04.07.23

It’s been a little bit since I’ve posted a blog! I’ve mostly been trying to get people to read my most recent essay, Large Soda, which I posted a few weeks ago. If you haven’t read it yet, please do! Otherwise, back to the blog situation…

It’s the home opener for the New York Metropolitans! I tragically don’t have cable, so I don’t have SNY, so I can’t watch it outside of clips and updates on Twitter. So I’m going to take this time to tell you about how I accidentally became a baseball person, after a lifetime of thinking that baseball was very, very boring.

I live alone now, but before I moved into my own space, I had two roommates. I lived with one for three years (Libby), and the other I lived with for two years (Kyle). Kyle is a baseball person, a lifelong Yankee fan. He and I watched Yankee games together on numerous occasions. I would ask him questions and he would have thorough answers. I decided I found Aaron Judge handsome (how original), so when I would leave the room for whatever reason and come back, I would always ask Kyle how my boyfriend — Aaron Judge — was doing. So it went.

But I wasn’t particularly compelled by the Yankees.

Then, in the latter half of my time living with Kyle, I started dating a Mets fan.

We dated during the offseason, mostly. By the time we broke up in late May, the season had barely started. I was not invested. I had hung around a Mets fan or two in my day (I attract a lot of Mets fans, but I don’t have time to unpack what that says about me), and it never really grabbed me because I never really let it. But during my summer of lonely post-breakup depression, when I laid on my couch at the end of the day, I couldn’t seem to get myself to choose anything to watch from the mountains of possibilities on streaming. I felt more paralyzed by the choice than usual. Thankfully, my parents still had cable, so I could sign into their account. I had followed SNY and the Mets on Twitter when the relationship was still intact, so I knew when there were games (which is all the time — there are so many goddamn baseball games in a season).

My relationship with baseball began because it absolved me of the debilitating choice of what to watch on TV. There was almost always a Mets game to watch. So I started watching them.

I fell in love with the booth first. Gary, Keith, and Ron roped me right in, with their actual commentary, sure, but mostly with the fact that it was clear they had known each other for a long time. There are few things I like more than listening to the conversations of people who really seem to like each other. Bonus points for having a common interest among them and a tendency to get the giggles. Getting invested in the commentary means, via the transitive property, I soon became invested in the team.

Despite their huge gains in the last couple of years (it is not lost on me that I picked a very convenient time to become a Mets fan), the Mets have a narrative surrounding them that they suck, they’re a joke of a team. They’re the underdogs. They are David. Watching the Yankees with Kyle never grabbed me in the same way. The Yankees are all clean cut — not allowed to have beards or long hair. They don’t have their names on the backs of their jerseys because you should just know who they are (EYE ROLL). They are Goliath — and who roots for Goliath?

The more baseball I watched, the more apparent to me it became that it’s a sport that is almost entirely contingent on vibes. When the energy dips, be it because the other team just scored a bunch of runs, someone gets injured, what have you, it can be completely detrimental. Conversely, when somebody gets some mojo going, it can completely turn things around (how DRAMATIC could a sport possibly be? I love it). My only note for the sport is that I think they should put more hype guys on the payroll — dugouts and clubhouses need personnel whose main job is to reset the vibes when things start looking bleak (not for nothing, I think I would be awesome at that job). That, and/or add some Phil Jackson-style meditation and yoga to practices to help the players get out of their heads when things aren’t going so good. I don’t know a lot about baseball, I am famously new here, but I think these are pretty brilliant contributions.

I could speak at length about why I love several of the players as individuals, but I will spare you that (for now!). All this to say — let’s go Mets.