Baseball Tonight

What is wrong with me?

For anyone who knows me that is a question that would take days to answer (my wife would say, “years”). Let me re-phrase it. What is wrong with me that at the age of 76, soon 77, I am prepared to go through an anxiety ridden experience this evening because of a baseball game.

As I write this, tonight, the New York Yankees will play the Boston Red Sox in the third and deciding game of their “Wild Card Series”. The winner will move on in the process of determining which team will eventually become the winner of the World Series – the championship of baseball. Why should I give a flying fuck about that, let alone care so much that I will be sitting and watching it with foot tapping, hand wringing, urination inducing apprehension?

Maybe it’s because it brings me back to my childhood. I had a wonderful childhood and was a very happy kid. A lot of that happiness came from baseball and a lot of my joy from baseball came from the Yankees. I wanted desperately for the Yankees to win and, when I was a kid – through the fifties and early sixties – they almost always did. I remember George Will, the political columnist, writing that a person’s view of the world can depend on which team they rooted for while growing up. He rooted for the Chicago Cubs to win. They never did. Hence, he’s a pessimist – the world is a place where nothing he wants to happen ever will. On the other hand, he surmises, that kids who rooted for the Yankees, like me, are optimists – what we wanted to happen as kids always did. The world to us can be a much kinder and gentler place.

So maybe I care so much about tonight’s game because I want that optimism to again be reinforced. Especially now, in this Trumpian world of hate and odium and loathing, I need my Yankees to bring me back to when my world was nothing like that – when my good guys won.

Maybe also it’s because of my father. My father was my idol. I became a Yankee fan because my father was. Baseball was a major part of our bond. He taught me how to play. We watched the games together. I also had another idol – Mickey Mantle. I remember that when I was very young I seriously wondered whether my father actually was Mickey Mantle. After all, then the games that I saw on TV were all played during the day when my father wasn’t home. Could he be at Yankee Stadium? (I realize how illogical that was, but come on, I was just a little kid).

So, maybe I care so much about this game tonight because I care so much about my father. He died some forty years ago, but the Yankees will always be a part of our bond. In some way, tonight we will both be rooting for them.

Now, of course, they might lose. I am preparing myself for that. I am rationalizing that if they do lose, then the season will be over, and I will thereby avoid the angst of future games. 

I know that I am not alone in this. I know that we Yankee fans are obviously not the only ones who feel this way. Every team has its own maniacs who think like I do. Tonight, for example, there will be folks all over New England and elsewhere who will feel the same way about the Red Sox and will be rooting just as hard against me. 

And in this Trumpian time of social rupture and dissonance, maybe it’s good to remember that. Maybe it’s good to remember that no matter what team we root for, we are all playing the same game. Maybe our team depends on our upbringing or maybe it depends on any number of other reasons, but ultimately, each of our teams is part of the process, the process on which all of these games depend. Tonight, we will watch fans wearing Yankee jerseys sitting together with fans wearing Red Sox jerseys. They will give each other the business each time one of their teams does something good. But they will be doing that in good faith, each knowing that neither of them could be having the good time they are if it weren’t for the other. 

Trump wants us to hate our enemies. Baseball just wants us to root against them. I like baseball much better.