During my family’s recent visit to Israel, we spent time with my brother in Haifa, who gave one of my daughters a “Guardians of Democracy” T-shirt worn by protesters who oppose the current government’s plans to constrain judicial power. We also spent time with my sister in Gush Etzion, a bloc of settlements near Jerusalem, who casually referred to such protesters as “anarchists.”
Those characterizations, each misleading in its own way, reflect a disagreement about the proper role of courts in a democracya debate that echoes familiar arguments in the United States. Israel’s version of that controversy, which has featured mass demonstrations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees as evidence of a nascent “civil war,” is flaring up again as the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, considers a bill that would bar the Israeli Supreme Court from blocking legislation based on a lack of “reasonableness.” That proposal, while less radical than bills that would virtually eliminate judicial review, encapsulates the issues raised by the determination of Netanyahu’s coalition partners to restrict the court’s authority.
Those issues, which go to the heart of legislative and judicial legitimacy, were illuminated 16 years ago by an exchange between Richard Posner, a now-retired judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and Barak Medina, a senior lecturer in law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Their debate centered on the judicial philosophy of Aharon Barak, who served as a justice of the Israeli Supreme Court from 1978 to 1995 and as its president from 1995 to 2006. That period included the “constitutional revolution” in which the court took on the task of enforcing limits imposed by Israel’s “basic laws.”
Barak is the bte noire of the right-wing legislators in Netanyahu’s coalition, who see themselves, contrary to their opponents’ take, as defenders of democracy against judicial usurpation. Barak “has brought disaster on Israel,” saysJustice Minister Yariv Levin. “His path stands in contrast to democracy. To him, judges are preferable to the people’s elected officials.”
In a 2007 review of Barak’s bookThe Judge in a Democracy, Posner offered a similar critique, portraying the Israeli jurist as an “enlightened despot” and “legal buccaneer” who overrode government policy based on his personal preferences. “Barak does not attempt to defend his judicial practice by reference to orthodox legal materials; even the ‘Basic Laws’ are mentioned only in passing,” Posner wrote in The New Republic. “His method, lacking as it does any but incidental references to enacted provisions, may seem the method of the common law (the judge-made law that continues to dominate many areas of Anglo-American law, such as contracts and torts), except that common-law rules are subject to legislative override, and his rules are not. The significance of this point seems to elude him. He takes for granted that judges have inherent authority to override statutes. Such an approach can accurately be described as usurpative.”
In particular, Posner took issue with Barak’s deployment of vague abstractions such as “reasonableness,” “justice,” and “equality,” which Posner called “as empty as they are lofty,” to second-guess the choices of elected representatives. As Posner saw it, that “lawless” method invited unjustified interference with the democratic process.
To illustrate the arbitrariness he saw as characteristic of Barak’s approach, Posner cited “a ruling made during the Gulf war in 1991 requiring the Israeli army to distribute more gas masks to residents of the West Bank.” Defending that decision, Barak said: “We did not intervene in military considerations, for which the expertise and responsibility lie with the executive. Rather, we intervened in considerations of equality, for which the expertise and responsibility rest with the judiciary.”
Although the basic laws do not explicitly mention equality, the Israeli Supreme Court has deemed that principle implicit in the “human dignity” protected by the 1992 basic law. Yet Barak’s book “strongly commends the balancing of competing interests as a technique of judicial decision-making,” Posner said, “implying that in the gas-mask case the court should have balanced against considerations of equality whatever military reasons the army gave for distributing fewer gas masks on the West Bank than in Israel proper, such as that Iraq was more likely to aim its missiles at Jews than at Arabs.” The general test, according to Barak, is whether “a reasonable person responsible for security would be prudent to adopt the security measures that were adopted.”
Medina’s rejoinder to Posner, published the same year in the Harvard International Law Journal, faulted the American judge for misrepresenting the Israeli system of government. Contrary to Posner’s assertion that the Israeli Supreme Court’s decisions are not “subject to legislative override,” Medina noted, the Knesset can change the basic laws at will, typically by a simple majority vote. Somewhat contradictorily, Medina also objected to Posner’s assertion that “Israel does not have a constitution.” He noted that “the constitutional assembly chosen to draft a Constitution decided, soon after its election, to also serve as the legislature,” and “it established explicitly that all future Knessets will have ‘all the powers’ given to the First Knesset.”
