October 4, 2016

Deep, But Playable

I Don't Care If I Ever Get Back

by Craig Goldstein

When you cover sports, part of the process is becoming detached, at least somewhat, from the team that you grew up devoted to. It sneaks up on you. It’s partly intentional, because even if it’s not always unseemly to be caught giving a full-throated cheer for your favorite team, it can leave you open to accusations of bias.

Bias can be adjusted for, but the accusation alone often means the accuser, among others, has stopped listening, whether it’s a valid complaint or not. Being a fan need not cloud judgement; many of our foremost experts are indeed partial on some level, and as long as the information and argument are solid then what should any potential bias matter? Still, the hoops jumped through to avoid such accusations distance us from ourselves, and every layer of objective reason, each level of irony is one we’ll have to fight through if we ever want to reach back to our inner fan.

In many ways, this is part of growing up. Perspective is forced upon us as we take stock of the world we are in, and measure ourselves and our predicaments against those of others. As we broaden our horizon to take in the full extent of the league, rather than an individual team or a division, we might begin to gravitate towards players or teams that exude a particular style or attitude that we have come to appreciate, perhaps more than those childhood associations.

This is fine, and not in the fire dog way. This is the “grow the pie” theory of fandom. Appreciating others doesn’t diminish the appreciation of your own, it just results in more...appreciation.

But here’s the catch: Over time, that expanded love of baseball and its many denizens means adjusting for proper context. You realize that your team’s most recent loss wasn’t nearly as crushing as Seattle’s from three days ago, or Texas’ harsh exit from the playoffs last year. The emotional roller coaster flattens out in time, and makes it easier to live the rest of your life outside of sports—though no small part of you wonders what happened to the second grader who, when faced with deciding whether they’d prefer a life of ups-and-downs or the steady, unflinchingly neutral life, decisively wanted the former. But adulthood is constant and pressing, and eventually you find that spending three hours being a malcontent after a loss affects not only your day, but also those of your loved ones. Expending that much energy on emotions is exhausting, and doing it 162 times per year borders on insanity. So, little by little, you’re steered into that unflinching middle.

It’s a rational choice, but the truth is that it still sucks. There’s a sense of exclusion you feel when friends, family, or fellow fans are cursing with a vengeance or going wild with delirium as their season ebbs and flows. You can try and fight it, try to get amped as the season crests towards its conclusion, but it feels forced. Like walking through your childhood home, it’s the same but different. It’s familiarity without authenticity.

The other day, I was driving to a friend's place and and to get there I passed my old house, the one I grew up in. I thought of that platitude about not being able to go home again. And we can't. Everything is different in there and even if you could change it all back, it's not going to be the same. There’s something about the in-the-moment-ness of it. You can’t undo what’s been done. Rooting for my favorite team is like that, too. I've come to appreciate players and approaches from teams that wear different colors. Even my awe at the feats of Corey Seager has as much to do with what he means to me as a prospect writer as it does with him wearing Dodger blue . It's borne of analysis and a quest for expertise and professionalism, but it's not the same.

But then, there are the playoffs. Everything is ratcheted up a notch or ten. The throngs of fans grow ever bigger, the sense of tribalism stronger. You feel like you’re back on your old block. Long-rested muscles are loosened as your full-throated scream is surrounded, amplified by tens of thousands more. The stage and stakes are such that deep mood swings based on a series, a game, an inning, a single pitch, are all accepted. There is no time for analysis when there is no tomorrow. This is the time and place for that manic behavior. This is when it feels like it used to. When you come home from college and you are different but the room is the same. It is true that you can’t go home again, but for about a month every year (if you’re lucky), you can be a kid again.

Thank you to Meg Rowley, Patrick Dubuque, James Fegan, and Ben Lindbergh for their assistance with this article.

Craig Goldstein is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @cdgoldstein
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