Baseball will break your heart and every song is a love song
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
- Bart Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”
“Every time I think I've finished being young
I catch myself having fun
But the moment passes as the sun moves on
So I turn myself back to you”
- Ozma, “Baseball”
The Seattle Mariners’ season has ended. How it happened maybe shouldn’t matter, since the same thing happened to 27 other baseball teams in the last month or so. But I went all in on rooting for this team this year, a team I have been caring about, off-and-on, for nearly four decades, whose games I used to listen to on the radio with my dad, whose fortunes I have seen rise and fall.
So it does matter to me, the heartbreaking specificity of it, the incredible high of Eugenio Suarez hitting a grand slam to win Game 5, which I heard through a faint AM radio broadcast from Bellingham while driving my car across Vancouver, and the crushing defeat of watching the Mariners lead for 2/3 of Game 7, then give up a go-ahead home run to George freaking Springer, their chance to make their first World Series in team history slipping from their grasp as we watched helplessly.
I have so many memories of this team: The sound of Dave Neihaus hoarsely screaming “swung on and BELTED!” on the radio. Flying over Seattle the day the Kingdome was imploded, looking down at what was in some ways the rubble of my childhood (I would mostly not pay attention to the next few years’ astonishingly good teams, led by Ichiro, being more interested in independent rock music and a woman I was hoping to — and eventually did — marry). Going to games with my kids and watching them fall in love with the sport, run the bases on the field after a game, put up posters of Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodriguez in their bedrooms. Making a pilgrimage to Seattle on my last few birthdays in hopes that a late September game will - please, baseball gods! - be meaningful this year.
The joke about rooting for a baseball team — or any sports team — is that because of the way modern sports works, because players come and go in search of better contracts and higher paydays, we’re all really just “rooting for laundry.” It’s funny when Jerry Seinfeld says it, but it’s not true: what we root for is something much bigger: us. Our city, our home, our families, our friends, our memories. That’s why your team winning feels so good, and why losing hurts so much. (To quote Hopkins, as is my wont: “It is Margaret you mourn for.”)
Opening your heart to a hapless team like the Seattle Mariners will hurt you - of this there is no question. But opening your heart at all will hurt you, and it’s something you must do, if you want to live.
As I listened to the song quoted above (“Baseball” by Ozma) and had, to be honest, a modest cry on my way to work this morning, I wondered what exactly the song is about. What does the singer mean when, at the end of the chorus, he sings “I turn myself back to you?” Who is “you?” A childhood baseball team, or the friend or friends he played with, or a girl he was in love with, or the city he grew up in, or the game of baseball itself, or his own youth? It’s probably all of them.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend about a Christian rock band we both listened to as teenagers. I remarked that they had only maybe written one “love song” (like in the romantic sense) in their career. He — despite, I should add, not being a religious person — was quick to counter: “they’re all love songs.” He was of course correct. The “you” at the end of the chorus is all those things, and more — it’s life, it’s love, it’s hope, it’s God, even. (Reminder for us all to read Martin Buber’s I and Thou. A used copy has been on my shelf for nigh on a decade.)
I wrote some years ago that baseball matters because everything matters. I still believe this. I am a white, middle-aged, middle-class American man. I did not need Brad Pitt to tell me I should feel romantic about baseball. It’s in my bones.
My younger son was decked out in Mariners gear for the game last night. He wore a Blue Jays cap to school today. I don’t care so much about loyalty to the laundry — anyway, he’s Canadian, unlike me. The Blue Jays have a chance to win their first World Series in over 30 years. The moment has passed for the Mariners, for now. But I am glad he is turning toward hope.
JHH
Burnaby, BC