Treating the basic laws as a constitution, Medina argued, “is based upon the recognition of the importance of judicial review in ensuring respect for basic human rights” and “protecting the fundamental principles of the State of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state.” He said that “appropriate compromise” also recognizes that “it is best to base judicial review upon explicit consent of the people, via its representatives in Knesset.”
Medina emphasized that the Knesset had accepted judicial review based on the basic laws. “The Knesset did not amend the Basic Laws in response to the Court’s decision regarding the ‘constitutional revolution,’ and refrained from limiting the Court’s power to practice judicial review over legislation,” he wrote. “Moreover, in recent years, the Knesset usually examines proposed legislation to ensure its accordance with the Basic Laws, recognizing the supremacy of the provisions of the Basic Laws over ‘regular’ legislation. The Knesset accepted, by a clear consensus, the Court’s decisions in which it voided provisions in legislation which violated the Basic Laws.”
As demonstrated by the ongoing clash over judicial review, that “clear consensus” has broken down. And the fact that the basic laws were enacted by the national legislature, which retains the power to alter them, makes those ground rules strikingly different from the U.S. Constitution, which by design is very difficult to change. While Medina surely is correct that judicial review is essential in “ensuring respect for basic human rights,” empowering the legislature to determine the content of those rights obviously makes them less secure than they would be in a system where the amendment process is more arduous and complicated. That is especially true under a governing scheme like Israel’s, which lacks the checks and balances achieved through an autonomous lower level of government and separation of legislative and executive powers.
In this context, judicial review is both more important and more precarious than it is in the United States. At the same time, the legitimacy of that power is open to question when courts go beyond interpreting and applying the law. According to Posner, that is what Barak’s approach demands.
Medina argued that Posner grossly exaggerated the extent to which the Israeli Supreme Court interfered with executive and legislative choices. He noted that the government and the Knesset had made many momentous decisionsincluding “the economic program of 1985, the expansion of the settlements in the Occupied Territories, the invasion into Lebanon and the withdrawal from Lebanon, the Oslo peace Accords, the policy of privatization, the increases and subsequent decreases in stipeds for families with children, the disengagement from Gaza, Operation Desert Shield against Palestinian terror organizations, the construction of the Separation Wall, changes in Israel’s immigration policy, [and] the policy adopted in the Second Lebanon War”without “significant intervention by the Court.”
Medina added that the court had not responded to “governmental inactions” in areas such as “measures to close widening economic gaps in society and the deepening of poverty,” “discrimination by private agents against Arab citizens,” and “delays in decisions to desalinate water and to recycle materials.” He noted that the court “did not instruct the Government to adopt a policy of affirmative action in order to contend with inequality,” “did not instruct the State to set up soup kitchens or subsidize lifesaving drugs,” “did not prevent discriminatory security checks of Arab citizens in airports,” and “did not even examine the constitutionality of the decision not to draft Arabs into the Israel Defense Forces.”
While some of these policies raise issues that are plausibly related to provisions of Israel’s basic laws and/or resemble constitutional claims that might be brought in U.S. courts, many of them seem far afield from such concerns. Medina nevertheless implied that the Israeli Supreme Court could have intervened in all of these areas, including large chunks of social and economic policy, but chose not to do so, perhaps because it worried about the potential for the sort of political backlash it now faces. It is precisely this open-endedness to which Posner objected: When judges reject or mandate government policies without “reference to orthodox legal materials,” he argued, they are usurping the role of legislators.
Medina did not really have a response to that objection, except to suggest that judges unavoidably act as legislators while pretending otherwise, a point he said Posner’s own preferred judicial method concedes. “According to [Posner’s] philosophy, a judge should ignore deontological limitations, for instance the recognition of values such as the dignity of man or tolerancea view which is in line with his critique of Barak,” Medina wrote. “However, Posner does not maintain that morality is irrelevant for judicial decision. In fact, the opposite is true: Posner believes that the judicial decision should be basedentirelyupon a moral approach that he calls ‘legal pragmatism.'”
Under that approach, Medina said, “a judge should render his decision by calculating the anticipated social ramifications of the application of each of the possible interpretations in the given case (though the nature of the calculation is unclear). Even if one were to ignore the difficulties in implementing such an eclectic approach, it is clear that this approach conforms with the position that a judge’s decision should ensure the greatest harmony between the law and (a certain definition of) the social good. The fact that Posner believes that the correct moral approach is consequentialism (and not deontology) does not make his approach any more legitimate than that which Barak espouses; thus his harsh critique of Barak’s approach is astounding.”
