I’ve watched three baseball games so far this year and they’ve all been Yankees games. And no, it’s not because I’ve suddenly started going hardcore for my father’s team, it’s just that’s what has been on since I live in New York and, to be honest, I do enjoy the Yankees. They’re the Yankees. The thing I’ve learned watching baseball my entire life is there are the teams I despise, the teams I respect and the teams I always say that if they’re in the World Series then I’m rooting for them. The teams I’ll cheer for in October are the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, New York Mets, New York Yankees, and, of course, the Chicago Cubs. The last one always seemed like the punchline until it finally happened and now, well, it sort of sounds like the punchline again because the Cubs won one World Series and then started to stink again.
And, honestly, that was sort of what I wanted. The Cubs stinking was such a natural thing to me that even hoping a little that they’d even make it to the World Series, let alone win their first one since 1908 was one of the most stressful, depressing things I’ve ever dealt with. When they finally won in 2016, I definitely cried, but I also whispered “Thank God that’s over.” I could go a few more years, even a decade or two, maybe even three, before another Cubs World Series because losing was what I was accustomed to. I was happy for the Cubs to go back to being loveable losers.
The thing is that now the Cubs stink again, but something has been missing. It’s that dietbaggy feel. The beer is too expensive and the rowdy old Bleacher Bums are long gone. The whole thing feels really corporate to me in a way I can’t get into. Part of it is just because the sport and the people that run it have figured out how to strip away so much of what made baseball special, trying to figure out how to appeal to a wider audience as younger viewers would rather watch basketball or soccer or play video games instead of sitting for nine innings watching a ball hurtle towards a batter who will either swing, not swing, connect or whiff. But it’s also that the Cubs ownership, the Ricketts, have successfully turned Wrigley Field and the surrounding neighborhood of Wrigleyville into some sad, expensive, family-friendly tourist trap. I wrote about it a few years ago for Rolling Stone, but even then I wasn’t ready for the new Wrigleyville to be such an alienating experience. The ballpark itself is thankfully still there. To the team’s credit, they haven’t left the place that has housed ballgames since 1914. You can still get nachos in a Cubs helmet and—sorry to give you this insider info if you didn’t know—last time I was there, men still lined up alongside each other next to a steel trough in the bathroom to pee out the beer they drank, so I guess that’s good. Those troughs feel like the circulatory system of Wrigley Field.
All of this is to say that I’m now at a point in my life where baseball is just baseball, and that’s sort of nice. I don’t really love any players besides maybe Shohei Ohtani and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., there are a couple of guys who bring me joy to watch. But for the most part, I realized recently when I was watching the Yankees by myself on some weekend afternoon that I’ve come to a comfortable spot with my relationship to the sport. It is what it is. I have no more real emotional investment in it besides saying if one of the teams I mentioned looks like they have a shot, then I’m going to put on their hat and root for them. There’s something sort of beautiful in that, just being whatever about baseball.
Speaking of whatever, I watched Bathtubs Over Broadway the other night. If you are looking for something that is literally anything to watch, it’s on Netflix and it wasn’t until the end of the hour and a half documentary following former Letterman writer Steve Young as he tries to document the weird phenom known as industrial musicals that I realized how incredibly sweet and moving the entire experience truly was. Young has the energy of What We Do In the Shadows energy vampire Colin Robinson, except…nice? Does that make sense? He is just really droll and weird and watching him is sort of hypnotic, but it’s also his singular obsession that is so sweet and weird that made watching the movie so enjoyable.