Since moving to the South where I am hours away from Major League Baseball and the dominant culture here is SEC football, it’s been hard to keep up with the sport I deeply love. Baseball puts most people I know to sleep and some of you are already yawning.
Yet, here I go again.
David Brooks wrote a column on his love for the Mets… and how they are ripping his heart out yet again.
It has to do with the particular Mets ethos. In his scintillating book, “So Many Ways to Lose,” Devin Gordon makes the crucial point: The Mets teams are not bad teams; they are gifted at losing. There’s a difference.
The Mets create imaginative ways to lose that other teams wouldn’t dream of, and they also come up with miraculous ways to win that the laws of probabilities would seem to render impossible. The Mets regularly lose games they absolutely should win, and then they turn around and win games they absolutely should lose.
And this brings me to the team of my childhood, the Kansas City Royals. I grew up in a magical era where at least they could make a run at the playoffs consistently. Yes, they kept losing to the $((#&$#(*!!! Yankees in the playoffs, but it was always hopeful.
Then came 1985 and the World Series win against the Cardinals and it was just too great. This had to keep going!
Thirty years later…
They couldn’t make the playoffs for 29 years. Two amazing years of being in the World Series and beating the Mets in 2015… and then… nothing. No playoff appearances. They have racked up 100 loss seasons like they were raking leaves in the fall.
In the intervening years I lived in Minneapolis. Over my 20 years in Minneapolis I grew to love the Twins, PLUS I was close to the ballpark when they built the new Target Field. My last two years in Minneapolis saw me at the ballpark more than I’d been in a lot of seasons. At least the Twins could MAKE the playoffs. Sure, they were going to lose right away, but here was a team that was constantly working on improving.
But Kansas City… UGH. They are in a brutal fight with Oakland for the worst record in baseball this year. Next year will probably be more the of the same. The sleepy new owner who thinks “cleaning house” means firing the GM and replacing him with the carbon copy assistant GM is jockeying for a new stadium downtown and has almost forgotten there’s a team to run.
I have to come to a hard realization: the Royals don’t find creative ways to lose. They are a bad organization.
And yet, I will find myself at Wrigley Field for the first time in my life in August watching the Cubs… play the Royals. (It was the luck of the draw.)
I am thankful I was able to take in a Braves game this year. It’s rare to be able to catch a MLB game for me. I miss the game. It’s hard to keep up. And it’s harder when I have to admit a team I’ve loved for decades is just plain awful.
But I can’t wait to get to Wrigley!
Apprentice 2 Jesus 
My big brother took me to Game One of the 1977 World Series in the old Yankee Stadium.
I had just gotten myself “born again” that summer in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, having gone there to try and sell books door to door in a program for college-aged young people with a company that had been around since the end of the Civil War so that I could make enough money to buy a gun, a motorcycle, and move from my hometown outside Phoenix, Arizona, to Los Angeles, California, where I planned to sell pot for a living and, hopefully, not get arrested like I had the year before after which I had dropped out of college.
My brother had finally passed the Arizona State Bar exam after taking it five times, and he had promised himself that if he ever passed the bar exam that he would go see his beloved New York Yankees play again in the World Series if that ever happened again, which it did that same year. Our parents had asked my brother to check up on me because I never wrote or called home and had stayed in Connecticut after the summer because I had failed at bookselling and was now selling carpet cleaning door to door while being discipled in my new-found faith in Jesus Christ.
I met my brother at the Hartford airport, and the first thing he asked me was, “Is there a bar in this airport?” We found one and the bar had on the television the deciding Game 5 of the American League playoffs between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees. My brother opened his brief case while we sat at a table with our beers watching the game and pulled out a lovingly wrapped package of bread veal cutlets that our grandmother in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had sent with him for me after he had just visited our relatives there. We ate those veal cutlets, drank our beers, and watched our beloved Yankees win the game and advance to the World Series.
A few days later on October 11, 1977, my big brother flew us both from Hartford to New York City where he had a friend from law school who got us some scalped tickets at Yankee Stadium in seats high up in the third deck but right behind home plate. My brother had spent almost everything he had for those tickets, and as the exciting game went into extra innings that night, I used my new-found faith to fervently pray, “God, please let the Yankees win. GOD, PLEASE, let the Yankees win! My brother spent everything he had on these tickets. SO PLEASE LET THE YANKEES WIN!”
There MUST be a God in Heaven who hears prayers like that and who that year was pulling for the Yankees, because the Bronx Bombers behind the big bat of the newly acquired baseball rebel, Reggie Jackson, not only won Game One in twelve innings, but went on to beat their hated rival Los Angeles Dodgers in six games with Reggie’s three home run outing in Game Six to end the Series back at Yankee Stadium, earning Jackson his immortal nickname of “Mr. October!”
In 2001, the Good Lord switched sides to help our Cinderella team Arizona Diamondbacks led by the dynamic duo of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling beat the greatest team in baseball, New York Yankees, led by the greatest baseball team captain ever, Derek Jeter, with the greatest closer in baseball, Mariano Rivera, in the greatest World Series in the history of baseball in seven magical and mystical games in the year America needed it’s sport maybe the most it ever did . . .
but that’s a story for another day!
What great memories. And reminders of how much I hate the Yankees. LOL
LOL . . . at least our DBacks beat them in 2001!