletic career one last chance.”

It's not as though a journeyman player who has been in the Cleveland and Tampa Bay organizations as well as with the Brewers has the lucrative contracts or endorsement deals of a Shohei Ohtani or Francisco Lindor.  And didn't the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act obligate school districts to provide health insurance coverage, and didn't the triumphantly-titled Family and Medical Leave Act ensure maternity leaves?

CURMUDGEON CALL.

"Dodgers player says MLB broadcasts are airing 'soft porn ads'."  He's not referring to Garrett Mitchell home runs.

In a social media post, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Alex Call said Major League Baseball playoffs broadcasts have featured "soft porn ads" and that "parents shouldn't have to worry about this."

Call is not on the Dodgers' active roster for the NL Championship Series – but is with the team – and posted on X about how his son wanted to watch a game with him and that the commercials left him trying to "justify ... half-naked women" on his screen.

Advertisements featuring Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney have been in heavy rotation during this year's playoff broadcasts across multiple platforms.

I wonder if the accompanying Sydney Sweeney photograph is on a Los Angeles skyscraper.

RAILWAY PRESERVATION IS CHALLENGING ENOUGH WITHOUT GETTING LAWYERS INVOLVED.

The Northeast's last narrow-gauge coal railroad, East Broad Top, ceased common carrier operations in 1956, but the owners never sold it for scrap, perhaps contemplating catering to tourists in the manner of Rio Grande's Silverton Branch.  The owning family ultimately conveyed the railroad to a foundation dedicated to preservation although with only a short stretch of track in excursion service.

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.

Our President hopes to do Andrew Carnegie, Elbert Gary, and Joe Magarac one better.  "President Trump Announces Largest-Ever Steel Plant Coming to Iowa."  The president's political allies in Iowa's Congressional delegation and in state and local government all join in hailing the development.  There's something off about the project, though, as I will argue at length below the jump.

KEEP MY REFRIGERATOR SIMPLE.

As information technologies improved, and my academic career wound down, I would caution students that perhaps the full-information economy we so blithely assumed in order to make the blackboard equilibrium equilibrate might not be such a good thing to live in.  If it's connected to the internet of things, there's the risk of somebody hacking it, or your private life revealed even if you never take your illicit date to a sporting event.  (That refrigerator is cycling an awful lot for a kitchen supposedly supplying one, isn't it?)  There's another, mundane dimension to that argument.

Simple: the more electronic components there are, the more ways there are for stuff to go wrong. An appliance repairman recently suggested I stick with my old school appliances (circa 2007 is old school these days) for as long as they last, as the new ones have a mean time to some sort of failure of less than a year. Most of his service calls these days are for the new ones, and one of the advanced features tends to be what fails.

So too let it be with owners of the latest smart refrigerators.  "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges."  Absurd, embarrassing, and totally unnecessary.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Hard pass.  All I want my refrigerator to connect to is a power grid, and all I want to start my car is an ignition key.  Other internet-connected home appliances?  No thanks.

The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.

While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.

I'm willing to use electric or gas appliances connected to the respective mains.  Adding internet connectivity brings avoidable first world problems that might not be worth the convenience of having the roast defrosting or the wine chilling or the oven preheating or food in the doggie dish (don't you have to activate the robot to get that out of the 'fridge?) before the owner gets home.

THE BITTER FRUITS OF ADULTISM.

Deconstruct "I'm the boss, you're the kid," and bear what follows.

I’ve never considered taking a drink into an interview. I’m not even comfortable taking one if offered. I don’t do it because it’s generally a short enough process that it’s unnecessary.

And frankly, saying you need to stay caffeinated to talk to a potential boss sends signals I don’t know that I’d have been a fan of.

The problem here is that people are opining on this sort of thing often without asking a question of why we tended not to bring beverages to interviews in the first place. It’s one of a thousand examples of people seeking to upset the status quo without understanding why the status quo exists.

On the flip side, many of those who are upset over it may not even know why they’re upset over it. I doubt anyone came right out and said, “You guys tend to be so boring that I need as much caffeine as possible to stay awake to talk to you.” They just got bent out of shape from the start.

These little rules are common, but they generally all start from somewhere, and like Chesterton’s Fence, we need to understand them and why they exist before we set about dismantling them.

That's Tom Knighton, reacting, correctly, to the most recent first world problem: should a job-seeker bring an iced coffee to a job interview.  His conclusion?

Perhaps more importantly, why do you think you need it inside with you for a 20-minute interview? Or do you just need to knock down doors for the sake of knocking them down?

If so, be careful, because you might be on the other side of that desk and have to deal with someone just like you, only worse, and have no recourse left because of what you did at the time.

Call me old school, bringing your own drink, hot or iced, into an interview, let alone food, signals a lack of seriousness.  If the interviewer offers you coffee, tea, or water, politely accept or decline: the prudent thing might be to decline, the offer might be to put you at ease or perhaps as a test of your impulse control.

The economics job meetings offered a different sort of hazard: there were departments that conducted interviews with bottles of the adult beverages in plain view.  Always politely decline an offer of one!

