Baseball
Friday April 11, 2025
Lindsay’s probably tired of hearing about this, but I’m back into baseball. As if she wanted me to be MORE into sports, here I go trying to follow a league that plays 162 games plus a month-long postseason.
But hell, what am I supposed to do? The Red Sox are fun again. Over the last six years, they’ve been a dumpster fire organization run by distracted ownership that routinely pleaded poverty while forcing the front office into trading or lowballing the best players from the 2018 World Series-winning team straight out of town. All the while, they’ve fed lies to the fanbase about wanting to be competitive as the payroll for the 4th most valuable organization in the league dropped to 17th, and the team finished last in the division twice.
Growing up, the Red Sox were my team. I’ve always followed all the Boston teams, but when I was playing my own 150+ game baseball schedule every year, the Red Sox were the thing that reminded me that I actually enjoyed this stupid game.
A big reason is how historical it is.
There’s just something special about the pageantry and legacy of Major League Baseball. The great players hold some loftier status in our collective imaginations; we deify them as great cultural figures rather than sports ones, and the numbers and moments live in an accessible ether rather than characters in a record book. I’m willing to bet many of you can picture Willie Mays’ Catch, Carlton Fisk waving the ball toward fair territory, or Bill Buckner overrunning a ground ball. You might feel the number 61 is important for some elusive reason. (Even Roger Maris’s 61 home runs in a season and Babe Ruth’s 714 in a career are strangely memorable, despite both being broken multiple times over.) Lindsay knows all about Tony Gwynn and .394 and Trevor Hoffman and “Hell’s Bells.”
Cooperstown just resonates in a way that Springfield or Canton don’t.
And maybe that’s why when the Red Sox are good, it just feels big. There’s been no shortage of awesome athletes to root for in Boston in my lifetime, but no team has the sheer volume of impactful players who transcended the field to become true fixtures of the city. Papi, Pedro, Pedey, Wake, Manny, ‘Tek, Trot, Millar, Roberts, Xander, JD, Sale, fuckin’ Mookie. Curt Schilling’s on the Mount Rushmore of pricks, but goddamn, did he deliver a hell of a run in the 2004 ALCS.
When the Sox are good, Fenway is buzzing, and when Fenway is buzzing, Boston is an unbelievable place to be. The Sox really do impact the city that way, more than even the Celtics kicking everybody else’s ass. They play in the summer, they play in a place that hasn’t moved for more than a century, and the players are always just about an arm’s reach away. Baseball’s a fan-friendly experience everywhere, but Fenway is a true emotional center to Boston in ways that I don’t think exist in many other cities.
The Sox are off to an underwhelming 7-7 start, but it’s clear they have more talent than they have in years. There’s a ton of season to play, but the vibes are already so high around this team.
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The Sox are loaded with exciting young players behind All-Stars Rafael Devers and Jarren Duran. Kristian Campbell and Wilyer Abreu are looking like two of the best players in the league under 26. They finally spent money this offseason to bring in a clubhouse leader and champion in Alex Bregman. They traded for a bonafide ace in Garrett Crochet. They have two of baseball’s top 10 prospects primed to debut this season in Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer. They’re set up to contend for the rest of the decade, regardless of how absurdly the Dodgers have destroyed the league’s parity.
Who knows how good they’ll actually be. But at the very least, the Sox are fun, and that bodes well for summer.
One Song: “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups
I spent an inordinate amount of time with a dozen dudes in sweltering vans in the American Southeast as a moody teenager. I had a wild love-hate relationship with my own baseball career, and one of the most complicated things to navigate was finding time to feel my teenage feelings on these trips when you’re constantly surrounded by teammates. For me, the best way to be left alone was often to put on headphones and hide in plain sight. One summer week in Myrtle Beach, I probably listened to this song 100 times and ever since, it has brought back ambivalent memories.
One Hollywood: The Clubhouse, Netflix
For some reason, Netflix decided to follow last season’s Red Sox for a docuseries. The team was 81-81 and not particularly fun to watch, but supposedly the doc is entertaining. I haven’t seen it.
One Book: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
I hated this book. Truly thought it was one of the worst things I’ve ever read, and it reminded me why I don’t read baseball books. Every book about baseball you read is about the love of the game or some bullshit. Baseball is a sadistic, horrible sport that’s more intensive therapy than game, and not one person who has played it competitively has an idealized relationship with it.
Fiction written about baseball loves to flirt with the psychology of baseball as part of an overarching theme that the game’s cerebral nature helps you navigate real-life difficulties… No, baseball players overcome personal or emotional challenges despite baseball doing absolutely everything it can to drag you back into the depths of despair and making you question your self-worth. There are far more minor league alcoholic burnouts than there are guys who made an MLB appearance.
One Place: PetCo Park, San Diego
The best ballpark in America, non-Fenway division.
One Food: Miller Light
Baseball’s zeitgeist is far more compelling than other sports. You don’t really see baseball movies anymore, but that’s partially because so many have been made already. The Black Sox, Mantle and Maris’s race to 61, A League of Their Own, even fiction based entirely on the iconic status of the game’s greats (Field of Dreams).
There are so many great stories about the game and its players, but the greatest of all is Wade Boggs deleting 107 beers on a cross-country flight. The number has almost certainly been exaggerated by time, and there’s a lot of speculation that the cans were 8-ounces, not today’s standard 12-ounces. What’s not debated is that Boggs drank Miller Light.
If you ever want to drink 100 beers, make it Miller Light.
One Quote: “I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning.” - Laurie, The White Lotus
Finally, a complete deviation because Laurie’s monologue in last Sunday’s season finale of The White Lotus was truly beautiful. Lindsay and I didn’t love this season, but the finale was rife with closure and consequence, and none of it resonated so strongly with me as Carrie Coon’s Laurie breaking down about her ostensibly fruitless search for meaning in her life only to finally realize that existence itself is meaningful. It’s a decidedly Buddhist epiphany for the show’s fun rudderless third wheel and is perhaps the obra maestro of Mike White’s immaculate grasp of character arc.
I agree with you about Petco Park. And how about the Padres’ start of the season?? Baseball is off to a wonderful start!