It's cool to watch baseball with your dad

Some reflections on a fellow substacker's reflections

“Alice from Queens” (a pseudonym—aka “AFQ”) is a writer best known for her presence on Twitter. She’s probably a genius, but no one—or at least no one we know—knows anything about her, aside from some scant biographical details that she’s dropped in various places over the years. Her Twitter takes are mostly confined to politics, with some occasional commentary on art (high and low), so you can imagine our surprise when, earlier this week, she dropped a new story about baseball. 

The piece, titled “GET ME INTO SPORTS: BASEBALL” is an interview with her dad in which he attempts to explain to her—someone who has never been bitten by the baseball bug—why she should love the game. AFQ’s dad knows his stuff. At one point in the interview, he’s able to discern, within two years, when a photo at Shea Stadium was taken based on the billboard advertisements and the playing career of Pete Rose. What’s really special about the interview, though, is the light it casts on their relationship with one another. It’s the sort of old-school, intellectual-and-loving parent-child relationship that some of us might remember fondly—and others of us might aspire to someday replicate. 

It’s interesting to see this dynamic play out while they’re talking about baseball. For some context, baseball fans just watched a World Series that was dominated by competing narratives: one around whether or not the Atlanta Braves fans are irredeemably racist or are simply adhering to a benign tradition, and another around whether the Houston Astros even deserved to be on the field after they won their last World Series by cheating. Now, entering the offseason, a new set of narratives is starting to dominate the baseball world, these ones about the impending labor lockout that might shut down baseball if the players and the owners are unable to reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). 

The sport is, by most measures, sputtering along, on the verge of what feels like could be a total breakdown. But Alice’s interview is as good a reminder as any that the really important narratives that come out of baseball are the personal ones. Alice and her dad spent a lot of time talking about the origins of baseball, but what her dad is really getting at throughout the entire interview is the way that baseball structures his view of the world—in other words, the way that baseball can become a sort of meta-narrative for people’s lives. Our favorite part of the interview was when he waxes poetic about Nolan Arenado. 

Notice that Alice’s dad is “bummed he can’t find footage of the guy between pitches.” He’s interested in the highlights, but he’s also interested in the rhythms of the game—how you can feel, if you ever played baseball yourself, the instinct to stay ready, even when you’re sitting in the upper deck on a very hot summer day during a 0-0 slog. A long, seemingly interminable time passes when nothing happens, and then, very quickly, everything happens all at once. 

Early in the interview, AFQ and her dad have a discussion of how baseball became America’s national pastime. They are more interested in the mechanics of it—how it came to exist—but he also hints the reason it caught and why it continues to hold us. Their discussion reminded us of one of the most famous quotations about baseball, from a speech by A. Bartlett Giamatti, a writer and academic who briefly served as the seventh commissioner of Major League Baseball. It goes like this: 

“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. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Baseball is rhythmic. Like a runner taking an extra base and then coming around the score, it neatly marks the passage of time, providing an analog for the passage of our lives. First, you’re a kid squirming around in your seat while your dad teaches you how to score a game and why the number “6” denotes the shortstop and not, as would be more logical based on the positioning of the infielders, the third baseman. And then *bam*—all of a sudden, you’re an adult, with that memory serving as the quintessence of your childhood. Alice’s interview with her dad gets to the heart of baseball, which is about the passage of time, and about fathers and their kids. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and his ghoulish squad of owners can try to squeeze the joy out of the game all they want, but it’ll be hard to take all of that away from us. We’re already counting down the days until spring. 

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about . . .

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. . . the money FBS programs pay coaches not to coach? “The Boom of Dead Money in College Sports,” by Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach in ESPN (November 5, 2021).