Baseball Is Designed to Break Your Heart
The familiar emptiness hit me in the pit of my stomach. For the second time in five years, my beloved football team, the San Francisco 49ers, wasted a 10-point lead to the Kansas City Chiefs and lost the Super Bowl. As soon as the game was over, I turned away from the screen, quietly thanked my party hosts, went home to feed my cat and grew determined to not read about or watch sports for a long while. I may have muttered the phrase “I hate sports” several times over the next few days.
Yet not two weeks later, with spring training games now underway, and every baseball team, including my beloved San Francisco Giants, offering its followers a glimmer of optimism for the coming season, I am drawn back in to sports fandom. A question plagues my mind: Why?
Why do we bother? Most of us will never meet the athletes we root for. We will never make as much money as they do. Nothing they do affects our physical health, our families or our livelihoods. Yet our emotional well-being rises and falls with their success on the field, on the court and on the baseball diamond.
I believe this is because, in a world in which tribalism is pulling us apart, the completely imaginary tribalism of the sports fan is a necessary balm. Not because it allows you to celebrate — though you do occasionally get to do that — but because you get to lose. A lot. Nothing brings us together like communal suffering. And this simulated losing helps prepare us for the worst that life can deliver.
I do remember one sentence I uttered as I stumbled out of that Super Bowl party: “Well, somebody had to lose.” (It is an inverse of what I often say when two teams I hate square off: “It’s a pity somebody has to win.”) Whether we realize it or not, every fan of a team that loses is constantly in the process of honing a valuable life skill. To live is to lose — a loved one, a marriage, a job, a sense of identity — and sports are trivial compared with any of that. But sports provide perspective: You think this is bad? Come on. This is just a game. It gives us a kind of laboratory of loss, a relatively safe arena in which to practice for the losses that really matter.
Even great teams suffer their share of heartbreakers. The New York Yankees, who have won more World Series titles than any other franchise, have given up two devastating walk-off World Series Game 7 hits (in 1960, to Bill Mazeroski and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and in 2001, to Luis Gonzalez and the Arizona Diamondbacks). Every league has lots of teams and only one of those teams finishes the season on top, which means the fans of every other team form a community of losers, a community that speaks the same language of bad beats, bad hops, bad calls, bad decisions and the all-encompassing bad luck.
As I was grousing on social media about my Super Bowl pain, a friend shared this sentiment from A. Bartlett Giamatti, the onetime commissioner of Major League Baseball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
He is talking about baseball, but he could be describing life itself, sweet and far too short. Sports is joy, and pain, and love, and hope and, yes, perhaps above all, loss. And just like life, it keeps us coming back for more despite it all.
Being a fan means wearing the colors, knowing the chants, memorizing the numbers. It means being part of a family or maybe part of a cult, which in these fractured times can both feel very appealing.
My friend Jason is a Philadelphia native who despises the 49ers and expresses his hatred with an obnoxiousness that only an Eagles fan could muster. But his Eagles lost in last year’s Super Bowl, also to the Chiefs, which means we got hit by the same bus. It brought us together. Our commonality crossed the boundaries of rooting interest. For a moment, we could commiserate before we resumed talking trash.
Now if you will excuse me, my favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, is finally starting to heat up. And the Giants just signed a coveted new slugger. Their opening-day game is right around the corner.
Sports, like life, has wonderful little moments of elation.