The Many Hats

If I had to put my relationship status with baseball on Facebook, I'd choose "It's Complicated."

Establishing fandom is easy. Your dad roots for the hometown club, and so shall you. A voice on a broadcast resonates in a novel way, turning mundane pop-ups into poetry. A new guy shows up in your uniform and the sparks fly. You pick up stakes and get caught up in the inescapable frenzy for your new local nine.

It’s all just a matter of giving yourself over to the movement, putting your faith in something bigger than yourself, getting behind it, shouting your support and riding the wave.

All the jerseys in your closet, all the ticket stubs, all the hoarse-voiced mornings after night games, all the impassioned arguments about bygone heroes and villains… fandom is something deeply personal that’s shared with millions of others. How you get there is important, and it’s not: your origin story matters, so long as it leads you to the place you’re supposed to be.

I root for all these teams. And more. And fewer.

In romance, the road of life has led me to blissful commitment to one person. My path to baseball fandom is a convoluted one, full of twists, turns, spurs and loops that ultimately ends in a place that some would consider to not be fandom at all. My relationship with baseball, in the lens of human partnerships, would fall closest to polyamory. It’s non-traditional, complicated, misunderstood and something that totally works for me.

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Full disclosure: I wrote about 4,000 words here about my history with the game of baseball and the evolution of my fandom. About a third of the way in, I got into some deeply personal, exceptionally dark, and graphically detailed life experiences that, frankly, I’m not prepared to share with anyone who’s reading this. I’m not even ready to talk about it with my therapist. Maybe someday I’ll let that story out, but it won’t be today. Baseball’s not supposed to be a huge bummer, except when your favorite team’s pitchers piss away a chance to win the World Series because they make five horrific throws on infield grounders.

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I started playing fantasy baseball as soon as I got internet access that didn’t make a series of screeching noises when I logged on. I’d wanted to play ever since I read about the game in Baseball Weekly as a hardball-obsessed teenager, but my peer group had, uh, other interests. So I waited it out until college, started playing in some public leagues online, got into a league shortly after graduation that I’m still in today,¹ and even started playing in a couple of higher stakes leagues against some of the world’s best players. I do OK for somebody who’s not a degenerate gambler, but I’m in no danger of being invited onto anyone’s podcast as an expert anytime soon.

An often-uttered benefit of playing fantasy sports is that it makes you a better fan. I’m not just rooting for the guys who are wearing my team’s laundry. To build a competitive fantasy roster, it has to be made up of guys playing all over the league. There’ll be stars, mega-stars, new kids getting their first cup of coffee, old vets on their last go ‘round, journeyman utility infielders, pitchers with more guile than skill, career years out of nowhere, sure things that hit a slump, and on and on and on. When those guys are on your roster, you pull for them to get that clutch hit, strike out the side, swipe a bag in a key spot or rob a homer at the wall, even if they do it against your favorite “real” team.

As a consequence, I don’t watch baseball the same way that I used to. I don’t tune in at first pitch and watch it through until the handshakes at the end. I hop around from game to game, watching for minutes at a time, just to catch a glimpse of what my guys are doing. If they get a hit, that’s great. If they hit a really sharp liner that’s robbed by a gold glover at third base, I’m glad I saw that too, because the box score won’t tell me that out would have been a hit 95% of the time. As soon as I get that snippet of info I’m looking for, it’s on to the next game.

I started doing a thing in 2020 where I’d buy the hat of the team I drafted the most players from. Those teams were full of my guys, and therefore that was the team that, more often than not, I wanted to see succeed. Whether I was digging for unknown value players on a wretched Oakland team, investing big in once-in-a-lifetime phenom Shohei Ohtani on the Angels or believing this was the year that Jacob deGrom would best Father Time with the Mets, I wear my allegiance on top of my head. It’s not going to be the same team year in and year out, and I’m sure some “real” fans would let me have it for that. But my love of the game, which has endured through winning and losing, through good times and bad, through youthful exuberance to mature practicality, is non-traditional, complicated, misunderstood and something that still totally works for me.

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By the by, I scaled back my fantasy playing considerably this year since I’m taking a two-month sabbatical road trip and I want to be more immersed in that experience than in spreadsheets and scouting reports this summer. I am still playing in my longtime home league, and we just held our draft on St. Paddy’s Day. Leave a comment below to guess which team’s hat I’ll be sporting this season.

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Soundtrack:

• Chipmunks on 16 Speed - Vol. 1

• The Chisel - What a Fucking Nightmare

• Liquid Mike - Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot

• Real Farmer - Compare What’s There

• Taking Meds - Dial M for Meds

1. In a true “small world” twist, I was at my wife’s parents’ house something like 15 years ago not too long after we had started dating. I saw a church usher contact list on their fridge that included a familiar name. I asked about it, and, sure as heckfire, it was one of the guys in my fantasy league that I had joined almost a decade earlier.