The Consolations of Baseball

I go through my days in this truly wretched time carrying a ball of anger, disgust, and fear in my belly at every moment. Because of my calm exterior, the legacy of my Great Plains upbringing, most people can’t tell that I am constantly seething. While that’s been great for my external relationships, I need things in my life to keep my interior turmoils from ripping my soul apart.

I have plenty of antidotes: reading good books, talking to the small minority of people who actually see the current situation for what it is, hiking, gardening, traveling with my family, putting myself into my teaching, and (of course) writing essays. On top of that is one that forces me to engage more broadly with the world: baseball

My affection for baseball runs deep and long in ways that are inexplicable from any rational viewpoint. My love is for the game itself, not just a particular team, a boyish kind of love cultivated through endless hours of sorting baseball cards and reading Roger Angell’s books. This romance began in my early youth, and despite a brief waning in my late teens, has been with me ever since. A lot of cringey stuff has been written about this connection by middle-aged men over the years. It’s easy to judge, but now that I too am a cringey middle-aged man, I get it.

In the first place, baseball is grounding in its dailyness. We all need routines to carry us through, and during the baseball season there is a game being played almost every day for seven months. I think of baseball during the season as my daily friend, always there for me to enjoy. Each year during the last day of the All-Star Game break I long most painfully for a ballgame; a summer day without baseball might as well not have ice cream or flowers, either. The day after the end of the World Series is typically one of the saddest days of the year for me, as it means five long cold months without the Summer Game as my daily friend.

More than any other American sport, I feel that baseball is a kind of patrimony. Parents pass down their love of the game to their kids, who then pass down the old rituals in ways that would make Confucius proud. The fact that one of my daughters rushes to put the Mets game on the TV when she gets home school when there’s a day game fills my heart like little else in this world. It reminds me of how when I last visited my parents my dad told stories of my grandfather playing for the town team (back when those existed) into his 50s. Baseball is a thread holding the generations together at a time when so much is fraying the intergenerational fabric. (Baseball is also where my “small c” conservative side comes out!)

Baseball is also a pillar of my idiosyncratic patriotism. Yesterday while driving to the Mets game with my kids it hit me that if I am forced to leave this country that I will have to leave the American baseball experience behind. I almost came to tears on BQE thinking about that in ways that other contemplations of exile have failed to move me. Yes I know baseball is big in many other lovely countries, but it would not be the same thing. Baseball MEANS SOMETHING in the American experience, from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier to Hank Greenberg sitting out a pennant race game for Yom Kippur to (yes) MLB players moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta after Georgia restricted voting in the aftermath of 1/6. These events mattered because baseball in America matters.

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Going to a Mets game yesterday reminded me of the importance of baseball, but also revealed, in small moments, where we are as a nation. While plenty of progressives like me love baseball, its culture and fandom tends in a more conservative direction. At the game, however, all of that seemed pretty unimportant, we were, all of us, there for the Mets. It soothed the ball of disgust in my belly to be around a lot of people I don’t see eye to eye with in a common cause.

In a couple of cases, that common cause was literal. We showed up very early in order to get in line early so we could catch batting practice and not miss out on the promotional jersey being given away. A lot of people had the same idea, and the lines to get into the stadium grew long. We were standing right at the point where the line had to dogleg to accomodate more people. Many tried to falsely join the line there, most out of ignorance, a few out of malice. I began using my teacher voice to inform people the end of the line was way up the way. Some other fans expressed gratitude for me taking this on, especially when the cutters were not mistaken older people but drunken jerkoffs. A bunch of us banded together to get one particularly recalcitrant asshole trying to cut the line to move along. In that moment a group of strangers got together to enforce a little fairness. That warmed my heart a great deal.

My children and I indeed got in early enough for batting practice, which is always fun. We explored Citi Field’s food options and found our seats in the right field bleachers. Before the game however, one thing shook me out of my reverie. As the ritual of the national anthem began, I realized I had not heard it performed live since Trump’s second inauguration. When it got to “land of the free and home of the brave” I could feel that ball in my stomach getting inflamed, but more by sadness than rage. Those words, rather presumptuous in the best of times, had never felt more divorced from reality in my life.

Soon enough the baseball antidote kicked in. When seeing baseball games in person it’s good to remember that different days of the week have different vibes, just as much as day and night games do. Friday games might be my favorite, as everyone is still washing the burdens of the week off of their backs and looking for a little hardball salvation. There’s also nothing like a Friday game three weeks into the season with your team in first place. The buzz of hope hung in the air at Citi Fields, you could practically feel its static crackle on the concourses, an energy Mets fans are not much used to. It felt good to be hopeful about something, for once.

Little signs here and there inflamed the ball in my stomach, however. Taking children to a baseball game is always a roll of the dice, because the games attract a volatile mix of young families and the loudest, most degenerate drunks I’ve ever encountered in my life. One of the people who tried to cut in line was already completely ripped on some kind of vodka-based wine cooler thing. (One of the guys right behind me was taking a lot of weed vape tokes, but he calmly helped get the drunk to move to the back of the line, so maybe some drugs are better than others at ballgames.) I’ve always witnessed crummy behavior in public, but I feel like it happens even more often nowadays. Trump is both the product of and catalyst for an increasingly impoverished public sphere where people behave in increasingly rude and inconsiderate ways. Even in the ballpark, the seamhead’s church, I was reminded of this dynamic.

There was another sign of the times where we were sitting in the stadium. There was a family sitting by us (thank goodness). As the game went on the father kept getting more and more invested because of an elaborate bet he had made. He even rooted for the Cardinals to tie the game in the ninth (which they did) so one of the Mets he bet on could come through on his parlay. When his own team’s pitcher blew a save he cackled with satisfaction for ten minutes. When his bet improbably came through in the bottom of the 9th, he exulted. His wife, the person actually watching the kids the whole game, looked stone-faced when he bragged about it, probably because she didn’t want him gambling the family’s money away. This little vignette seemed to reflect a lot of things about how we live now.

Any negativity I felt about this didn’t matter much because the game was amazing, the kind where friends text you to tell you how lucky you are to be there. The Mets were down, then tied, then down again. They tied then went ahead, but in the ninth, the Cardinals tied with a home run. We were seated in the second row of the right field bleachers, right on the line. The Philly homer ball struck the foul pole right above me. I had never heard the sound before, it sounded like doom in the hushed stadium full of gut-punched Mets rooters.

For some reason, I was not fazed. Between halves of the inning I could feel, in the same guts unsettled by the state of the world, that Francisco Lindor was going to lead off the inning with a home run. That’s exactly what he did, the ball flying directly over our heads, another first for me at a baseball game. Seeing the ball in air heading to the upper deck I could not believe my eyes, and when I play it over in my head I still can’t fully accept that it was real. Euphoria rocked the stadium, but I didn’t find myself yelling as much as I normally would at such a miracle. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of inner contentment, one I have not felt since at least before last November. Too bad I can’t go to a baseball game every day.

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I like writing about music, but have tended to leave that for my personal blog. However, I am going to start adding a playlist to each post here.

Sister Wynona Carr, “The Ball Game”

The Baseball Project, Buckner’s Bolero

Steve Goodman, “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request”

Buddy Johnson, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”

Bob Dylan, “Catfish”