Hey Tim,
Last time I wrote* was to exalt. Today it’s in desolation. Mariners baseball, huh?
Last night, your Seattle Mariners lost Game 7 of the ALCS to the Toronto Blue Jays. I refuse to get into bullpen
management discourse with you again, but suffice to say that it was a heartbreaker. That’s kind of the whole thing with Game 7s though, isn’t it? Half the hearts that have laid themselves out will experience a new fissure by game’s end. It’s the cost of playing ball, so to speak.
But we didn’t really understand how it would truly feel, because we’d never been there before.
The Mariners almost made the World Series!
The Mariners almost made the World Series.
One sentence and two truths. It was the best they’ve ever been, but still not enough. How do we reconcile a season of incandescent moments with the lowest of lows? Will we only ever think of this year as what could have been? So many things finally went right, and now we’re left standing empty-handed in the proverbial rain, wondering if it could ever be as good as it was.
In Thanksgiving of 2020, you quoted the opening of Bart Giamatti’s seminal “Green Fields of the Mind” essay, where the one-time commissioner who was also gone too soon, begins “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” That’s the line you hear constantly, the one that appears on all manner of baseball decor and every “Best Baseball Quotes” page. But what they all miss is the end, where he explains why.
It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
As each year passes and I experience more loss in box scores and in reality, I grow more convinced that baseball can act as training wheels for grief. It doesn’t really prepare us, in that you can’t ever truly prepare for grief, but it does give us some scaffolding upon which to process. How many times have we, as Mariners fans, reminded ourselves that this won’t last, amidst another losing season? The exact same sentiment is true now, but rather than soothe it just fosters the gasping ache of an end that came later than ever but still too soon.
It would be a wild, comical disservice to say that if you were here you’d be able to offer some sage, measured wisdom today. Just the thought of that brought a much-needed smile to my face. You’d be right in the thick of it with us, as you always were. Today, it isn’t your wisdom I miss, but your friendship. I wish you were here to process alongside us. To wallow and scuffle and flail around in these messy feelings that are a little bit silly because it’s baseball, and also not at all silly because what is baseball if not a lens for life. But because I cannot turn to you today, I’ll turn to Bart again instead.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
As always, we love you and we miss you.
*Publicly. You and I both know I stay yappin’ to you. Not sorry about it.
