I pick a seat on the right side of the Amtrak train whenever I'm sliding south through New York City en route to DC. The water tower is my guidepost, a sentinel that marks the baseball field tucked between the highway and the river. Baseball has lingered in my mind all month despite spending a week+ in the Utah desert on assignment with camera and notebook in hand.

My in-person attendance this season totals a paltry one game, and I’ve only read one (quite entertaining) short essay. Like most successful stories, the narrative centers the people, not the abstract qualities of sports, all rules and numbers.

Yet those statistics in baseball—176 years of them in America—provide the foundation for a deep archive, which means history, which means humanity.

Baseball is a reminder that we can be perfect for more than a day. And resilient enough to overcome the infinitely bad. This sport tells us the story of ourselves, as reflective of our country’s continued grappling with racial and gender inequities as it is our collective ability to coalesce with strangers in unity, joy, and unabashed screaming at the complex outcomes that result from a simple combination of bat, ball, and glove.

Or whatever's happening in the stands on a slow day.

The game is spies and curveballs and "not even a slice of life" – no, it's the whole thing.
 

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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.