PERMISSIONLESS INNOVATION.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux manages to offer an economics lesson and keep a straight face.

I applaud this market experiment with a, shall we say, unusual kind of leisure spot.

But the experiment is failing. And yet some people – ignorant of the foundation, working, and benefits of free markets – are unjustly criticizing the owners of this experiment for trying to salvage it.

The "unjust criticism?"  It brings to mind a parody of the late Yogi Berra's observation, phrased as "They're so inclusive nobody goes there any more."  Lift a mask requirement on Saturdays, alienate the "immunocompromised disabled divas," never mind that there still is a mask requirement all the other days the bar is open.  Benjamin Bartee is less than impressed.  "One night per week without the muzzle, in 2026, in a town with nary a single case of COVID, was enough to warrant the avalanche of outrage from the 'disabled community.'"

Perhaps lifting that requirement on Saturday was a mistake, but for a different reason.  The bar is in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a few miles upriver from Northampton, where people practicing alternative lifestyles are as common as seagulls in Boston: all the same, there might be people trying out an alternative lifestyle on the best pickup night of the week who welcome the anonymity of a Biden muzzle.  That the interest of the queer-adjacent aligns with that of the immunocompromised is convenient. 

GREAT MOMENTS IN IDENTITY POLITICS.

America's True Newspaper of Record strikes again!  "Experts Believe Lindsay Clancy Case May Set Feminist Movement Back Decades, But There May Be Some Negative Effects As Well."

The story continues.

The current feminist wave, which includes the belief that women are inherently superior leaders due to their peaceful nature, has been undercut by millions of women openly cheering homicide. "The Clancy trial has somehow caused feminists to argue that women are completely controlled by their hormones," said legal expert Ben McCray. "They now vehemently say that women are so weak and feeble that they can't even be held responsible for their own actions. The nation now agrees with their assessment."

Psychiatrist Sally Satel had thoughts about that argument.  Satire or not, the women of the fevered brow do a pretty good job of bringing on the mockery simply by being their authentic selves.  Not too long ago, Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham, who shies away from the culture wars, noted, "You can be girly, and you can go out and kick someone's a**."

WHAT PRICE IGNORANCE?

Contemplate, dear reader, the wry description of a mathematician as an organism that converts coffee into theorems.

Does that half-liter of water produce more theorems in the mathematician's coffee pot or somewhere off in the cloud?

For today, dear reader, we will not be too fussy about what data a "data center" processes.  A center might provide the servers that store your photographs, music videos, social media posts, and cribbed term papers.  As the Unofficial Newspaper of Record notes, "New Data Center Built To Handle Influx Of Online Rants Against Data Centers."  These days, mass storage using solid state components apparently does file allocation among servers so seamlessly that disk defragmentation is no longer necessary.

National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke's "Your Data Center Life" suggests the civilization-advancing capabilities of a variety of information technology complexes lumped together as data centers.

If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

Thus, a data center might be a switching center to keep the wireless internet and cell phone conversations working, something it does so well that the eternally ditzy former vice president could wave her hands about that data "cloud" being all around us, sort of like Yoda's Force but lacking the capability to lift your spacecraft, er, your campaign, out of the swamps of Dagoba.  Or it might include actual computers, although Tyler Cowen recently noted that computing capacity is still a constraint on artificial intelligence doing anything intelligent.  That doesn't surprise me: businesses and universities might have phased out their legacy mainframes, but true supercomputers still exist and they're still useful.  That Chat GPT prompt the above message complains about is going through that water and power to search through the information at its disposal, way more rapidly than the most assiduous of file clerks with the best associative memory.  Those data centers might be coming up with another "most strikeouts against switch hitters by any major league pitcher since 1908," or more quickly comparing millions of x-rays or gene sequences, and perhaps the computing capacity is finding a proof of Fermat's Theorem that does fit the margin of a Renaissance textbook.

Now contemplate replacing that file clerk with stepper switches and relay stacks.

That's a simple relay stack connecting two old-school dial telephones in a museum of telephony on the Iowa State Fair grounds.  A docent there told me that younger kids interpret "dial" as putting their finger on the number, as they've never had to physically dial in a number.  Now, you could build a computer network out of such relays and stepper switches, although it would be seriously impractical.  For that matter, the first mainframe computers replaced the relay and stepper switch accumulators with vacuum tubes to handle the logic, and the electrical, cooling, and maintenance requirements (one engineer replacing bum tubes, full time) extracted a much larger price on that "most critical resource."

TRAINS ARE MADE FOR RUNNING.

Facebook keep offering me unsolicited Advice For Elderly Persons including "13 Things Model Train Dealers Quietly Notice About Collections Owned by Someone Over 70 in the First 5 Minutes."

The article is about people who treat trains as investments, and they behave like speculators in matchbooks and sports cards.  The first item on the list seems sensible.  "Whether the Original Boxes Are Still There."  Not because those boxes are useful for protecting the rolling stock in the event of a move and when the owner crosses the final summit.

