How Can You Not Be Romantic About Baseball?

Hey I’m talking about sports

There are many reasons why I love baseball. It is the only sport that reflects the seemingly contradictory yet complimentary dynamics of an ideal social construction - it allows for individual achievement, and yet that achievement must always serve the good of a collective above all else. The games are long and often slowly-paced, giving them an almost meditative quality perfect for lounging with a cold beer and avoiding all other responsibilities, and yet when something is on the line that languidity becomes weighted with import and excitement. Perhaps the most compelling reason for me, though, is the fact that it is the sport in which fortunes can shift most dramatically. The length of a season provides ample opportunity for fate to ply its cruel trade on a team at a given moment - dreams can be ground to dust over the stretch of a dozen games; a beloved championship team can the next year watch a bitter rival climb over the wreck of its dashed hopes of repeat to their own victory; an all star roster can collapse under the weight of injury and attrition.

This season, as the Braves have faltered in the wake of injuries over the course of the last 162 games, the Tigers have put up the best record in the sport over the last couple of months, going 30-11 since August and this week clinching a spot in the playoffs when just a month ago they had a 2% chance of doing so.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

My affections have been split between these two teams since I rekindled my overall fandom in 2011. I grew up watching the 90s Braves win a string of division titles only to falter in all but 1 of their World Series appearances. The first game I ever went to was the match in 1991 in which they clinched their first of those 14 straight pennants. I remember being mystified by both the extent of the celebrations on the field as well as the broadcasting of the Dodgers loss that sealed the division title after our win. I thought every game must be that exciting.

For those early years of my attendance the Braves played at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. Part of what kindled my love of old ball parks was watching games in that dump, a parking deck with seats that still had long steel troughs rather than individual urinals in the men’s rooms. I developed, among other things, a bizarre nostalgia for the unique odor of the urine of a dozen men converging into one noxious river as it mixed with cheap disinfectant and traveled down the grooved metal bottom to the nearest collective drain.

Most young men find the game through their fathers, but I came it to through my mother, the biggest baseball fan I’ve ever known, who took us to that first game and who woke us up screaming a year later when Sid Bream raced home on a bloop single and slid in safe to win their second ALCS in a row against Jim Leyland’s Pirates (Leyland would go on to manage the Tigers through their next peak years). It was my mother with whom I eventually took my first (and as of now only) trip to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and was with her that I took my oldest son to his first ever Braves game earlier this year.

But much of that would come later, as I reconnected with the game. As I moved through high school, my physical ineptitude collided with my overall maladroit status to preclude any interest in athletics, and I simply stopped paying attention to any of it.¹

I don’t consciously remember what brought me back 13 years ago. Nostalgic curiosity, or perhaps a desire to reconnect with some past version of myself, but I started checking standings about halfway through the 2011 season. This was the year that Justin Verlander earned the Triple Crown² in pitching and the AL MVP award. Miguel Cabrera was a year away from winning the first Triple Crown for batting since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.³

It was the Tigers rather than the Braves to which I initially came back. I attribute this in part to the fact that I was nearing 30 and finally getting to a place where I was no longer running from or avoiding my past but fully integrating it within my full self. My absent father no longer defined me, and while I couldn’t (or maybe didn’t even want to) reconnect with him, I could instead reconcile with a version of myself that may not have ever gotten the chance to fully exist but was still nonetheless within me somewhere. This is perhaps why I became so obsessed with Tiger Stadium, which by that point was already long demolished and lay as an empty lot which nonetheless still held the carefully maintained original diamond. The same mound upon which Mark Fidrych had that miracle season, the same home plate that Kirk Gibson crossed in Game 5 of the 1984 World Series still stand, even if everything that surrounded them no longer exists.

That ‘84 series was the last time the Tigers won a championship - despite some promise in the 2010s there would not be another during that period. They flamed out in the 2012 ALDS against the Rangers (who went on to spectacularly blow that year’s Fall Classic to the Cardinals). They would make it to the World Series the next year and get swept by the Giants for their efforts - the second date I ever went on with my future wife was to a local bar to watch them eat shit in game 4. I watched one of my heroes⁴ cheer from the stands of Fenway as the Red Sox knocked them out of contention in the 2013 ALCS and then snuck periodic glances through shamefully covered eyes as one of the greatest pitching staffs ever assembled was shown straight to the exit door in the next year’s division series.

A strange confluence: that year, the last in which the Tigers made the Postseason, was also the last time I had seen Pearl Jam live until this past May. I was walking through the crowd awaiting that very show, wearing a cap emblazoned with the Old English “D,” when I heard a voice in Doppler call out “Detroit - man, tough series.” Not in a mocking or even conciliatory way, but merely stating unavoidable fact.

After that the wheels had fully come off. Jim Leyland and Dave Dombrowski were gone and the team was traded away for parts. It was at this point that the Braves had started to become good again. I’ve never had to worry about the good fortunes of these teams intersecting. I had to navigate finding a way to root for each when Tiff and I went to the last home game the Braves ever played at Turner Field, which was against the Tigers (the only time I got to see Verlander and Cabrera play in person). But they’ve never faced each other in the post-season, and while the Braves may limp into the playoffs this weekend, it doesn’t seem too likely that will change this year - if either team is going to advance beyond the Wild Card round my money would be on the blazing hot Tigers.

But stranger things have certainly happened in baseball, god bless and curse it.

1. I went so far as to make the conscious choice to neither attend nor watch a single football game while at UGA, thinking that I was…well, doing something.

2. This year the Tigers once again have a star pitcher notching a Triple Crown (and presumptively earning the Cy Young) just like JV did 13 years ago.

3. Statheads will tell us that the metrics which make up this honor are not as meaningful as we think. Maybe, but the fact that it took over 30 years for this to happen again surely speaks to something.

4. Yes, it was Eddie Vedder.