Even by Medina’s account, however, legal pragmatism comes into play when a judge chooses between “possible interpretations” of the law, which requires an intelligible principle that arguably can be applied in different ways. According to the basic law that the Knesset enacted in 1992, for example, “every person has a right to privacy and to intimacy.” That right includes restrictions on searches of “private premises” and protection for “the confidentiality of conversation” and of “writings or records.” On its face, that guarantee is broader than the U.S. Constitution’s privacy protections, and it is clearly relevant in search and seizure cases.
Medina mentioned various other ways in which the basic laws have been construed to protect “fundamental rights of the individual.” He noted decisions “voiding the government’s decision to prevent the participation of certain parties and candidates in elections,” “enforcing the prohibition against discrimination against Arab citizens in the distribution of state land,” “enforcing the prohibition against discrimination against women in a variety of contexts,” “protecting freedom of speech,” “prohibiting the use of harmful meansincluding torturein investigations of those suspected of terror activities,” and “prohibiting the use of military methods that cause ‘disproportionate’ harm to citizens.”
Those cases involved disputes that implicate widely recognized civil liberties. Not so the hypothetical decisions that Medina imagined, which involved issues such as recycling, desalination, pharmaceutical subsidies, and welfare programs to address “widening economic gaps.”
Medina also noted that Israeli “judicial activism” has included “relatively great involvement in ensuring the proper functioning of politics (predominately
restricting those who are suspected of breaking the law from serving in public office, barring someone from public office when there is a conflict of interest, and so forth).”The New York Times cites a recent example: Israeli judges invoked “reasonableness” to “bar Aryeh Deri, a veteran ultra-Orthodox politician, from serving in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. They said it was unreasonable to appoint Mr. Deri because he had recently been convicted of tax fraud.”
The bill that the Knesset is taking up this week targets decisions based on “reasonableness,” which the Times describes as a “flexible and contentious legal standard that currently lets the court intervene in governance.” Under that standard, the paper says, “a decision is deemed unreasonable if a court rules that it was made without considering all relevant factors or without giving relevant weight to each factor, or by giving irrelevant factors too much weight.”
That sort of analysis seems indistinguishable from the judgments that legislators themselves are charged with making. It is not hard to understand why critics would argue that the “reasonableness” standard invites judges to overstep their proper authority. The question is whether Israel can curb such unbridled discretion without compromising the rights that the Knesset has promised to respect.
Editor’s note: All writing, editing and photography for this story was done by Ryans
It is 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. Beer o’clock. The shout goes up in a Denver bar as a man indeed named Ryan strides through the door. Suddenly, everyone in that bar, roughly 250 people, all begin hollering a rolling chorus of “Hey, Ryan!” Then the entire no-way-the-fire-marshal-would-allow-this crowd breaks into a unified chant. “RY-AN! RY-AN! RY-AN!” You see, they are all named Ryan, too.
New Ryan is steered toward a check-in table, where two men named Ryan ask to see Ryan’s ID to officially prove his Ryan-ness. He does. Thus, he is worthy of entrance. Even if he hadn’t been named Ryan there is a clipboard of forms stacked under a cover sheet that reads “Legally Change Your Name to Ryan,” — legit legal forms drafted by a lawyer Ryan. New Ryan doesn’t need to file a document. Instead, he is allowed admittance once he agrees to wear one of the hundreds of identical “Hello my name is Ryan” name tag stickers, to be affixed to the T-shirt he is handed that announces where all these Ryans will be later that evening: COLORADO RYAN MEETUP 2025.
It is June 20 and Ryans hailing from 31 states and Canadian provinces have assembled in the Mile High City seeking to achieve previously unreached heights for a gathering of humans sharing an identical handle. Their goal: to set a record for the most people of the same first name to attend a sporting event. That event: Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Colorado Rockies at Coors Field.
“You see, Ryan…” explained Ryan the college student from Seattle, surrounded by Ryan of Nashville and Ryan of Amarillo, Texas. “I think that what myself, Ryan, Ryan, and all of the other Ryans are here to do is set the bar. Place that bar where no one of any other name would dare to match it. And setting that bar starts here in this bar.”
