When the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops

And so ends another season of baseball. 162 games scheduled and 162 games played. Collectively, 2,430 games were played this season. I mentioned in a previous post that baseball was the game of my youth. I collected cards, memorized stats, went to games, and even played some myself. But in 1994, I fell out of love with the whole enterprise with the Strike and the cancellation of the World Series that year. My return to the game has been in fits and starts, but 2024 was the season when I really began to feel some of that old yearning for the game rekindling in my old heart. The excitement to see records made and broken, and following the rhythms of the season, from streaks and slumps, to blowouts and blowups.

I didn’t plan it or set out to say, “This is the year I get back into baseball.”

It just happened.

I went to my first ballgame when I was 7 years old. I watched the Cubs play the Braves at Wrigley Field. This was before the lights. The Braves won 7-5. I still have the program for the game where my Dad kept score. It’s not the fancy multi-page programs with full color photos on glossy stock that you may see these days. It’s just a simple bi-fold on heavy stock with the rosters of each team on one side and a scoring table on the other. The only color is on the cover, which is a stylized rendering of a man sliding into second base.

After that game, I decided my favorite player was Bill Buckner, a first baseman who got a hit that day. Don’t ask me for any reasoning behind that decision. The workings of my 7 year old brain are a mystery, even to me. Maybe I liked the direct, alliterative name. I’ve always been partial to those, so maybe it was that. Whatever the case, Bill Buckner was it. My baseball card from my T-Ball days bears witness to this fact.

Then 1986 happened. By this time, we’d moved again to the expansive confines of Norfolk, Virginia within Hampton Roads metroplex of Southeastern Virginia. They had a AAA team affiliated with the New York Mets at the time called the Tidewater Tides. They played at Met Park, whose dimensions were the same as those at Shea Stadium where the Mets played. This is where I became a Mets fan and my allegiance shifted to Dwight Gooden.

It was in the 1986 World Series where Mookie Wilson hit a ball right-up the first base line to the awaiting glove of Bill Buckner, who through the vagary of chance failed to put his glove down completely on the ground, allowing the ball to roll past him to give Mookie the hit. This started a chain reaction of events that ultimately led to the Mets winning the game and the World Series itself.

With my minor league team linked to these Mets, they had my allegiance for the rest of the 1980s. But then the Atlanta Braves came along in the ’90s to steal my attention.

I’d seen most of the Braves pitching staff and many of their players come up through the Richmond Braves, who were the cross-state rivals of the Tides that came through town all the time. I saw the most dominant pitchers of that age just humble the hometown team, but became a fan of them at the same time and rooted for the Braves up until ’94 and the Strike.

One of the effects of traveling around so much as a kid (and later as an adult), is a kind of rootlessness and the feeling that you don’t really belong anywhere. I was from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, leading to an eclectic mishmash of accents, idioms, and sports team affiliations. I consider myself from Norfolk, mostly because it’s where I lived the longest as a kid, and it’s where most of the important milestones of childhood and my teen years happened. But we didn’t have a major league team of any kind around us, and it was a Navy town, so everyone from around the country (and the world to an extent) all lived in the same place, denying it any real depth of cultural identity or team loyalties.

So most of the sports teams I followed were based more on key personal events than anything else. I liked the Cubs because that was my first baseball game. I liked the Mets because my hometown team was affiliated with them and they came through every year to play an exhibition game. I liked the Braves because I’d seen many of their players and I was impressed by their ability.

But I never had any strong feelings towards them. I was happy when they did well, but I had no real emotional investment in any of them. I held a much more ecumenical view of things, as my true heart belonged to the sport itself more than any individual team. I tended to be a fan of players, rather than the livery they were wearing at the time.

Now in the warm September of my years, I felt the old pull of my youth tugging at me again. Nostalgia for me is painful; a bittersweet longing for places I can never revisit and people I can never see again. I do my best to resist the siren song of sentimentality beckoning me to come and wallow in its inviting, shallow waters that feel like a warm embrace, but provide no comfort or relief, only a deepened sense of emptiness and loss.

But I’ve hit the time of my life where the long years of striving is ended. I did what I set out to do and I’ve accomplished everything I wanted. I’ve traveled and lived around the world, met Presidents and Kings, and participated in history. The family is grown and while my labors have far from ended, their only purpose is to provide for the necessities of life. Any sense of personal investment is gone and many of the things that I set aside have risen again in my mind, beckoning a return to the simple pleasures of my youth. Not out of any sense of nostalgia or vain attempts at recapturing moments that can never return, but to just do the things that made me happy.

