Gone is the Game
I feel the emptiness of the vanished season.
Each year brings a world series. Each October brings a champion. As baseball fans, we watch, we yell and cheer and curse the fate of one team or another. Each fall this cycle is repeated and, for most, a melancholy descends after that final out. Some years are easier than others.
There have been plenty of great, even brilliant synopses of the 2011 World Series. Heavy-hitters like Posnanski, Boswell, and Angell have all weighed-in. There’s little if anything I can add to that holy trinity or the growing canon of the afterglow. And yet, a few days removed, the emptiness of the vanished season abides.
Like all fans, I had rooting interests for the playoffs, but my boys were irrelevant before the season even began. I thought 2011, despite the excitement down the stretch, despite the improbable run of the Cardinals, would be like any of the others years. I thought the depression of cessation would fade. I thought it would get easier, that the pensiveness would subside.
2011 has proved resilient.
My love for the Cubs requires a muted antipathy toward all things St. Louis. I’m not vocal or venomous, simply resolute. I watched their drive from 10 1/2 back with silent bemusement, thinking their daily valiance would eventually fail. That the undying logic of baseball would intercede and that the flailing Braves would right their sinking ship long enough to stave off the unseemly insurrection mounting against them. I presumed “order” would be restored.
Though annoyed with their run, I felt confident in the Phillies. When they overcame that obstacle, the quiet and creeping fear rose within me. As I watched the Brewers stumble over themselves, those silent fears were cacophonous. Mute no longer, I threw my NL prejudice away and vested myself in my adopted home state. The Rangers, they were the last bastion. The last stand of all that was right and true in the world. Surely they of all the teams would be able to overcome the blinding red sea.
Delusion is as good and necessary in sports as it is in life.
As the World Series unfolded, my discomfort grew. A game one loss was expected, but unwelcome. Game two tested my nerve. I drank beers and played gin, hoping for some miraculous turn of events. When those hopes were answered, I knew all was well with the world. When game three turned into a blood bath, the arrogance morphed once more into genuine worry. Then, with a flurry, games four and five made me once more forget the discretion necessary in baseball. It was all over, it seemed. Game six came and seemed to solidify this confidence. Reason was triumphing. The beauty of the Cardinal assault seemed destined to end.
These things never end as we wish them to. The pain of defeat is personal. As fans we invest many hours and nights to the slow, unfolding arc of the season. When the end comes after all those throwaway moments, we’re somehow caught off-guard. Things don’t seem right or fair.
So I sat in a chair with a gnawing, grotesque lump inside me as I watched the heroics unfold.
Game seven came almost like a silent overture, an unthinking afterthought to the mania that had preceded it. The sea of red yelled and screamed and cheered. Those antlered men of 2010 returned, lost in the lights of this hysterical mass. As the unthinkable became inevitable, an infantile scream sat within me. I felt jilted, unable to thrash about as I might have in 1989.
There is no release for this abstract suffocation. It sits there, deep beneath my sternum, gnashing at its civilized gaol and waiting for the unthinking blindness of winter to temper its dissatisfied fury.