The streetside banner that hangs by the front door of that bar reads “Is your name RYAN? Join the Ryan Meetup. No Bryans allowed.” Soon, the Ryan Triumvirate climbs atop the bar inside that bar to welcome their fellow Ryans and instruct them on the proper execution of the Ryan cheers they will use once they have made the 105-degree, sun-baked, three-block walk to Coors Field.
“Let’s go, Ryan!” Clap clap clap-clap-clap
“Give me an ‘R’!”
“The Rockies have four Ryans on their roster and the Diamondbacks have one,” Ryan explains to the room of Ryans, speaking of Colorado third baseman and cleanup hitter Ryan McMahon, rookie shortstop Ryan Ritter, as well as pitchers Ryan Rolison and Ryan Feltner (though Feltner is on the injured list) and Arizona reliever Ryan Thompson.
D-backs righty Ryne Nelson does not count. Ryne is not Ryan. There are rules.
From atop the bar, one of the Ryan Trio has been DM’ing with one of the Rockies Ryans but won’t reveal which one. Not yet. “We cheer for all Ryans. They are our priority!”
The Ryan rah-rah routines are explained by one of three New York Ryans standing above the others. In 2022, Ryan Rose, aka Ryan of New York No. 1, says she had moved to New York and was looking to make new friends. After a couple of failed attempts to create other groups, she decided to lean into her name and printed 10 flyers she posted around her neighborhood. It was a deliberately simple sheet of white paper with the question “Are you a Ryan? No Bryans allowed” and a QR code that led to further information. Ryan Cousins, aka Ryan of New York No. 2, says one day he was leaving his apartment and only a few steps from his front door saw people gathered around a telephone pole. They were reading Ryan Rose’s flyer and one of them turned to him and asked, “Isn’t your name Ryan? You should do this.” When Ryan Cousins showed up, only two other Ryans were there, Ryan Rose and Ryan Le, aka Ryan of New York No. 3, who had been sent a tweet of the flyer from a non-Ryan friend.
From there, the three OG Ryans began posting more Ryan invites around the city and wherever their work travels took them, from Texas to Philly. Then one of Ryan Le’s Manhattan flyers caught the eye of a popular New York social feed, which created buzz within a Ryan Reddit group.
Ryan began a’flyin’.
“All of the sudden,” Ryan Cousins recalls, “We went from Ryan Meetups that had maybe 20 people to having 100, like overnight. And it’s kept growing from there.”
There was a Ryan Rodeo in Austin. A St. Ryan’s Day in Boston. An All-Ryans Game Show in San Diego. They raised enough money in one hour to help a family afford their baby Ryan’s hydrocephalus surgery. And one year ago, they rented out a Manhattan movie theater for a screening of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” attended by 150 Ryans and one Hugh.
“We were hoping Ryan Reynolds might show up,” Cousins confesses. “We did bring in the one Hugh. But we also knew that Hugh Jackman lives in New York and if he had shown up, we would have totally replaced the other Hugh with the movie star Hugh.”
It is now 5:30 p.m. and the Ryans are on the move. A couple dozen Ryans are in a pack, marching toward the entrance of Coors Field. There’s a Denver Ryan, accompanied by another local Ryan, whom he’d just met. It was his Uber driver. “When I got in and realized his name was Ryan, I said I didn’t care if he was at the end of his shift or not, he was parking his car and coming with me.”
There’s a kid in a Rockies jersey with purple “Ryan” lettering across his shoulders, holding hands with a woman whose shirt reads “Ryan’s Mom.” There’s a Ryan in a Kris Bryant Rockies jersey with the “B” and “T” covered with tape so it just reads RYAN. There is a wobbly-walking gentleman in a bowling shirt with a script embroidered “Ryan.” Other shirts say, “Ryan’s Wife,” “Ryan’s Sister,” “I’m With Ryan” and, yes, “F*ck Bryan.” Multiple foursomes of Ryans have no shirts at all, having grabbed the cans of black body paint that were at the bar and slathered R, Y, A or N across their chests. When a “SportsCenter” live report from the pregame festivities attempted to include them, they accidentally but enthusiastically spelled NAYR.
However, on this day the most memorable Ryan was a pregnant woman with a name tag affixed to her belly that informs us she has a Ryan on the way.
