I Will Watch Terrible Baseball Until I Die
You may be wondering why a person like me would suddenly develop an interest in America's oldest major sport. I'm wondering that too.
Something’s dripping from the concrete overhang onto the green plastic between my legs. It’s only drizzling, but Citi Field has seems to have been precision-designed to collect all the moisture in the upper deck and deposit it directly above my seat.
This game sucks.
My New York Mets are at home playing last year’s (alleged) worst team in history, the Chicago White Sox. With the biggest payroll in baseball, the Mets were losing by two before they even had a chance to bat. The game was supposed to be tonight, but just in case someone might actually want to attend a Wednesday game against a team that had an estimated 0.0% chance of making the playoffs before the season even began, it was rescheduled to 1 pm. That’s why I was able to get this ticket, with a pretty fantastic view, for $25. I could have had better in another section, but this one has a roof that prevents the water droplets from settling on my glasses.
In theory. A particularly large drop splatters my jeans. I shift over one seat, because it doesn’t matter. There are one hundred eighty seats in this section, ambitiously dubbed “The Excelsior Box.” Only eight are occupied by a living person. Almost no one is here.
Why am I?
Neither of my parents ever watched or took me to sports, with the exception of the World Cup, when they would lock around the TV to shout for Argentina, Brazil or Korea in a good year. Even then, I tended to observe with a polite (or less-than-polite) disinterest. When I was growing up, the two times I had been to a baseball game (once Yankees, once Cyclones) were both a chore, which I dutifully but unenthusiastically attended with a family friend for his birthday.
One could forgive my demeanor as that of children everywhere dragged to events about which they do not care in the slightest; then, one could double-forgive it as the obligatory self-satisfied angst it blossomed into during my teenage years. After all, sports were held in a cultural chokehold by half the people I hated in high school, the half who showed up every day wearing the jersey of some soccer or basketball star like a Visigoth who believes that the pelt of a mother bear will imbue him with her strength. But my joylessness was eventually revealed to be just that: an inability to experience joy. Once I discovered that ability (thanks to estrogen, call your representatives), that side of my personality slipped into the good night — not entirely, but far enough.
Still, when I pulled the vernix of boyhood off my naked, wrinkled body to discover who I would become freed of its burden, a passion for baseball was one of the last things I expected to find.
Two people take their seats in front of me, then apologize in case they’re spoiling my view. They move seats after the first inning, seeking shelter from the rain. There are now three people in my row, including myself.
They’re tourists from Australia, and they have never been to a baseball game before; they came to one today because they’ve seen it in movies. They ask me where I grew up (Brooklyn). They’re impressed that I was born somewhere famous — they visited it yesterday, because they’ve seen it in movies. They thought it was beautiful.
I don’t have the heart to tell them they picked one of the worst days to come to Citi Field, nor that most Americans don’t even like baseball anymore. I just play up my accent as I recite the holy numbers to them when they ask: three strikes an out, three outs an inning, nine innings a game.
They leave in the top of the seventh, hot dog wrappers in hand. They thank me for my company. Skyler from Brooklyn becomes a minor character in their magical trip to New York.
‘What do you even like about baseball?’ is the question a lot of people have for me these days. It’s an excellent question. The game itself lasts for two and a half hours, but the highlights video later uploaded to YouTube, which contains all of the interesting things that happened, is only nine minutes in total (this is considered high). Despite the recent efforts to reduce the length of games, baseball’s reputation as boring is still warranted.
One only needs to look at the players themselves for a cue: people for whom every play on the field is factored into hyper-scrutinized metrics by both fans and managers alike, people whose image and future are in jeopardy if those metrics are deemed insufficient. Those people, for whom millions of dollars are on the line, are slumping over the top of the dugout with their arms limp in the air. One of them is seeing how many of his teammates’ caps he can stack on top of his head. They look like middle schoolers whose parents are an hour late to pick them up from band practice.
King of the deadbeats is second baseman Jeff McNeil, a man who perpetually looks like he would rather be doing anything else with his life, even when he hits a home run that gives his team a 3-run lead. I keep his empty-eyed baseball card in the back of my phone case.
There’s a reason baseball is ‘America’s pastime’ while football gets to be ‘America’s game.’ No other sport has this much standing around, so abundant that some players have been famous for chatting at length with spectators while plays were happening in the infield. No other sport boasts legions of grandfathers who record every detail like they have a worksheet on a field trip. No other sport features its stars jogging in white button-up shirts, like your dad when he realizes the bus isn’t leaving quite as soon as he thought.
I think we can forgive the world of baseball for being so dreary. Remember that the regular season is 162 games long, whereas basketball and hockey are both 82 and football only 17. The eternity of them means tickets are relatively cheap, because each is much less important; it’s supply and demand. Nobody’s calling out sick from work to come see the White Sox.
Almost nobody I know shows up to a baseball game because they want to see what happens. Most of them do it because it’s a place to hang out where you can get greasy food; the sport is mostly an excuse. In that way, it has more in common with going out bowling than a basketball game.
