Venezuelan Doctors Save Chilean Lives | Shifting Back to Starting Pitchers

The first time Luis Vieras Delnardo gazed across Last Hope Sound and saw the icy blue waters ringed by snow-covered mountains, he felt like he was watching a scene unfold from a movie. The then-33-year-old anesthesiologist from Caracas, Venezuela, had applied online for a position at the public hospital in Puerto Natales, a town in Chile’s southernmost region — Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic. He had never heard of the town’s name before, so on a frigid winter day last July, Vieras stepped off a bus to see if he could envision building a life in a blustery coastal town in the Chilean Patagonia.

Just over three years ago, Newsweek ran a story titled “Baseball’s Unhealthy Obsession With Starting Pitchers Is Killing the Game.” At the time, the thought process was clear: Four of the top five highest-paid baseball players in 2016 were pitchers. Starting pitchers appear once every five games, at most, when they’re healthy. If that starter fails to outperform his contract, teams are essentially left paying more for a depreciating talent who works less. It should come as no surprise that plenty of front offices were eager to change this dynamic.

Nowadays, the dominant baseball philosophy contends that a high bullpen usage rate will, in the long run, lead to more success than relying on starters to pitch deep into games. Rather than running a tired starting pitcher out to face a lineup for the third time around, the stat nerds running organizations prefer bullpens full of power arms.

You might think Turkey an unlikely spot to find a small, isolated community of Poles, and you’d probably be right. But that makes the village of Polonezköy — which has been popular with Pope John Paul II and other Polish celebs — all the more intriguing.

Nestled in the middle of a forest an hour’s drive outside of Istanbul — Turkey’s most populous city of 16 million — Polonezköy has become the place to escape to when city life gets to be a little too much. Visitors might want to check out this quaint and tranquil village soon before increasing government controls take effect that may erode what makes it so appealing.