It is a reminder of why there are so many Rockies-bound Ryans here in her age group. Millennial and Gen Z Ryans, with some Gen X Ryans, dominate the crowd. According to the Social Security Administration’s database, there isn’t even a blip on their Ryan radar until the 1940s, when the name first cracked their list of the annual top 1,000 baby names. Ryan remained ranked in the triple digits for decades until Ryans ran rampant in the mid-1970s. Ryan peaked in 1991 as the 11th-most-popular name for boys, when 27,534 Ryans were born in the United States. From 1976 through 2009, Ryans rooted themselves in the top 20. Then the Ryan rung of the registry rusted over. In 2024, only 3,892 boy Ryans were birthed, ranking 87th in popularity. They were joined by 399 girl Ryans, rated only 702nd on the female moniker mountain.
“Maybe that’s why we are all so eager to find each other and stick together,” surmised one of the 477 girl Ryans born in 1998, having arrived at the Ryan Meetup from Colorado Springs. “They might call Ryan a dying breed, but clearly, we are very much alive. And maybe we will inspire people to do the right thing and bring more Ryans into this world. By pregnancy or paperwork.”
Ah yes, that paperwork. She and the other Ryans are all buzzing about the one guy who accepted the Ryan Meetup offer to convert him into one of them. To another round of “Ry-an! Ry-an!” encouragement, he held up the name change form he had just filled out, ready to be taken to a local judge. His given name was Payton Thatcher. But here, only 2½ miles from where Peyton Manning once led the Broncos to a Super Bowl championship season, this Denver-living Payton has started the process of changing his name to Ryan. Why? On the line of the form that says: “I am requesting a name change for the following reason(s)” the newest Ryan simply wrote “Because Ryans are awesome.”
As the Ryan Revue marches its way to the front steps of Coors Field, they are greeted by one of the six Ryans who work in the Rockies’ front office. He is there to escort a group of them to the field for the ceremonial first pitch, where they will be joined by Ryan Harris, one of the offensive linemen who blocked for Manning during that Super Bowl run.
It was those Ryans on the Rockies staff who reached out to the Ryan Meetup after spotting their efforts on social media. Said Cousins: “We had done a Ryan Meetup at a Boston Red Sox game and had a decent number, but it’s hard to get a lot of Red Sox tickets. The Rockies don’t have that problem, currently.”
That’s what happens when it’s late June and you are a franchise that is losing ball games at a historically terrible rate. The kind of season where a big league club is looking for any sort of spark to get its ballpark cranking and save its sinking ship before it hits the bottom of the South Platte River.
Rockies Ryan watches the Ryans take a photo in front of the ballpark and then announces, “Ryan, come with me!” And they do.
It is now 6:30 p.m. and the five sections located in the lower-level center-field section of Coors Field are reverberating with the roar of Ryans. Two of those sections are almost exclusively Ryan’d. The Ryans get revved up when the Diamondbacks relievers walk across the outfield to the bullpen and Ryan Thompson gives them a point. They are whipped into a full Ryan ruckus when on the 8,369-square-foot Rockies Vision scoreboard, the massive face of former Colorado outfielder Ryan Spilborghs appears like the Wizard of Oz, points down into the Ryan sections and leads them in a “Ry-an! Ry-an!” cheer. There are so many Ryan Meetup white T-shirts in center field that one Ryan wonders aloud if it might keep the hitters standing 415 feet way from being able to clearly see pitches. Then he adds, “But I don’t really care as long as the two Ryans who will be hitting can see. I’m not sure how I will react when they are at bat.”
Ryan’s and the Ryans’ reaction comes precisely 30 minutes later, when Ryan McMahon’s name is announced and the 6-foot-2 third baseman, whose 11 homers have been one of the lone bright spots during this dismal season, approaches the plate. The Ryans lose their collective “Ry-an! Ry-an! Ry-an!” mind. When he starts with a 1-0 count but then strikes out on three straight pitches, they give a polite “You’ll get ’em next time” clap. Then, as they sit down, a Ryan among them shouts, “That umpire must be a Bryan!” They are cheering again.
(Side note: Unless you are a Ryan, you can’t possibly understand the animosity toward Bryan. Why? Imagine being called the wrong name on a weekly, if not daily, basis. For Ryans, the Bryan confusion makes for so many long first days of school, so many misspelled coffee shop cups, even diplomas and driver licenses that have to be sent back. Is it a bit much to serve a F*ck Brian Belgian White Ale as they did at the brewery on this day? Probably. But now maybe you understand where it comes from.)
