I was a late convert to baseball. I never played it growing up—or even watched it, for that matter. I went to one Orioles game my freshman year of college and didn’t stick a glove on my left hand until my junior year, when a couple buddies were heading out to have a catch and I tagged along. At which point I promptly fell in love.
My early 20s were spent in the kind of thrall to baseball in which most boys are held around the age of 9. I found someone to play catch most days and went out to the diamond to run drills with my friends at every opportunity. I spent one summer teaching myself how to hit by going to the local batting cages every day after work and dropping $20 on tokens. (I justified this extravagance by thinking that if I’d had a drinking problem I would have been spending at least that much every night at a bar.)
And I started going to ballgames. Washington didn’t have a big-league team back then, but there was a single-A club 26 miles south of the city. So I drove down once or twice a week each season and sat in the field box seats 20 feet behind first base and watched guys my age living the dream. (After major-league ball came back to D.C., my club went from being a Cardinals affiliate to being the Class-A club for Washington. Today, the team is called the Potomac Nationals. We call them the P-Nats.)
The years passed and I got older, but the boys playing for my minor league team stayed the same age. I got married, my wife and I had kids, we moved from our tony suburb close to the city out to the exurbs. We moved—as it happens—just down the street from the P-Nats.
I took my oldest son, Cody, to his first game when he was 2. He only made it through three innings, but he was hooked. The pictures I have of him at the ballpark tell the story of his childhood: There he is in diapers; there he is after losing his first tooth, there he is eating his first hot dog with his first Pepsi. I have a picture of Cody at a playoff game last year where he’s got his cap on backwards and he’s staring at the field with solemn intensity, like he’s in church. He’s lanky and you can already see his triceps and biceps and even though he’s 8, you can tell exactly what he’s going to look like at 15. It’s like looking into the future.
The memories Cody and I have of this ballpark are among the happiest I possess. One afternoon we were seated in front of the parents of one of the P-Nats players. They had come in from Missouri for the weekend to catch a home stand and they were thrilled that Cody knew all about their son. We talked throughout the game. At the end, Cody told them that they didn’t need to worry about their son because he would cheer for him all season long, even when they had to be back in Missouri and couldn’t be at the games.
There was the time we took his best friend to a game and a foul ball landed right at our feet and Cody scooped it up and handed it right to his friend. I was so proud of him. The next pitch—the very next pitch—the batter fouled the ball off to the exact same spot. They each got game balls, at the same game, during the same at-bat. It was magic.
It wasn’t all magic. One afternoon when Cody was 4, a P-Nats player got hit in the head with a fastball. The impact made a sickening sound and the fellow—a catcher named Brian Peacock—dropped like a sack of flour. It was serious enough that they landed a helicopter on the practice field next to the stadium and medevac-ed him to a hospital. We still talk about that day and the name Brian Peacock is shorthand for the dangers inherent in all things. We went to his first game back and cheered for him like crazy when he returned to the plate.
The P-Nats have taught Cody just about everything he needs to know about life. Not just danger and resilience, but winning and losing. When he was five, he got the idea to try booing one of the visiting players. I sat him down and explained that the all of the boys on the P-Nats were living their dreams and working as hard as they could to be the best baseball players that they can be. And that the boys on the visiting team are exactly the same. We can root for our boys to succeed, but we never root for the others to fail, or take pleasure in their failures. The only team we ever root against, I explained, is the New York Yankees. Because they are evil.
This was a deep, epistemological conversation and I am not exaggerating when I say that it seems to have had a lasting impact on his thinking and view of the world.
Last weekend we went to see the P-Nats play the visiting Wood Ducks, from Kinston, North Carolina. In the bottom of the fourth, one of our boys popped a high foul toward where we were sitting in the front row. The Kinston third baseman came thundering over, tracking the ball. He was about 15 feet away and Cody called out to him that he had room. The ball fluttered a bit as it fell, the way they do sometimes, and the Kinston player made the catch. It was the kind of play that is utterly routine, even at the minor-league level, but seems impossibly exciting to a young boy. “Great play number 36,” Cody called out excitedly. “Way to stay with the ball.”
The visiting player—his name was Luis La O—looked over at us. At first his face was mildly annoyed, like he thought he was being put on. But then he saw Cody standing there at the railing clapping for him and he looked surprised. I watched these two boys staring at each other for a quick second and it occurred to me that Luis was closer to Cody’s age than mine. And then Luis flipped the ball to Cody and smiled at him. And in that moment I couldn’t tell which of them was happier.
I mention all of that baseball stuff about the P-Nats not to be self-indulgent but because my beloved P-Nats are in trouble. After 30 years in their current stadium, Minor League Baseball has decreed that the facility isn’t big enough. They have to move.
I’m inherently suspicious of publicly-financed sports deals—they’re almost never a good deal for the community. But the P-Nats have proposed to move to a new spot a couple miles away and to pay for the entirety of the construction costs of a new stadium. All they need is permission and a 30-year loan from the county development corporation. It seems like a pretty good deal for the community by just about any measure. In fact, so far as I can tell there aren’t even really any serious arguments against it.
But the local politicians are fighting about it on strictly partisan lines. Team Donkey is against whatever Team Elephant is for, and vice versa. There’s no prudential or fiscal debate about whether or not to let the P-Nats move. There’s only a partisan one.
Minor League Baseball says that they won’t let the P-Nats continue to play in their current stadium past next year. The club’s owner says that if he isn’t allowed to build the new park, he’ll have to sell the team. At which point the P-Nats will leave town.
None of it makes sense—in the way that much of our politics has ceased to make sense. Ideology and pragmatism and even self-interest have all been superseded by pure tribalism in America.
We’re not even really rooting for our own team to win any more as much as we’re rooting for the other side to lose.
