I’ll be real with you, I said pretty much everything that needed to be said about the decade-plus-long journey of the Texas Rangers — also known as my favorite baseball team — in the post/blog/article titled ‘Flags Fly Forever,’ so for the sake of this one I will spare you all of those details. What’s important is that the Rangers last Wednesday night defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-0, giving them a series win of 4 games to 1, and delivering the franchise their first World Series title in franchise history. And there ain’t nothing you or I or anyone can do about it.
Baseball can be a brutal sport to love. I don’t talk much about the years I blogged, almost daily, about the Texas Rangers, during the 2011-’13 seasons, because honestly there was not a lot to talk about as far as my life was concerned. It literally took me like nine months to complete casino dealer school because I only went for a few hours every weekday, because I just had to watch every single Rangers game so I could write about it afterwards.
It all sounds incredibly lame in retrospect, knowing I had so little going on in my life that I made some obscure nobody-else-I-know-is-a-fan-of-this-team team a 365-days-per-year priority in my life, but that was how deep my emotional investment was. Even then, as a 23 year-old back in 2013 when I was unemployed and going to dealer school, I think I always kind of knew that that was my last hurrah of childhood (so to speak). I intentionally dragged my feet through dealer school because I knew once I got hired I wouldn’t have the ability to follow my favorite baseball team as closely. There were not enough hours in my day to bake the cake and eat it.
And that emotional investment I had been making in a stupid fucking baseball team for something like three full years was hard on me. Each season I rolled the boulder up the hill, every day, only to be let down in October during the playoffs. Intellectually I knew it made no sense, but then February and March would come around the next year and I would be, again, engaged to the point of obsession.
There are all these clichés about baseball, but perhaps the most common is that ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint.’ It’s true, and then when the playoffs start it’s the opposite of true. The playoffs rarely reward the best team, the marathon team — which the Rangers were in their first two World Series appearances in 2010 and 2011 — and instead reward the sprinters, the teams that happen to get ‘hot’ for like a month. The great irony about the 2023 World Series Champion Texas Rangers, as opposed to those great-but-not-great-enough-at-the-right-time Rangers teams of ’10 & ’11, is that this team sprinted to the finish line. And they won.
I am so much more hands off now than I was then. I don’t listen to Rangers games on the radio during my drives home from work anymore, which I used to love doing. On my weekends, on Monday and Tuesday every week, I’d watch them play. But if they went down 6-1 in the fourth inning I would turn the game off and find something better to do. Over the course of the season I kind of turned into that guy who would come home from work and watch highlights of the game on YouTube if they won, and ignore them completely if they lost.
But once the playoffs started I quickly realized I was back to being my old early-20-something year-old self. All those old feelings found their way to creep back into my stomach. I grew irritable at home and at work. I didn’t miss a single pitch during my weekends, and on games that they played while I had to work I got out as soon as possible and watched them at one of the local bar/burger joints around the corner out in the desert. I was all the way back, baby.
I got away from baseball specifically due to it being so goddamn unhealthy for me. The regular season is a marathon, yes it is, but what truly gets my dick hard are the moments of consequence, the ones where pressure is constant. As a 33 year-old I don’t have the time anymore to wait around and live and die on a 162-game regular season. I need the best-of-three, the best-of-five, and the best-of-seven. That’s what the 2011 World Series did to me. It killed the sports fan inside me and now only allows me to wake up when the playoffs begin.
There will never be another year like this for me, I know that now. In February my favorite football team — the Kansas City Chiefs, in case you’ve been living under a fucking rock — won the Super Bowl. On November 1st, the Texas Rangers won the World Series. A different sort of writer on a different sort of blog on a different sort of cold and dusty area of the Internet might take that sort of information, with two of his or her favorite sports teams winning their respective championship, and think it’s all about them. That they willed it to happen, with the power of their mind, because the mind has so much power. They might believe that they did this.
I think the beauty of reality lies in just how random everything is. There are no miracles, there is no special intervening force or being that cares enough about me or my favorite teams to give me the best sports-fan year of my lifetime. It’s all just an arbitrary equation being punched into a calculator that said before the season that the Chiefs had like a 10% chance (+1000) of winning the Super Bowl and the Rangers before the season had like a 2% chance (+5000) of winning the World Series and the figure that pops out reads that there was like a 2-in-1000 chance, otherwise known as 500-to-1, of those two things happening in the same season. It’s not all about me, but I would understand if someone else in my position believed that to be the case.
Instead, I choose to view this long shot year of 2023 as being about love. I’ve actually learned to kind of hate that word, since at this point in my experience it feels more like an abstract concept. According to some thing online there are eight different kinds of love, which to me only reinforces the idea that it either is or it isn’t. ‘Love,’ that is. You can’t just pick and choose à la carte what it means when it’s convenient. There is love, and then there is something else.
A lot like the Chiefs, which I shove down everyone’s throat on here at every opportunity that arises, I love the Texas Rangers. You could have asked anyone I was in third grade with, anyone from middle school or high school when the Rangers fucking sucked, any girlfriend I spent any meaningful time with or any fling I participated in, any coworker past or present, and they would identify me, Eric Reining, with the tiniest of windows and the smallest of circles into what I cared about. They would say I am a sports fan. They would say I love the Chiefs. They would say I love the Rangers. Then they would probably call me an asshole or something and lament some of my behavior and that would be my story.
I was there, at one of those local eating/drinking places, when the Rangers won it all. When I saw my mom I gave her a big hug and told her I wished I had gotten to see it happen, live, with her. Because it was always the two of us, whenever the Rangers played in the World Series, when I was 20, and 21. It was us who went through the bullshit and the heartbreak of losing. I couldn’t help but feel like some chapter of my childhood was closed, or completed, or accomplished, whatever you want to call it, when in the most boring way possible the Rangers closed out a seven-game series in only five games by winning 5-0.
But boring is kind of what I like at this stage of my life. I don’t think I need the spice anymore, even though I like it from time to time. When I think about 2023 I will think, like I said, about love, about all these dormant feelings that became unearthed, somehow, like glaciers that melted to release these toxins I forgot existed in the first place. One day I will be an old man and I will be able to tell my kids about this one year, 2023, where everything kind of came back to me. Into focus. And long gone will be the Super Bowl Champion Chiefs. Long gone will be the World Series Champion Texas Rangers.
For now none of that matters. For now, we just live. We exist. We love.
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