One inning later, Ryan Ritter’s name booms from the same scoreboard that has spent every between-inning break showing the in-stadium contests, every participant being a Ryan plucked from the meetup. The rookie is barely two weeks removed from making his big league debut. He has yet to record an extra-base hit.
Until now.
When Ryan Ritter slides into second with a double, he turns and points toward the Ryans in center field. As the Ryans dance and scream and hug, Ryan Cousins finally reveals to the Ryans around him that the Rockies Ryan he had been DM’ing with all day was the one now standing on second. Five pitches later, Ritter is crossing home plate for Colorado’s first run of the night.
It is now 7:30 p.m. and Ryan McMahon is back at the plate. It is the bottom of the fourth and the Rockies are trailing 6-1. What happens next is difficult to fully describe. McMahon shows patience as he takes a first-strike fastball and then lays off an 85 mph changeup out of the zone from Diamondbacks pitcher Zac Gallen. Then, another changeup. It is also 85 mph but most definitely in the strike zone. At least it was. Moments later it lands in the right-field stands, 467 feet away, Ryan McMahon’s 12th home run of the season.
A Ryan and his Ryan-loving wife, dressed in Denver Nuggets and Rockies jerseys with “Realtor Ryan” sewn onto the shoulders, kiss. A Ryan in a 1986 Nolan Ryan jersey high-fives a woman holding a sign that says “Ryan, Call Me” complete with her phone number. A kid Ryan in a Ryan Meetup T-shirt is crying. Pretty sure the grown-up Ryan next to him accidentally stepped on his toes. He is also crying.
“It was so cool, man,” McMahon would say later. “They were loud. They were rowdy. It was good energy. So, it was cool.” And are the Ryans the reason you went yard, Ryan? “It sure didn’t hurt. Whenever the Ryans want to come back, let them know that this Ryan is all for it.”
So is Ritter, who wound up 2-4 and accounted for three of the Rockies’ runs, with two of his own and an RBI.
“Yeah, it was me they were DM’ing on Instagram,” the Ryan wearing No. 8 confessed later that night. “They were acknowledging me, McMahon, Rolison, it was fun.”
It is 9:30 p.m. and perhaps there has been a little too much fun. The last Ryans standing have found their way to Section 160. Few are actually standing. The usher has given up trying to check and see if everyone is in their correct seats, having picked up a “Hello my name is … Ryan” name tag and stuck it just above his official stadium name tag that reads Deandre. The R-Y-A-N boys are once again standing in NAYR formation, the black body paint now sweat-smeared into more of a M-A-V-P. At least three Ryans are asleep. An award has been given to a South Florida Ryan, determined to be the Ryan who traveled the farthest to be with other Ryans. A baseball is being passed from Ryan to Ryan, who handle it with reverence as if it were fine gemstone delivered by Ryan Diamonds (that’s a real place in Los Angeles). It is the ball Ryan McMahon deposited in the stands, retrieved by a Ryan Meetup member who offered the person who caught it $40 and a free beer.
The last burst of Ryan rowdiness rolled through Coors Field a half-hour earlier. That’s when a Ryan ran down to the front row of the meetup sections and announced, “Hey Ryan, it’s time for a Congo line!” Ryan, of course, meant a conga line. And after that line of Ryans had completed a “Let’s go Ry-an!” lap of the stadium, many Ryans went not so quietly into the good Colorado night.
By the time the game ended with, fittingly but cruelly, a Ryan McMahon strikeout, the final official tally of the Ryan Meetup had been rounded up and rounded off. The official Ryan count per Ryan Cousins was 481, based on tickets sold to Ryans. But Rockies estimates were higher, in the 700 range. It wasn’t enough to break the record for same-name gatherings. That still apparently belongs to a group of 2,325 Ivans who amassed in 2017. But until someone of a non-Ryan name can prove otherwise, the Ryan Meetup is claiming the mark for its original goal, the most to pack a singular sporting event. Until they do it again.
It is 10:30 p.m. and the Ryan Meetup core planning group is back at the bar where it started eight hours earlier … plus one. Ryan Ritter is now among them and the shortstop has traded in his Rockies jersey for a white Ryan Meetup T-shirt. The next evening, Ryan McMahon will take pregame warmups while wearing his.
