Baseball Saved Me

You may have noticed that life is rich with tragedies large and small, and it can be hard to tell the difference.

The loss of a job, a bad breakup, a nervous collapse: Where do these fall on the spectrum? Is there any way of knowing? Does it all depend on where they lead; on what comes next?

So goes my thought process as I make the routine mistake of googling my beloved New York Metropolitans. Record: seven wins, 16 losses, the worst in the National League. Last 10 games: zero wins, 10 losses. Payroll: $370 million, the second-highest in baseball.

My favorite player, Pete Alonso? He’s slugging for the Baltimore Orioles now. Big Pete, bullied as a child, a great beauty at the plate, had spent his entire career in the Mets organization and last year set the team’s all-time record for most home runs. He was a hero to the fans. But the Mets are the Mets, so they just let him go in free agency without a fight.

Brandon Nimmo, my second-favorite player? The good news is that he’s the best hitter on the team. The bad news is the team is the Texas Rangers. The Mets traded him away for Marcus Semien, who is barely hitting at all.

This brings me to the real question: Why am I doing this to myself?

Maybe it’s because baseball breaks my heart in a way I can handle.

Major League Baseball is undergoing a renaissance. Viewership is up, and while it can’t be definitively said that baseball is now more popular than basketball, it’s certainly catching up—last year’s World Series and the NBA championship both went seven games, but a lot more people turned in to watch the Dodgers beat the Blue Jays. The introduction of pitch clocks, changes to the bases, and other small tweaks to make the game shorter and the play more exciting have been credited for the comeback.

I’d like to offer another explanation, informed by how I fell back in love with baseball.

It’s the spring of 2022, and I’m catatonically depressed. It’s not the first time I’ve been in this condition and it won’t be the last. For whatever reason, it’s just something that happens to me. I’m sprawled out on my mom’s couch because I’m sane enough to know I shouldn’t be alone.

I see there’s a Mets game on and, although I’m not in the habit of following the team I grew up rooting for, I watch it anyway. What else am I doing? Up to the plate steps Alonso. Home run. Then Nimmo gets a hit. Then the pitcher, I don’t remember who, strikes out the other side. Shortstop Francisco Lindor is lightning in the infield and raking at the plate. These guys had chemistry. They might not have always liked each other but they trusted each other to be great. You could see it, even tuning in by chance for the first time in years.

There was a game the next day, then the one after that. I watch them both. Each team plays 162 games every season and in 2022 I watched probably 100 of them, right up to their ignominious end in the first round of the postseason. Alonso is a bit goofy looking, with a weak chin and thinning hair and a body people call “unathletic.” But to me, he’s perfect. Same with Nimmo, a Wyoming boy with searching cowboy eyes. I text my friends Audrey and John, both committed Mets fans. I dated Audrey briefly in high school before she dropped me for John. But now we’re all close again and on a group chat to talk about the Mets. Life unfolds in mysterious ways.

The depressive episode came to a close after about a week, and I can’t credit all that to the Mets. But years later, when people ask me why I stick with this misbegotten franchise, I say they were there when I needed them.

The fog lifts, everything is suddenly going somewhat well, and I see on Instagram that a pretty girl named Alice has moved to New York for grad school. I knew of her when we both worked in D.C. We’d never met, however, so I politely slid into her DMs, with the athleticism and grace of Lindor stealing second base, and asked her out for a coffee. We were engaged by the end of the year. I proposed on one knee in Grand Central on Christmas night after meeting her train home. This being New York, nobody appeared to notice, save for a janitor who put down his push broom to applaud.

I dragged Alice to a lot of games in the summer of our courtship. I explained the basic rules, but when the scoreboard flashed important-looking statistics—baseball, more than any other sport, loves its stats—I shrugged them off. Batting average for position players, earned-run average for pitchers—these are the only numbers I bother with. I’m not Billy Beane over here. I’m just a guy who likes baseball a whole lot.

Alice loves the opera. Not in a know-it-all purist way but in much the same way I love baseball—with reverence and affection, and an easygoing willingness to leave a little early when you know how it’s going to end.

“I take her to the Mets, she takes me to the Met,” I tell people. It’s never earned an actual laugh, but it’s a good enough line for small talk at work. Opera and baseball have quite a bit in common too, from the high emotional stakes to the funny costumes. The inherent sweetness of how seriously people take something so ultimately silly. Plus, a baseball game is a theatrical production. And playing Don Giovanni is an impressive athletic endurance event.

There’s also a reason it’s sometimes called the Church of Baseball. This is typically meant derisively, to jab at the way the game never really changes, has a certain piety about itself, and is peaceful compared to the breakneck pace of basketball or the brutality of football. It’s all true. And that’s exactly the point. Baseball today is the same game that Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb played. It’s impossible to compare Johnny Unitas and Tom Brady because so much has changed that they might as well have been playing two different sports. Baseball, meanwhile, invites you—really, requires you—to measure Shohei Ohtani against Babe Ruth, and to argue endlessly and pointlessly about who’s actually the all-time greatest with your fellow fans.

Here lies the missing part of the story of baseball’s comeback. It’s hard not to read into trends like the resurgent popularity of the national pastime, what with all its respect for tradition, and the spike in conversions to Roman Catholicism. Let’s say Americans are seeking a certain solace in these enduring institutions, these man-made structures that offer us a glimpse of something sublime when we get together and believe. We live in dangerous times, an era of profound anxiety set to consume us if we don’t look away from it for a moment and mitigate our fears. This is where religious faith and baseball, our most meditative sport, provide an antidote.

The pews of a church, the stands of a baseball stadium—these are approved places to feel deeply alongside other people without having to talk to them. We all face in the same direction, every last man a boy reaching out for his father. We bring our own children with us even though they won’t know what’s going on. We want them to know the cadence of the liturgy and the crack of the bat. We want them to begin to feel the presence of the spirit, a sense of something that will always be there, that always has been. Every believer knows even a toddler can touch the eternal. It’s more of a miracle when his wrung-out dishrag of a dad still can too.

After googling the Mets this morning, I threw on a baseball cap, lit a cigarette, and shuffled out for a walk. I looked depressed because I am depressed, hangdog Charlie Brown expression and all. “They’ll win tonight,” a man said as he passed me on the sidewalk. It was just a dash of Manhattan kindness, I figured, turning to catch a glimpse of the man’s long brown coat as he ambled away.

It wasn’t until I got back home that I realized I wasn’t wearing the tattered Mets cap I usually wear, but a New York Jets one. And needless to say, the Jets are not playing this late April evening. The Mets will take the field, however, in the first of a nine-game, do-or-die home stand.

Who knows what that was? But the Mets were there when I needed them. They break my heart in a way I can handle. And I’ll be watching them tonight.

This essay was originally published at The Free Press. Check them out at thefp.com.

About the Author

WILL RAHN is a senior editor and writer for The Free Press. Previously, he was the politics editor for Yahoo! News and the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast.