I was expecting to feel a little more conflicted. Or, at least, a little less invested. There was the end of the drought to think of, and the fact that I had tickets ALDS Game 3 in Seattle, and the fact that I haven't watched as many hours of baseball this year compared to the last eight years. But as soon as Cal Raleigh homered in the first inning on Friday, I felt that sick feeling in my stomach, and the truth was undeniable: I wanted the Blue Jays to win. Maybe it was less present in my thinking brain than it has been in the past, pushed aside by a busy life, a break in the habit of thinking about baseball developed over my years of writing about it — an active desire not to think about it, to leave behind the memory of stressful hours trying to think of something meaningful to say. And maybe it was the fact that I haven't been thinking about it as hard that made the pure feeling rise with such overwhelming force. The fandom, it turns out, lived in my body, whether I was thinking about it or not.
After a few innings of watching Luis Castillo slice through the Jays’ lineup, it was easy enough to mentally check out of the idea of winning that game. I’ve watched enough of this team to recognize the hopeless version of them when they show up. Everything was off: Alek Manoah’s command, the hit sequencing, the energy in the building deflated from the beginning. Even so, I was in a grouchy fucking mood for the rest of the day in spite of myself. But no matter: there was still tomorrow, and my brother home from school for Thanksgiving. We went out for an early lunch, then returned in time for the game to begin, gathered anxiously around the TV.
The first inning of exchanged zeroes was that tense, anxious feeling, every baserunner potentially signalling either victory or defeat, every inch of break on Kevin Gausman’s splitter the narrow margin between the beginning of something and the end of it. And then they scored, and then they scored again, and Robbie Ray was clearly on the ropes. They knocked him — and then came Paul Sewald, disastrous, essentially gifting them a lead that is, most of the time, insurmountable. 8-1 in the sixth. An exhale, and thoughts began to swirl of tomorrow: the plan of attack against Logan Gilbert, whether George Springer, in his extreme and obvious pain, would be able to play, and whether the team would be able to recognize that even if he couldn’t. Because there still had to be tomorrow. This was no winner-take-all game — the Mariners could risk defeat, but the Jays couldn’t, and even as my thoughts relaxed with assurance of logic, of the precedent set by all the previous 8-1 leads in the history of the game, the fear remained in my body, growing more frenzied as the bases loaded up in the top of the sixth, as Tim Mayza immediately wild-pitched in a run and then gave up the homer he had been brought in to prevent, and even though the Jays were still winning 8-5, it already felt like they were losing. And in the eighth, right when it seemed like Romano might actually get out of it, the absolute disaster of the collision in center. The violence of the moment itself, the chaos, and the dead silence as the tying runs crossed the plate and Springer lay motionless on the ground. It was tied, but it would take some miracle even greater than what the Mariners had created to come back from that.
The Blue Jays lost. And for the next few hours, as life resumed its normal shape around me — take the bus, feed the cats, do some work, go meet friends — I was wandering around, dazed and absent, like someone suddenly dropped into human existence from another world. I wasn’t even thinking about the game, not in any way that could be verbalized. I was depleted, physically and emotionally depleted; at the same time, I was vibrating with energy, too much of it to be exorcised through pacing and finger-tapping and groaning and sighing. It was 8-1, and tomorrow existed; it was 10-9, and tomorrow was gone.
During my hopeless pandemic days, I clung with desperation to my newly-developed habit of working out. Every other day I set up in the living room with my borrowed mat and dumbbells and sweated it out for twenty minutes. It was a pathetic exercise at first. I couldn’t complete a workout, and what I could do felt horrible, holding myself up with painful, trembling limbs. Every time, I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But every other day, I went back to the living room and did it again. Eventually, I was able to complete a workout. It didn’t stop being horrible, but I started wanting it to get worse. I bought heavier and heavier weights online. Even if I couldn’t do anything else on a given day, which was often the case, I could at least carry simultaneous exhaustion and elation that followed each workout with me. And with all the benefits of physical strength — more energy, less pain, an ease of movement that I’d never experienced before — came a mental clarity, a knowledge I’d often heard spoken of but hadn’t believed until I really felt it. That to work, one simply had to work: that, for those twenty minutes four days a week, nothing would exist except pure physical engagement, no matter how difficult it was, and that I knew I was going to do it no matter what. Applying that knowledge to the practice of writing (and to the practice of living more generally). I struggled, before, to write one article a week, and now I’ve finished one novel and am most of the way through another, and I can lift almost 300 pounds. That would have been inconceivable to me at the beginning of 2021, when even an endpoint to the darkness was beyond my imagining.
And look: the Blue Jays lost, and now I am sitting here, in tomorrow, writing my little blog. I wish they had won, and I really wish that Springer hadn’t been injured. But I don’t wish I hadn’t watched that game, no matter how much I wanted to turn it off in the moment. There is nothing like that feeling, that living and dying with every pitch, and it is worth feeling for what it is capable of bringing to my life: the connection to others, the connection to the version of myself that exists outside of the rational, the intellectual, the tortured over-reasoning, the logic that wants me to discard my own emotions, deny their truth, deny that they have any use to me or anyone else. And the knowing that the game will end, and the knowing that there will be another game, whether it’s tomorrow or months from now, when I’ll be able to feel what I feel without excuse or denial.
Next Saturday I’ll do it again, this time in Seattle with thousands of other people. And come April, the Blue Jays will return, an entire season of small joys and tragedies with them, with all outcomes sickeningly, gloriously undetermined.