There are laughs. There are smiles. There are a few more “Ry-an! Ry-an!” chants and a few more F*ck Brian beers consumed. Because another goal has also been reached. It’s the problem that Ryan Rose went searching to solve three years ago. She wanted to find some friends. Now Ryan — and all these other Ryans — have more friends than they can accurately count.
“Here we are, in this time where everyone and everything seems to be working to divide us,” a local Denver Ryan said during the game, identifying himself as a psychologist. Dr. Ryan, like dozens of other Ryans, had come from his seats elsewhere in Coors Field to see if as a Ryan he might get in on this Ryan-ing. “Here’s a bunch of people from all over, probably from very different backgrounds and political views, and they have found the simplest common ground to make them forget all of the things that might normally prevent them from being together like this.”
“I mean it when I say the Ryan Meetup has changed my life,” explains Ryan Fisher of South Florida, a member of the committee. “A year or so ago, I was struggling to find my identity. As we get older, it’s hard to meet new people and make new friends and make new friend groups … and this is the most random thing that just has been the coolest thing. When I talk to people about it, they often tell me how they can hear the joy in my voice. And that means a lot to me.”
The New York Mets announced that starting pitcher Griffin Canning suffered a ruptured Achilles on Thursday night.
Canning was placed on the 60-day injured list on Friday and faces a lengthy recovery. It is the same injury that affected NBA stars Damian Lillard, Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton during the playoffs.
On Thursday, Canning threw a pitch to Atlanta’s Nick Allen, who grounded out to shortstop Francisco Lindor. Planting his leg to run to back up third base, Canning crumpled to the ground and held his left leg in the air. Mets catcher Luis Torrens waved for the training staff and manager Carlos Mendoza to attend to him, and they had to help Canning off the field.
The right-hander pitched 2⅔ scoreless innings, allowing just one hit and fanning three with no walks. In his first season with the Mets following five with the Los Angeles Angels, Canning was 7-3 with a 3.77 ERA in 16 starts.
New York made a number of other transactions along with Canning’s move to the IL.
The Mets recalled right-hander Blade Tidwell and selected left-hander Colin Poche from Triple-A Syracuse. They optioned right-hander Austin Warren and infielder Jared Young to Syracuse, and left-hander Dicky Lovelady elected free agency after declining an outright assignment to Triple-A.
The Mets also reinstated infielder Mark Vientos from the 10-day IL. Vientos last played June 2 before going on the injured list with a hamstring strain. He is in the Mets’ lineup for Friday’s game at the Pittsburgh Pirates, batting sixth as the designated hitter.
Finally, the Mets signed outfielder Jose Azocar to a minor league deal and sent him to Syracuse. Azocar began the season with New York, playing 12 games for the major league club; after being granted free agency, he saw action in two games for the Atlanta Braves, then was granted free agency again June 18.
Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh, who leads the majors in homers with 32, said Friday that he will participate in next month’s Home Run Derby.
The Derby will be held July 14, the night before the All-Star Game, at Truist Park in Atlanta.
It’s the first derby appearance for the 28-year-old known as Big Dumper. This season, Raleigh became the first catcher and first switch-hitter to reach 30 homers before the All-Star break.
“I’m excited to represent the Mariners and our fanbase,” Raleigh said in a statement. “It will be extra special for me getting to do it in Atlanta, where I spent a lot of time playing baseball as a kid.”
Raleigh said he is considering hitting from both sides of the plate, which would make him the second player to do so after Adley Rutschman in 2023.
“That’d be kind of cool, but you’ve also got to plan it out right with the timeout,” Raleigh said, according to MLB.com. “… I feel like it’d be cool to do both.”
His father, Todd Raleigh, will pitch to the Mariners star in the Home Run Derby. Cal Raleigh also expressed a hope that his brother, 15-year-old Todd Jr., could serve as the catcher.
No catcher has ever won the Derby, which began in 1985.
Raleigh is one of the finalists for the American League starting catcher spot in the All-Star Game, along with the Toronto Blue Jays‘ Alejandro Kirk.
He will be the eighth Seattle player to compete in the Derby, joining Hall of Famers Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez, along with Jay Buhner, Alex Rodriguez, Bret Boone, Robinson Cano and current teammate Julio Rodriguez. Griffey won the event in 1994, 1998 and 1999, and in 1993, he became the only player to hit the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards on the fly.
Entering Friday, Raleigh was batting .275 with 69 RBIs, 15 doubles and 47 walks in 79 games.
