The walk up 10th Avenue last night was surreal. Just before midnight the too rare rain fell on honking cars as crazed drivers hung out of windows and weaved through the streets filled with screaming foot traffic. I could feel the humanity flowing through me. Flags waived from the high rise balconies above us. Bars and restaurants poured out into the street. It felt like we’d just blown up the Death Star. San Diego had come unglued.
Years of losing; of lost time of the pandemic; of losing the beloved Chargers to Los Angeles; of losing the best young player in baseball to injury and scandal; of losing more baseball games over the last 50 years than any team in American professional baseball. Years of losing. Years of being losers. All of it washed away in the warm October SoCal rain. The flood had come. The sins of the past washed out with the tide. The San Diego Padres had just beaten the Los Angeles Dodgers in a playoff series. It was time to party.
I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been all over this planet. I’ve been to war. I’ve won championships myself as an athlete. I’ve got children and a family that have celebrated amazing things together. But I’ve never felt anything like I felt in that ballpark. Not because it was more important or the magnitude of personal joy was greater. But because I’ve never felt the feeling of that many people, of all walks of life, wanting so badly for the same thing to happen. And then having it happen in an improbable, dare I say miraculous, way. Then the dam gave way and a collective outpouring of joy rushed over us. Something written deep in our source code to allow us to exist as one people had awoken. Because the Padres scored five runs in the seventh inning.
Baseball is a game. On face value it means nothing. But what happened in that ballpark was no game. It was something close to religion.
There’s a stack of plastic paint buckets in my garage. The same ones can be found in a half dozen garages in a half dozen houses on my street. They’re not filled with paint though. They’re filled with baseballs.
I coach baseball; not as a card carrying paid member of the clergy. I’m a layperson. Like thousands of dads around the world I coached my son’s Little League teams. I passed on to him what was passed on to me by dads that coached their son’s Little League teams. How to throw a baseball . How to load up, stay behind the ball and let that outside pitch travel a bit longer. How to keep his glove down, scoop, gather and set his feet. I passed on just what it means to a team to be its catcher. Just who climbs onto your shoulders when you take the ball on the mound. And how crying when you get out is selfish baseball.
There’s a scripture to it. Drop anyone who knows the game onto a field half a world away and the words would be different, but the meaning wouldn’t.
Down here in the South Bay of San Diego county there are murals on the walls of heroes down here. There’s a deep connection between the Latino community in the South Bay and the Latino ball players on the team. Manny Machado could walk across the Sweetwater Reservoir if he wanted to. The trolley north out of San Ysidro on game day is a pilgrimage. This is San Diego Padres baseball.
The games are three and a half hours long. There are 162 of them. Which means that in any baseball season, my family spends about 25 full days watching baseball. If I plopped down on a bar stool next to the broadcast team I feel like we’d just continue the conversation we had the night before through my TV screen. Padres Twitter has homegrown shamans.
This is all part of what it means to be a Padres fan. Not just from San Diego. But of San Diego.
This is the part of the narrative where you might think that I’m about to wander down the path of saying why San Diego is different. And why this is the best fan base in the world. It’s my favorite fanbase. It’s my tribe. But it’s not unique. This happens all over the place wherever people care about their baseball team. Go check out what’s happening in my old hometown of Philadelphia. #Redoctober is something. San Diego isn’t the point.
Neither is the game. I could go on about why baseball, the game, is just so special. Stiff gatekeeping sports writers have talked about the sanctity of the sacred rituals of baseball for over a century. About how the game is to be played. Or how we must respect our traditions. That’s not my narrative either though. Like all things built on tradition alone, it’s rickety. It won’t stand up to the stress of a mandatory future none of us can see. Instead my message is a different sort of revelation. The last 24 hours have filled me with a need to seek meaning. I’ll fall back on the great Cincinnati warrior poet Joey Votto to explain it.
I Love that there’s no uniformity to our game. It’s my favorite part of our sport….I think we’ve got a monopoly on the summer. I think we’re blue skies and green grass and baseball caps and you know there’s something about the different ballparks, the different climates, the different fan bases. That’s to me the appeal of our game. You can sit and putt around on your phone. You can have a beer and a hot dog and stay locked in on the game and score it. You can sit in the stands or sit on the concourse with friends and family and catch up. You can come late, leave early and have a great time. I love our game for that reason.
And when your team wins in a way you never thought it would, on a stage you never thought you’d see it get to in a time where everything the world throws at us seeks to vilify strangers and turn us on each other, you can rejoice. You can hug the drunk fool next to you. You can sing songs from the old times together. For in that moment, you’re together. You are one tribe. As the peoples prophet Don Orsillo says, “The #FriarFaithful stands as one at Petco Park.”
What happens on the field in baseball is fine. For those of us that played a little and understand how insanely hard it is to do what the players do it’s maybe a little better. But if you’re looking for the real magic, look to the stands. And the living rooms at game time. And the Twitter feeds where we bleed our frustrations and our joys. Look to the Little League fields where fathers and mothers and sons and daughters gather around it. To bathe in the unity of caring for something together exposes a higher purpose for humanity. It’s religion.
Where ever two or three people gather in its name…the church of baseball is near. And I wish we had more things like it. Because where we’re going, we’re going to need it.