If you build it
Hello, friends!
Last night Squish stayed up a bit past her bedtime, watching baseball with me. She's settled on a favorite team—the Los Angeles Angels—and they were battling it out with the Oakland Athletics. When we started watching the game, Oakland was up 7-2.
Squish is learning how to root for a team even when they aren't making it happen. It's a marvelous thing to witness as a parent who also loves baseball, to see your child ride that roller coaster of highs and lows for the first time. It's a time machine that transports me back to childhood, when I watched the Houston Astros lose too often.
Squish is growing up without a home team—there are no major league teams in Oregon (though the Hillsboro Hops, a minor league affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, play a short drive from our home)—so she reached back to her earliest days for some help. She was born in California, and though she has no real memories of the state, she has a deep affection for it; it's a magical land she dreams of returning to someday. Given that, she had a handful of choices: Would she be a Giants fan? Dodgers? Maybe the A's? (She's seen Moneyball.) Padres?
She made her choice because of Felicia and me. In 2007, when we'd been dating just a month or two, we took a road trip from the central coast down to Anaheim, where we watched the Angels play the Twins. I don't remember who won. Instead, I remember what it was like to sit with Felicia just behind right field, to eat hot dogs and cheer. Squish knows this story, mostly because it's also the story of how Felicia and I nearly died after the game. (Another story for another time.) In any case, the Angels became essential to the story of how Squish came to be here at all, and so she had her team.
We watched as the Angels struggled. "No team can lose a lead as efficiently as the A's," I told Squish, encouraging her not to give up quite yet. And it was true! The Angels went on a tear, and before we knew what had happened, they'd demolished the Athletics' lead and taken a small lead of their own.
Squish went to bed after the ninth inning, with the score tied 8-8, and I kept watching on her behalf. The Angels stumbled, giving up three runs in the tenth, and then, despite a two-run homer in the bottom half of the inning, they fell short. The game ended in an 11-10 loss.
This morning, walking the trail, Squish said, "They lost last night, didn't they." I said yes, and she said, "I knew it." Baseball is a marathon, I said; even if you live and die with every single game, there's always another one tomorrow. "I remember once you said baseball can break your heart," Squish answered, a few steps farther down the trail. She left that sentence hanging, as if she wasn't quite sure how to tie a nice little bow in it.
Her favorite player is Shohei Ohtani. There's speculation that, if the Angels fall out of contention for the playoffs, Ohtani may be traded away this season. I asked what she would do if her favorite player no longer played for her favorite team. "I'd still root for the Angels," she told me. "My favorite player would just be somewhere else."
My favorite player, when I was her age, was Darryl Strawberry. I started really following baseball at the tail end of his time with the New York Mets, and saw him move to Los Angeles after that. (Though he played for the Dodgers, not the Angels, who at the time were known as the California Angels.) Any time the Dodgers came to Houston, I'd try to convince my dad to take me to a game. We'd sit in right field so that I could see Strawberry up close. I rooted for him, and for the Dodgers, despite the Astros being my home team.
Baseball is big in our house right now. Squish was sick last week, and we spent a lot of time watching games together. She got lost in the small details, felt her soul crushed when her team took a beating, soared a bit when they didn't (the Angels hit three homers in a row a few days ago, and Squish couldn't stop talking about it). When there weren't any games on, we watched baseball movies; she's seen a lot of them, so the most recent was The Rookie. She's eleven, at that age when documentaries or black-and-white movies are, by default, boring, so I haven't yet gotten her hooked on Ken Burns's epic series about the game. But she's beginning to sound a little philosophical about baseball, and maybe that will be my way in.
The game is a constant, filled with ghosts and fairy tales. In Field of Dreams Terence Mann said:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
In Burns's series, one of the men interviewed says, “There is this hope that even one hundred years from now, baseball will be recognizable.” Another says, “I worry about many, many things, but I never worry about baseball.”
I sure do love this game. Felicia loves this game. (Our first date, in fact, was at a ballgame.) And it makes me endlessly happy that Squish has come to love the game, too.
I know today's letter had nothing to do with writing or the creative process. Sorry about that.
⚾️ Until next time,
Jg
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