I hope by the time you read this, the Yankees have snapped their seven-game losing streak. The Minnesota Twins are usually the salve for whatever ails this team, but New York has been dead, dull, and boring for the last week. That last indictment is the worst one for me: If you’re going to be bad you have to be entertaining. Every team goes through dry spells — yes, I promise, every team — but you can’t bore me. The Colorado Rockies are my B-team purely because they just do things that nobody else
in baseball does and that is entertaining even as they’re arguably 15 years behind the rest of the sport.
In this bad, bad week, the closest we got to interesting were two Jazz Chisholm Jr. stolen bases and an OG Anunoby-esque tip of the baseball over the fence by Spencer Jones. It’s not exactly been a comedy of errors despite the 14 the Yankees have made in their streak, more of a funeral dirge of errors.
At the same time, this will be published a little under an hour before the most important men’s soccer game in Canada’s history begins. They are playing Morocco and they will likely lose. Indeed, it probably won’t be close. I do not care.
Canada’s men’s team is certainly not as polished as most in the Round of 16, down several of their best players and playing like a Doberman puppy who is not yet aware quite how big his paws are. I do not care.
Before this World Cup, Canada hadn’t earned a point in tournament play in two previous trips. Prior to 2022, they had only even qualified for one World Cup in its history, back in 1986. To jump from “never recording a point” to “winning a knockout game” has this second knockout match against a much better team mean that, for me, there are no stakes. Everything I could have reasonably hoped for this side has already been accomplished. Whatever happens on Saturday, successful World Cup for les rouges.
That these two things came at the same time — the team I think about more than I think about my like, extended family, and the team that the entire nation turns its eyes to a couple times a decade have wildly divergent runs — makes me think about the nature of fandom itself. I’ve always appreciated the way Meg Rowley, managing editor of FanGraphs, has defined it: a low-stakes way to feel emotion.
There’s so much in the world that can make us feel so many things. In more recent years those feelings have often been of anger, frustration, injustice, fear … and these feelings bring high stakes with them. Sports shouldn’t be a distraction from the very real things with very real stakes that exist out there, because sports are downstream of broader culture and can indeed be useful object lessons for talking about how things like rampant corruption, courts oriented toward profit instead of justice, and protected monopolies allow the Los Angeles Dodgers to pay less than their fair share of revenue back to the league. Hmm, what possible parallel could I be drawing to here?
Anyway, downstream of culture.
Instead, let sports be a low-stakes way to engage with those feelings, and hopefully the good feelings too. When Aaron Judge comes back, because he will come back, and hits that first home run and it’s something stupid like 117 mph off the bat, and Statcast insists that it somehow only went 428 feet and not 828, I’ll let myself giggle. When Alphonso Davies gets his first touch today, I’ll allow myself to laugh. And when Anthony Volpe fails to turn yet another double play and look skyward as if the correction to his messy footwork is written in the clouds, I’ll grind my teeth. If only for a moment.
It’s just sports, after all.
