Watching bad baseball in dark times

Is the sport a needed distraction, or something more?

If you spend any time on Bluesky (or, in the old days, Twitter, but I can’t speak for that anymore), you’ll see a variation of this kind of post-and-response.

Original Post: I made a really good pizza today, nailed the crust!
Response: How can you celebrate making pizza when [terrible thing is happening in the world]???

Usually, the respondent is pretty roundly mocked, and not only because this has become the equivalence of correcting grammar on social media: There are always terrible things happening in this vale of tears we call life, and, despite that, pizza is still always good. We have a duty to enjoy life, even while fighting for a better world.

There are some who argue that these small acts of joy are little pockets of defiance against grim literalists and jackbooted murderers. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know finding happiness is the only way to stay sane in dark times.

And these are, unquestionably, dark times. The Fourth of July was a queasy malaise of cognitive dissonance. Fireworks and BBQs were the backdrop to the evisceration of the social safety net, ripped apart to make an unaccountable secret police one of the most well-funded militaries in the world, while the President turned a legally non-partisan kickoff to America’s 250th birthday into one of his nitwit Nuremburgs. Meanwhile, rising waters in Texas killed dozens, as the climate keeps breaking and the means of both prediction and relief from its effects are being stripped away.

This just a few days after a cheese-eating photo-op at what is, by every definition, a concentration camp.

(If you disagree, and believe that it is fine to open up concentration camps in the swamp, with the gleeful promise that escapees will be eaten by alligators, as punishment for what has been throughout the entire 20th Century a paperwork violation — if you believe that someone looking for a better life, who has committed no crime other than trying to live in America should be sent to a foreign gulag without trial to face torture, slavery, and death — then we are enemies. There’s no other word for it; it isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree. Feel free to keep reading and yell at me in the comments, but if our moral universes are so different I assume you feel the same way about me.)

So, these are dark times. And the question is: What do we owe them? Do we owe them somber penitence? Do we owe them humorless rage? Should we go through some of the motions of life, or does that diminish the scale of the slope down which we’re sliding? Or, worse, does depending that things are normal actually grease the slope even more?

These are questions that every sports fan should ask themselves, and I think there is a clear answer. Sports are not a mere distraction, or they don’t have to be. Sports, at their best, create communities. They bring people together. You are here reading a site devoted to a team that has lost 181 of 252 games in the past two years, for goodness’ sake.

Sports remind us that we are all part of something more, that there we are actually collections of individuals, that these great masses of people are all human beings, no matter what your fucking papers say.

And, in addition to that, there is beauty in sports. I have spent the last week watching Wimbledon, mourning the losses of Coco Gauff and Madison Keyes, thrilling to the furious grace of Aryana Sablenka, the breathtaking perfection of Jannik Sinner, the gleeful genius of Carlos Alcaraz, the growing power and promise of Ben Shelton. There is beauty that makes me love the possibility of people. And while that isn’t strictly political, it also is: It makes me furious at those who want to crush human potential instead of celebrate and elevate it.

So really, what it comes down to, is this: What is a distraction, and what is essential to being human?

Which brings us, of course, to the weekend series between the Sox and Rockies.

This was arguably the least-essential matchup in sports history. There are many things tied with it — say, a Wizards-Pelicans game in February, or a Browns-Cardinals game in 2003 — but there isn’t anything less essential. Sure, you can say that this matchup is important for draft status, or more grimly that this series goes a long way toward the Rockies “beating” the last year’s Sox record for historic losses. But none of this is why we watch sports: Playoff implications, competitive intensity and importance, watching good players do fun things, etc.

And yet, I watched, parts or all of all three games. And I wasn’t the only one, either.

A whole lot of people watched. And sure, maybe that was some burnout after holiday activities on Thursday and Friday night. Maybe it was masochism, or completism, or some remnant of loyalty to the team we love. But we watched. And while Friday was a bit choppy, Saturday was a reward.

We saw timely two-out hitting. We saw some clutch pitching. We saw the official Colson Montgomery Breakout Game, a day after being dazzled by his highlight defense. We saw the second Colson Montgomery Breakout Game on Sunday, making it an indisputable: Breakout Weekend.

And sure, it’s the Rockies. Colson could go zero for his next 30 and look lost. The Sox could not win again until August. But who cares, at least for today. It was a fun weekend of baseball. Much more fun than we could have expected, or maybe deserved.

That’s baseball. There is something that happens in every at-bat. There’s potential in every game. There’s potential in every player and every play and every moment. It’s what makes the sport so vital and thrilling and sometimes boring but always, always, always deeply human.

We live in times when talking about shared humanity is sneered at as “virtue signaling” by the freaks and ghouls and scions that control our world. They celebrate a dull grey vision, which they pretend is shiny and chrome but is just a mirror reflecting their empty souls.

So maybe reclaiming a bit of our humanity, even for — or especially for — something as pointless as the White Sox playing the Rockies is not just OK, but vital.