In December of 2013, I sat on a train as it wound its way through San Francisco, out to the ocean. The sun was in season, and shadows danced across the pages as I read a book I’d borrowed from a friend: George Plimpton, On Sports. I’d read Paper Lion, I’d read his work at the Paris Review, but on sports is an anthology of essays he wrote for Harpers, and various other bougie mags. One essay in particular stuck out to me then, and remains burrowed deep in my marrow today.
Plimpton wrote about the many right fields we face in our lives. How as an old man on a community baseball team, he was usually sent out to right field. There are few switch hitters in rec leagues, you know. There’s not a lot of action over there. He spoke of staring at flowers and watching his teammates get the plays — and the glory and error that accompanied them. The beauty of right field, however, is that it will one day be your turn. The ball will fly upward, or bounce erratically on the grass to you. And you switch into gear. You catch it in your glove or you hurl it toward your cutoff man. But by god, man, this is your chance! An error would be tragic.
If my adult years prior to 2014 featured a series of right-handed hitters who pulled to left, this year I was delivered my golden pop fly to the wall. I took it, man.
I moved to New York one month before the beginning of the 2014 baseball season. I took an opportunity to write about sports for a living, but to do so, I had to leave the teams I love so deeply.
In the first few months, the Giants were on fire. And my sleep schedule, it turns out, was similarly torched. West Coast games start at 10:30pm eastern, but I’d stay up late in bed, eyes glued to MLB.tv, fingers hovering over a mixture of iMessages, tweets, and Gchat with my friends back home. What will this season bring, we wondered. Back in April, May, and especially June, we never could have known that we’d be weeping through our joy once again through the month of October.
I moved twice this year, have had three apartments. Three employers, three first days. Two haircuts, I’ve read 25 books, I’ve eaten at least 75 bagels. I dumped someone after he called Zelda Fitzgerald manipulative, crazy.
Through it all (or most — things have settled since November), I had baseball to anchor me back to San Francisco, back to my friends. To act as a constant, my only constant. To lull me to sleep as I returned from parties on Fridays and Saturdays. The sixth inning begins at midnight. Nothing good happens after 2am, but anything could happen until 1:30.
I spent the autumn miserable at a media company that couldn’t find a fit for me; I couldn’t find a fit for them. I wept at my desk and passed the time by reading long essays. Wednesdays, when the Giants played at 3:30, were the highlights of my week. I was most productive during those games: I couldn’t leave my desk, and I felt guilty having the game streaming in a corner of my monitor.
October was when everything changed. It always is, I suppose. Professionally, personally, I felt defeated. But the Giants were hot. They’d snuck into the playoffs.
It was this October that taught me how to love baseball. I loved baseball before, of course, but it was this year that I found the beauty beyond the action, beyond the home runs, beyond the sliders that catch the corner. It’s the statistical anomalies — I went to Pittsburgh and watched Brandon Crawford, a decidedly terrible hitter, hit a grand slam. In DC, I shivered in my jersey as the Giants slid back from a shutout in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs. It took them eighteen innings, but by god, they did it. It was this team, this season, this year that taught me that baseball is beautiful because — not despite — its wild unpredictability. I am a person who craves control, a tendency developed as a function of necessity. There’s none of that shit in baseball. For 162 nights per year, I am freed from that weight.
I went back to my dream job the week of the World Series. It would be my final fly ball to the right field of my year. The night of Game 7, in which Madison Bumgarner once again blew away my understanding of baseball, humans, how blessed I am, I sat huddled over my computer in head-to-toe Giants gear. I had two posts ready to launch: one for the Giants, one for the Royals. The Giants won. Again. I published. I wept.
Baseball had floated me through my first year in a new city, and it’d gone out in glory. The season slunk away like the tide on my home coast. I had to say goodbye to the team that had anchored me back to San Francisco. It was time; it was fine. It was all so shockingly convenient.
The day after the World Series ended, Roger Angell published his gamer. In it, he described the way Pablo Sandoval caught the last out of the series. His last play as a Giant, as the offseason would turn out.
“He made the last out of the season, catching a harmless pop in foul ground and falling backward to the turf, splayed there in his delight.”
When I read this now, two months removed from the World Series and the turbulent eight months that preceded it, I find new relevance. He could be describing me, on this last day of December.
I feel the same, Roger. I feel the same.