The very first thing a dealer scans for isn’t the trains themselves. It’s the cardboard sitting next to them.

Original packaging protects against dust, moisture, and warping, and its presence signals a collector who understood what they had. A box in solid shape quietly raises the offer before a single piece even changes hands.

There's even a category called "new in box" referring to rolling stock that has not been taken out of the box.

I suppose we could have figured the article was going to be crazy based on one of the images of the appraiser at work.

Gemini image retrieved from Climate Cosmos.

If you know, you know.

Let the record show that if it's property of Cold Spring Shops, it's going to run.

YOU CAN'T RELEGATE US, WE'RE GOING INDEPENDENT.

The corona shutdowns led to the National Collegiate Athletic Association extending years of eligibility, primarily by allowing more generous "redshirting" or designating players for a variation of injured reserve status.  Recently the association reverted to its pre-pandemic eligibility and redshirting rules, but a few players who had corona-era eligibility left finished their collegiate careers and signed with the professional leagues.

At least for the time being.  Consider, dear reader, a college player who signed a pro contract, didn't make the team, and then treats that remaining year of eligibility as a kind of option to return to his college team.  Sounds like the sort of thing lawyers could litigate all day.

Does a collegiate coach, athletic director, or conference commissioner use a variant on "card laid, card played," to tell such returning players, NO, we are pleased to count you among our alumni, and our recruiting pitch offers opportunities to catch the eye of pro scouts, it does not guarantee it.

LET THE REPOSITIONING FOLLIES CONTINUE!

I've long been on record doubting using college football to attract enrollment.

The thought process of some university administrators must run something like this:  Flagship universities are visible in football.  There are lots of people in the stadium six or seven Saturdays in the fall.  So let's get some football visibility and play in a big stadium.

It hasn't worked so well for the University of Massachusetts.

Or Rutgers.

There was some controversy about turning back time in Ann Arbor, but I'm not going to get into that.  Rather, it's the follies that get administrators in New Brunswick thinking about playing in the Big Ten and administrators in Amherst seeking a return to the Mid-American.  "UMass turned a second-quarter takeaway into the decisive scoring surge and defeated Rutgers 37-21 for a Fly the Flag victory to open the 2026 season on Sept. 3."  Plus Pop-Tarts.

Those two programs are perennial poster boys for making relegation a thing in college football.

Yes, years ago Julius Erving played for the Minutemen, and their men's hockey team recently won a national championship, perhaps begging forgiveness from the wokies for that Minutemen. That "storied athletic tradition" also included the Minutemen serving as crash test dummies for the Northern Illinois football team, at least until the football-only affiliation with the Mid-American ended.

Massachusetts scheduled a home-and-home with Northern Illinois in 2024 and 2025 and they learned a lot.  Now Northern Illinois play football in the Mountain West, and their latest attempt to be the next Boise State ran into reality at Iowa City.

Over the years, our meditations on attracting students by offering that game day (note, not game night) experience have raised the possibility that offering beer-'n-circus doesn't attract the studious sort of student.

A LATTER-DAY RED BALL EXPRESS?

A report describing Syria's attempt at geographic arbitrage, giving local teamsters a slice of the Hormuz maritime risk premium, opens with a photograph.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Yahoo News.

GIVE THE KIDS SPACE TO PLAY.

The women's professional basketball season in the United States is taking a two week pause for the international World Cup competition in Berlin.  The team and player descriptions suggest there are, in fact, ways of ranking players' capabilities, and some of the ladies who grade out well might not be making the trip.

Perhaps, when the professional season resumes, the playoffs begin, and the speculation about contract renewals and the like goes on, we might be able to have a reasoned conversation about the cagermetrics.  There might even be a simple summary statistic out there, something along the lines of "wins above replacement."  Rather that than a resumption of the culture wars.

EXCESSIVE SPORTS HYPE?

In the course of a lament over gridiron parents taking the joy out of youth football, Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien notes, "Little League baseball players should not have 'walk-up music' any more than youth league football players should have 'recruiting videos,' but they do."  I might still have some of my nephew's Greendale Youth Football trading cards (no, they did not come in Topp's bubble gum packs) but I digress.

Rather, dear reader, I want to consider a recent high school football game in which St. Joseph took an early thirty point lead over Mount Carmel, only for Mount Carmel to rally back and win the game.

It made for compelling television.  Television?  Television.  "Mount Carmel football stuns by overcoming 30-point deficit to win on national TV."  Specifically,  on ESPN.

There might not be another game as thrilling as Mount Carmel played on Friday night.

In a nationally televised game, New Jersey visiting St. Joseph Regional High School went up 30-0 on the Caravan just one play into the second quarter. It was the definition of a rout.

Until, the Caravan staged a comeback for the ages. They stunned the high school football world, as Jordan Lynch's Mount Carmel squad overcame that 30-point deficit to shock St. Joseph and win its first game of the season.

That's right, a nationally televised, if on sports cable, game, involving a New Jersey team visiting the Chicago area.