Among these is baseball. Of all the loves of my youth, this is the one that caused the deepest hurt in my heart, but time, experience, and plenty of therapy have granted me a measure of equanimity and the ability to just let things go. I live in Southern California now, which interestingly is the first place I actually chose to live. Every other place I’ve lived in was a decision made by the government or through forced circumstance.

The great thing about the region is it has an embarrassment of sports teams. While I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’ll really belong, I’ve definitely insinuated myself here and its dovetailed with my renewed interest in baseball. We’ve got the Angels and Dodgers here, and while I’ve been to a few Angels games and I don’t have anything bad to say about them, I threw my lot in with the Dodgers.

I take that back, there’s one thing that really bugs me about the Angels — they’re in Anaheim. In Orange County. Yet they call themselves the “Los Angeles Angels” (of Anaheim?). I can’t abide such blatant falsehoods and I wonder just who on earth this bit of chicanery is meant for. Everyone who lives here knows they’re not in LA or LA County, so the name can only be for people who don’t live here and why would they care either way? They ought to just go back to being the California Angels. Everyone was happy with that back then. They made movies about them and everything. Now they’re just kinda there and known more for wasting a generational talent and getting me free medium fries from McDonald’s when they win a game.

But the Dodgers? To a kid growing up on the East Coast, they were synonymous with LA and California. Fernando. Tommy Lasorda. Vin Scully. There was always a romantic notion of California born of TV and movies, and the Dodgers got wrapped up in all of that as well. And while the real world is obviously far from that concocted illusion, it had completely captured my imagination as a kid and it’s hold is so strong that I can never shake it.

I don’t think it’s just me, either. I think a lot of people here live in two Californias — the one we deal with every day and the romantic ideal of our imagination. Every time you get beat down by the traffic or the receipt at the grocery store, all it really takes is that one perfect sunset and the California of the mind re-asserts itself again for a while longer. There is magic here; fleeting, near insubstantial, and elusive. But every once in awhile you have it in your grasp for just a moment and gifted a glimpse of Paradise before it flits away.

At any rate, when I moved out here, everyone was a Dodger fan unless they lived in Orange County (which I don’t), so I figured why not. They’re a team with a storied history with an equally historic ballpark, and if I was to be a true southern Californian, I was gonna be a Dodger fan.

I didn’t jump in whole hog, but mostly in fits and starts. I thought it was odd the Houston Astros seemed to have the Dodger batters dialed in and then it came out that they were cheating, which not only offended whatever sense of justice was left in me, it revealed something else to me — I was mad on behalf of a baseball team. I was in it.

I still didn’t really get into the weeds until the pandemic season of 2020, when I was stuck at home and didn’t have much to do except hang out with my family and listen to baseball games on the radio. Most of the games were being played during the day, so I ended up listening to almost every game that season while assembling puzzles, cooking, or re-arranging the house. With the shortened season and day games, I was able to really dial into the rhythms of the players and begin to understand the game management philosophy of Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager.

By the time the post-season came around, I knew these players. I had a feel for how their at-bats would go in various situations (the types of pitches they bit on, what they tended to do when down in the count, etc) and also a good picture for when Roberts would yank a pitcher and why. It was the first time I’d watched a World Series in maybe 25 years where I was completely dialed in and invested in at least one of the teams.

And then they won. And I was finally, completely, a Dodger fan. I bought a hat and got a T-shirt.

Over the following years, I attended games, bought merch and got excited when they signed Ohtani in the off season. After that, I followed this team more closely than previous years, and after attending probably the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen in person, I knew this team was something special.

They even had a Mookie.

And so the season ended and the Dodgers once again won their Division, heading into the post-season amidst a mix of hope and hesitation — they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball for the last ten years, but they were never quite able to get over that hump and win the whole fucking thing outside the pandemic season, which a lot of people dismiss.

After getting into a 0-2 hole against the Padres, there was a feeling of here we go again. The Padres have been the Nemesis these last few years, bouncing the Dodgers out in the first series of the post-season, but then something new happened.

The Dodgers bats woke up. Freddie Freeman, playing on a bum ankle and gutting his way through the post-season, became Mr. October and delivered clutch hits again and again, including the sweetest grand slam I’ve ever seen in Game 1 of the World Series. The Dodgers rolled the Yankees 4 games to 1 and finally won in a full season, fulfilling all the expectations of the last decade and cementing Dave Roberts as one of the most exceptional managers of our times.

Amid the exultation and celebration, the season is now ended and we are bereft until Opening Day next Spring. The days will be shorter, football will assume its preeminence in the calendar, and the world will continue to turn about its axis.

I’m extremely happy I returned to baseball and fortunate to follow one of the best teams in recent memory, who delivered real magic this year and enriched my life in many ways this season, providing a soundtrack to my summer and delivering fantastic experiences for me and my family. I would’ve been poorer for having missed it.