Love and Baseball

I wrote a few days ago about the Texas Rangers — with sincere apologies — and I have to do it every so often because I never know when the next time I’ll have the chance to write about baseball will arise. I needed to create a time capsule to remember what this moment was like, for frankly it’s just been so damn long and I am conditioned, as a fan of the Texas Rangers, to not only anticipate the worst but to expect it.

I got massively tongue-in-cheek towards the end of it, my latest blog, that is, but it’s one of those things where more or less everyone already assumes anyway that I am some cocky arrogant narcissistic piece of shit so why not lean into it, you know? I wanted to be a sports journalist before I ever knew what it meant to be a sports journalist; the more I learned about what that job specifically entailed I understood that it wasn’t for me and it was never going to be for me, because at the heart of every story I write is me. That’s not to confirm the somewhat pointed collection of descriptors I mentioned earlier in this stanza, it’s just a fact. No matter what sports team I am writing about, Chiefs, Rangers, Duke, Virginia Tech, I am and always have been just using them as the background — or foreground — to write about myself. My favorite teams are merely an extension of me.

The Texas Rangers, whom I admitted were my first love when it came to sports teams, are like the most intimate relic of my childhood, teenage years and early adult life. Because of how dramatic the circumstances played out last time they were in the position they are now in, in 2011, it’s almost too personal for me to write about. Anybody who knows anything about me in real life knows, beyond anything else that they know about me, that I am a sports fan. Regardless of the sport, or the time of the year, or the matchup that may occur on a given Sunday, or Thursday afternoon, whenever someone doesn’t know they can always rely on me to know. Sports are my reference point. They are my identity.

But baseball, and the Texas Rangers, more specifically, are that one sport and that one random sports team within the sport who happens to be my favorite, that I tried to distance myself from as much as possible. That is never what diehard fans want to hear, for you stand by your man in the same way as you dance with who brung ya. I have always loved the Texas Rangers. But they were my first love. And first loves tend to leave deep cuts. They hurt sometimes, you know? You never forget them.

In 2011 I said and have referenced several dozen times, I’m sure, that when the Rangers lost to the Cardinals in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series sports were never the same for me after that. It wasn’t like I don’t enjoy them, or care about them, or spend countless hours revolving my life around them. I just mean you can get any higher than I got. You can’t get any closer to reaching a championship without actually getting it. Everything happened in Game 6 of that World Series. I could feel almost like a balloon the feeling of deflation while it was happening in realtime; I knew then that everything had changed.

I almost don’t even want to get into the details, but I will for the sake of my blog. I was in my parent’s kitchen, huddled up with my mom next to the small TV that was in there. The Rangers were winning 7-5 with two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning with two runners on base. Young fireball closer Neftali Feliz — once a godsend prospect whom the Rangers acquired from the Atlanta Braves in the franchise-altering Mark Teixeira trade a couple years earlier — threw a perfect pitch, off the outside corner, to Cardinals third baseman David Freese, who kind of threw his bat head at the ball with two strikes in a way to protect the plate and prolong the game, but since the pitch from Feliz was thrown so hard the contact that was generated was immense. The fly ball carried to around the warning track in right field, and Nelson Cruz couldn’t get his glove on it. It ended up a triple and two runners scored. The game was tied 7-7.

In the top of the next inning Josh Hamilton, who won an MVP with the Rangers and is arguably the most talented player in the organization’s history, hit a two-run homer to make the game 9-7. Since Texas had already burned through their best bullpen arms, they used Scott Feldman, who was kind of a journeyman-type pitcher but had real success with the Rangers for a time there, to try to close out the game. Again, with only one strike away from a World Series, and men on second and third, he threw a beautiful cut-fastball in on the hands on Lance Berkman, who hit a broken-bat single to center field to tie the game at 9-9. The Cardinals ended up winning 10-9 on a walk off homer in extra innings.

It’s funny, you know, talking about love and baseball. When the Rangers made the World Series in 2010 my ex-girlfriend and actual first love of my life, her name was Caitlin, texted me even though we were on murky terms: world fucking series. By the time the 2011 World Series came around, the following year, which I just described above, her and I were in regular communication and I told her after that Game 6 loss to the Cardinals in the brutalist of fashion — twice — that I wasn’t even going to watch Game 7. That’s the funny thing about that Game 6 loss… the Rangers were actually up 3-2 in the series. It was tied 3-3 afterwards, but they had another shot. I just knew what was going to happen afterwards.

She was disappointed that I was in essence abandoning my team, but I followed through. The next night I was out with the boys and the game was on in the background but it was 6-2 and the Rangers lost. I was right. I knew what was going to happen. You don’t get that close to the mountaintop without ever reaching it and then all of a sudden regroup 24 hours later and do it. I had seen, even as a 21 year-old, enough sports to understand the way these things worked.

