Emotional Investments in Baseball and Politics

I am a baseball fan. I used to be a huge baseball fan and would catch every game my favorite team played on TV, on radio or in person. I felt as if I knew the players and that they were my friends. I wanted them to do well and really pulled for them with all my psychic energy. When the team wasn’t playing, I read about them and listened to sports radio shows about them and talked interminably about them.

I loved the Mariners when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, and whenever the Blue Jays were in town, I had a choice of tuning in to the Vancouver broadcast or the Seattle broadcast. This permitted me to contrast the perspectives of the broadcasters from both teams. When a Blue Jay batsman came to the plate, the Mariner broadcasters would talk about what a dangerous hitter he was and a threat as a base runner and such, whereas the Blue Jay announcers would fret about how crafty the pitcher was and how apt the batsman was to ground into a double play.

This mirrored how I felt as a fan. No lead was too large for my team to squander, but a slight lead in the late innings by the other team was probably insurmountable. The opposing team’s closer was unhittable, but our closer might just blow the save. That Norm Charlton, in fact, blew his share of saves was a factor, but not the entire story. I expected my team to choke for some reason, and this protected me somewhat from the heartbreak of baseball. Being a huge fan was emotionally draining and more than a little psychotic.

When we moved to New York, I never got attached to either the Yankees or the Mets, and I have gradually cut way back on my investment in baseball. I might watch the Braves, my first love after all, from time to time on TBS, but I don’t go out of my way to do so. I find that I am a more dispassionate viewer and can enjoy games for their own sake rather than for the sake of partisanship. I savor good playing on either side, and I don’t really care which team wins. On the other hand, as I said, I don’t follow the game nearly as closely. I reckon partisanship is more of a key to salience than competence in the sport alone.

I find that following politics closely in the news and rooting against the GOP are similar to my experiences as a baseball fan. Because I hate the GOP, I am rooting for the Democrats. This causes me to see the GOP as stronger than it probably really is. I fully expect that the GOP’s base will stick with it and that the GOP will pull something out of its hat to rally in the late innings. I see the Democrats as error-prone and having poor judgment at the plate. They’re playing not to lose and nursing a two run lead when they know they don’t have a solid closer. Worse yet, the umpire is squeezing the Democratic pitchers. The manager puts on the hit and run, but the batter takes the pitch! Add more baseball metaphors here if you like.

I wish that I could treat politics like baseball and invest less psychic energy in it. The trouble is that I genuinely believe that the GOP might just get us all killed. I don’t have to worry so much about the New York Yankees’ starting a nuclear war or setting up a police state, but the Yankees in Washington might do both.