I went to go watch baseball with someone I know (I’m not sure how many times you have to meet someone to call them a friend, or if you have to see the inside of their house, or what), unsure what to expect. I knew I was going to see the Mets (my team, even though I had never seen one of their games, because I live in south Brooklyn, so fuck the Yankees) and the Marlins (their team). I knew the general rules of the game (hit ball good, sometimes, but sometimes not so good, depending on location). I knew that the games lasted a very long time. I knew that the best thing you could get at a ball park (soft serve in a small hat) was, unfortunately, no longer available to me due to being lactose intolerant and not wanting to take my chances on an hour and a half long subway ride.
Knowing all of this, I went to watch baseball, but even though I grew up going to minor league games, and with family who cared about the sport, I never understood the appeal of baseball. To me, baseball is quite boring. My favorite part of the game, other than the small hat of soft serve, were the varieties of races that happen between innings. I loved the condiment races, and dizzy bat races, and, perhaps most of all loved the electric cooler races they had at Lookouts games, because I also wanted to win a motorized cooler. Growing up, I knew that my grandfather and my uncles cared, quite passionately in their youth, about the Atlanta team. I knew that they had a sort of spiritual devotion, albeit one that seemed to wax and wane, to that team that lasted a lifetime. I knew that one uncle in particular had some sort of superstition about going to their games (it was either good or bad). They had watched, breathlessly, as that team had lost and lost and lost and lost and then, finally, won. I knew all of this, but I didn’t understand why they were breathless to begin with, I did not understand what moved them.
As I have mentioned, maybe a time or two—a totally reasonable and moderate number of times I am sure—I started watching pro-wrestling a few years ago. Because I am constitutionally unsuited in having an average degree of interest in things, I almost immediately became a fanatic. I have gone to states, and a country, I had never before visited, in order to watch people in fun outfits and with regrettable hair, play at fighting. For me, wrestling filled the space that romance novels once filled: stories about love, longing, redemption. I get the most enjoyment out of narratives where the emotions are foregrounded, and communicated clearly. I find literary fiction to be annoyingly obtuse, because I am quite capable of not understanding people in regular conversations, and don’t need novels to replicate that for me. I read books, and watch wrestling and TV to take a break from the constant confusion of day to day interactions.
Wrestling, to me, is easy to love, and easy to care about, passionately, devotedly, because there are stories. It is a genre of storytelling, where words, clothing, the movement of the body, the turn of a head, every moment and interaction is heightened to tell a narrative that, even if it is not obvious at first, in the best instances is blindingly clear in retrospect, like good genre fiction. In wrestling, if you are happy with the company you have devoted yourself to, you trust that a story will be told, that characters will grow, and change, that there will be conflicts that break your heart, and victories that buoy your faith in the world. (Hey! Watch DDT! It’s so good!)
Sports fans, by which I mean fans of real sports, always tell me, when I bring this up to them “there are narratives in baseball/basketball/soccer” which always confuses me a bit. I mean sure, there are narratives “team does bad, team does better” or “coach is bad, manager is bad,” “player becomes better/does something cool/funny/nice/bad” stuff like that, but it’s all so… real. I want the surety of a plan. I want to know that my faith will be rewarded some day.
But I realized, at the Mets game Friday night, listening to this person that I know, who is not my friend but could be, I guess, talk about watching baseball with their father as a child, and asking me to be quiet during certain moments, so they could watch, devotedly, their boys: there is a reason why every baseball player is religious.
Everyone says baseball is like religion. I think it is something that everyone who has ever said anything about sports has said, it has got to be one of the most overused cliches in the world, but it’s true! At first I thought “oh it’s just the Abrahamic religions that can be mapped onto baseball” but then I realized, thinking about my uncles and the Atlanta team, and the Mets fans in my neighborhood “no, you could see the whole ethos of Confucianism here too: the sage kings of the past, the longing for a better, mythic time, where there was a perfect order.” If only we could learn enough, find a way of learning (playing) that would take us back to that time, when the Mets won the world series, when it wasn’t shameful to be a Mets fan.
The Abrahamic traditions are too obvious: the obligation of enduring suffering in this life, the promise of eternal salvation in the next. This is why, I think, there is so much disdain for Yankees fans, they spent too much time in the promised land, there was no 40 years of wandering in the desert, with only mana from heaven and Miriam’s well to sustain you. They have not undergone all the trials of faith that we see in the Torah. Fans of the Yankees are the reason why G-d had to go so hard during the Passover: they were convinced by the Egyptian priests, so G-d was forced to show his full hand at the Red Sea. The Yankees are, it seems, in a truly Confucian situation now: they had their dynasties ruled by sage kings, and now they have lost that ancient learning.
Going to see the Mets, talking with a baseball fan, you really get the sense of the true meaning of L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim. For every Mets fan, for, it seems, every baseball fan, the enjoyment of the game isn’t so much in the game itself, but rather in the waiting for next year; next year in Jerusalem my team will be good. Somehow, every baseball team is miserably bad, year after year, and that is the point. Can you love a winning team? Maybe for one or two years, but after that, why? Would it really make you happy? The enjoyment of baseball seems to be anguished hoping, watching, desperately yearning for the time to enter the promised land. As soon as the promised land is entered you feel nothing but dread: the temple will always be destroyed, but the Messianic age was foretold, so at least there’s that to look forward to. The fan of baseball has taken the lesson of the Israelites to heart: they fear the 40 years of wandering, and they have devoted themselves, body and soul, to the belief that they will reach salvation.
Wrestling is, compared to that, a bit godless. A wrestling fan is someone who is constantly at war with their god, second guessing the decisions of the booker, complaining and resentful. A wrestling fan is one of the spies of Canaan, coming back to say “well, if X had won over Y, this story would have been better.” Wrestling is modern, it’s a religion for non-believers, for the atheists who have talked themselves out of god. Baseball is for the true believers, with nothing but faith and season tickets to sustain them.
Or, idk, maybe they really like statistics? I honestly don’t know.