And that’s why I remain so numb to the whole song and dance of it all. That’s why the Rangers have been so dormant in my life for so long. We can’t get it twisted, I still pay attention during the regular season. I always do. Even though I tell people when they ask me about the Rangers that “they stink,” it’s not like I am not consuming them from a distance. This year, with this whole playoff run and everything, I had to take them out of the garage, sort of dust them off, and remember what this feeling was like. I love it so much, but I also hate it.

It has been very cathartic for us fans of the Texas Rangers to relive what these opportunities really mean to us. I wrote the other day about the upcoming series against the defending-champion Astros, not knowing quite for sure what was going to happen. I gave my most optimistic approach, which can at times be a rarity for someone like me, but I couched it all with some bullshit about the city of Philadelphia as if it should mean something. It doesn’t. Nothing ever does.

But we are here now, and the Rangers have a 2-0 series lead against those Astros. Apparently all these historical facts are coming out, about how teams that go up 2-0 win the series 84% of the time, how no team has ever lost the first two games at home and ended up winning the series. This all points in the direction of the Rangers inevitably winning the fucking thing, moving on to the World Series. As a math guy I would say that is the likeliest of outcomes. But, again, we are talking about the Rangers. If ever history was going to turn on itself, it would be now.

I say that, and I now present you with Adam J. Morris, who writes for Lonestarball, the best current Rangers blog on the Internet. I have said everything that I have needed to say on here, but I just wanted to let everyone know that it isn’t just me. This is a mentality for fans of the Rangers who care so deeply. He described his emotions from today’s 5-4 win against the Astros, propelling Texas to the 2-0 series lead (emphasis mine):

• Much the rest of the game is a blur. Eovaldi finished off the sixth, allowing one more run to cross, making it 5-3. Josh Sborz did his job. Yordan Alvarez homered off of Aroldis Chapman, making it a one run game and prompting Bruce Bochy to bring in Jose Leclerc for a four out save. Leclerc promptly walked Jose Abreu and Michael Brantley.
• At that point, two outs, two on, one run lead in the eighth, I think I went numb. My emotions checked out for a bit, leaving me cold, without feeling. It was as if my mind, having seen things like this go south all too often, had prepared a defense mechanism, separating out my passion for the game and anesthetizing me against the potential pain of a crotch kick loss.
• Amidst that vacuum, Chas McCormick came up. Took a slider for a ball, swung and missed on a cutter, then chased a slider and slapped it weakly to third base.
• Jung, who had been excellent defensively all postseason, but who had the error earlier in the game, came in on it. The ball hit his glove, then popped up in the air, spinning.
• It was an instance when time slowed down. The ball seemed to hover outside of time. It was just an instant, but in that instant, I could see disaster. The ball caroming away, the inning continuing, things falling apart. Collapse. Defeat. All that I saw and processed and experienced in that fraction of a fraction of a second a little white orb was at the apex of its flight.
• And the ball settled into Josh Jung’s glove. He went and touched third. Inning over. The ninth was a 1-2-3, and the game was over. A 5-4 win. And in my minds eye, the image from this game is that ball — which, Jung said afterwards, hit off the thumb guard he is still wearing due to his fractured thumb — in the air, as time slows to a crawl.

I ask: who the fuck talks about sports in such ways, other than fans of this team? I get that many organizations across many sports have never won a championship, have never felt the highs of being so close, and thus don’t know what it feels like to get there but not really get there. They envy us, and we envy them.

We talk about love, and we ask that one philosophical question that pops up that nobody really has a right answer for. It’s the whole “Would you rather love and lose or not love at all?” In the sports-fan sense, the question is whether you would rather reach the championship game or series and not win, or never get there at all?

I can say as a lifelong Texas Rangers fan that nothing was ever better than getting to the World Series in 2010 and 2011, back-to-back. It meant something that people weren’t at that time talking about the Dodgers or the Yankees or the Red Sox or anyone else. It was us they were talking about. It was us that the rest of the league and baseball universe had to deal with. We loved that shit.

But it is also what made us, Rangers fans, specifically, fall so goddamn hard. Our team remained relevant for a solid portion of the 2010’s decade; they won a couple more American League West titles and added a couple playoff appearances to boot. But 2016 — when I was 26 for crying out loud — was the last time they made the postseason. It wasn’t very long ago, but that’s seven fucking years. I’m 33 right now. What the fuck happened?

But now we’re back. Unbelievably the Texas Rangers are two wins away from making the World Series for the first time in 12 years; they are six wins away from doing the impossible. Every pitch, every at-bat, every final score, will keep me unsatisfied until they actually do it. I can’t get high anymore. Not on baseball. I have already gotten too high, and traveled too far, in this sport.

In the nail-biting moments, those which make lesser men crumble, my heartbeat maintains a slow beat. The hard claps and exclamations and jumping up and down I reserve for different moments, generally on Sundays during the NFL playoffs, for baseball is the one sport I went too far with. I came off too strong. And now I’m seeing it again, through the eyes of my childhood self, when I was in a very different place in the world.

That’s what love does to you, though. It brings you back. It makes you feel the things that you forgot about, that you wish you never experienced in the first place, but at the end of the day they make you remember. Remember that you were there. That you are here.