A foul ball flies directly at my head. Most fans would try to catch it, but when a small object is going to hit me in the face at a significant number of miles per hour, my animal instincts win out: I duck. It rockets off the floor behind me, heading towards a family in the back row, the dad reaching out as far as one can with a six-year-old on one’s lap.
The attempt is in vain. The ball jumps back down the stands, passing empty row after empty row. It settles at the feet of a young woman in front of me, who holds it up to polite applause. Other sections join in when she walks up the empty rows and offers it to the kid.
On her way back down, she gives a little bow.
The kid begins chanting, “Let’s go, Mets!” It’s the first time I’ve heard his voice.
Mets fans are known for being long-suffering. We tend to think this is special about us, yet another mundane experience New Yorkers claim can only happen here. Maybe there is something to it, though; after all, we do live in the perpetual shadow of the most successful team in American sports. To be a Mets fan is to choose, almost every year, to break your own heart while big brother pops bottle after bottle of champagne across the East River. Why one would subject themselves to that fate varies from person to person.
For some, it is a blanket bias towards the underdog. This is certainly a noble position, but a little hard to swallow with a payroll over $340 million, which is actually more than the Yankees’ $300 million. If you want a scrappy underdog team with good spirit, the Seattle Mariners are only three time zones away. Contrasted against the Yankees, your old-money country club types, the Mets aren’t really the orphan kid with nothing but a dream — we’re the new-money real estate agent blowing his commission on a Lambo.
For some, it’s a matter of heritage. Their dad was a Dodgers or Giants fan, and the Mets were founded explicitly to cater to old Dodgers and Giants fans. My grandfather was a Giants fan, and my grandmother was a Dodgers fan, but neither cares about baseball, and my one relative who did, my other grandfather, was such a Yankee devotee that he spent his final days clinging to life to see Aaron Judge break the American League single-season home run record. He died a few days after.
What I like about the Mets, though, is exactly what I hate about the Yankees. Yankees caps are worn by all kinds of people, from the Bronx to Brazil, including many who don’t care about baseball or New York in the slightest. What the Yankees cannot have, then, is the tribalistic in-group connections, especially in foreign territory: the one time I went to Fenway Park in a Mets jersey, an older man in a Mets shirt pointed at me and smiled like I had just made his week.
For a similar reason, I tend to forgo a Mets cap at Citi Field, opting for the obsolete logo of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I sometimes get mistaken for a Red Sox fan, including by our Australian friends, but it’s worth it when I get to talk to old Jewish guys who are still bitter about the 1958 relocation to LA.
I stand up to grab some food at a glassed-in food court area with views of the field that provides a little shelter from the rain and cold. I run into a friend from college who is here with her mom, who is also a Mets fan. We talk for an inning and change about how miserably this game is going, and why did we even bother to come out and see it, and they’re probably going to blow the season again, and at least there isn’t a line for the Dippin’ Dots. After I leave, I wander around the park, completing a full circuit of the field by the time I return to my seat.
On the Jumbotron, the largest in MLB, a video of comedian John Oliver tries to get a chant going. He fails, but, being a recording, he is at least spared the embarrassment.
Baseball is a sport traditionally passed from parents to children, usually fathers to usually sons. My kind, who pick it up from nothing, are rare. Meanwhile, the number whose parents love baseball but choose a different sport, or no sport at all, is only growing. That’s bad math.
Much ado has been made about how baseball is dying. On a day like today, that feels desperately true. When they built Citi Field, less time was spent debating how to make a stadium to herald a new era for the Mets than whether it was fair that the whole exterior is designed as a tribute to the Dodgers’ Ebbets Field while the only homage to the Giants’ Polo Grounds was the color of plastic chosen for the seats. It’s all dedicated to a lost past, to the two teams that left our city behind from the one that never truly replaced them. A grand mausoleum to the baseball gods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, who left us their colors so we could piddle away the years in Queens under the shared delusion of legacy.
But when I come back on Friday night to see the Colorado Rockies, this year’s worst team, the stadium is packed once again. So maybe all the nostalgic fatalism is an illusion, too.
The thing I love most about Baseball is that it’s the only major sport in America that doesn’t end when a clock hits zero, but when a certain condition (27 outs per side) is fulfilled. Because of this feature, it’s always technically possible to win. Sure, your team might be down by seven runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but there’s no law in the rulebook or physics that says you can’t score eight runs in a row. The game is always daring you to believe something amazing can happen. It almost never does, but the hope stays alive. In this, of all years, I think that’s something a lot of us can use.
As I write this, the Mets have been eliminated from the playoffs. Maybe they’ll win the World Series next year. Maybe trans people will fight for our rights and win them back. Maybe the unknown 33-year-old assemblyman will be the mayor of New York. Maybe I will write a story that changes the world.
Maybe there’s still something to cling to, way out in the dirt.
