I first started watching baseball in Los Angeles, at the behest of the man I was married to at the time. In an attempt to cultivate shared interests, with the understanding that beer and hot dogs were a part of the ritual, I obliged, assuming that those would be the extent of pleasure I would find at Dodgers Stadium..

Part and parcel of being a young person might be a certain stringent idea of your identity and what your pastimes should be. The hope is, perhaps, that we loosen our identity to any dogmatic tropes and become open minded and compassionate about ideas of the self, both towards ourselves, and others..

I am a maladjusted, working class woman in a major city of California. At that time, I was also undereducated. The most dignified self-image I could muster was ‘artist’.

Learning about myself through mimicking late 1990’s caricatures of sarcastic young white women (from movies and shows like Daria, 10 Things I Hate About You, or Ghost World), I never allowed myself to be interested in sports. Nor was it encouraged in my household, where my dad was afraid of my getting injured, and my mom didn’t want to pay the team fees, and we just didn’t watch them as a family.

Getting involved with something new and unfamiliar was like reimagining myself. In a surging crowd of Pantone 294 t-shirts, the namesake of this copy written shade being “Dodger Blue”, I felt like a part of America for the price of an admission ticket. I did not own a Dodgers hat or shirt yet, but wanted to be lost in the surge. I checked the tags on the blue cotton jerseys hanging inside the merchandise store. After subtly flipping up the $50 price tag, I resigned to look for something from a street vendor, carefully tucking the tag back into the neckline. Slightly disappointed, I was still buoyed by this new emotion I was sifting through with my entire body; pleasure at being part of a crowd, eagerness to assimilate.

Up to this point the crowds I had been part of were church gatherings, family gatherings, and school, all of which had been painfully alienating. For some reason, this experience was not. None of the tension and defensiveness and dissonance were present, I was just there to pass 3-ish hours watching men play a game.

Tottering carefully to my seat with beer and a hot dog, I sat down on a worn wooden bench with chipped blue paint. Looking around me, I saw a family pulling shiny tinfoil husks from containers in a large cooler, hot dogs and bags of chips. A pair of women with full faces of makeup had blue baseball hats jammed over their carefully coiffed hair. Sitting behind them I could see their faces reflected in the selfie cameras on one of their phones, holding plastic cups filled with Modelo, licking the Tajin salted rims for a picture. The part of me that inspects and mocks was silent, I just wanted what everyone else had.

Baseball was, in fact, the only positive thing that came from my short stint in Los Angeles. Because the birth of my love for baseball occurred in Los Angeles, the Dodgers are my team. Since that time, I have attempted to, or have successfully, watched a Dodgers game as a distraction at some of the worst junctures of my life. Sometimes it was a success, sometimes it was not.

November 1, 2017: I had just sold off the last of the shared belongings from the house my ex husband and I shared, and was moving into a small room and trying to finish college. I pulled up to the new place with a truck full of stuff, to find that someone else was occupying the room. I asked to live in the barn behind the house, and after unpacking my stuff from the U-Haul and stuffing it clumsily into the corner, I opened up my $200 laptop and watched a baseball game in my bed while a rain storm raged outside. The laptop promptly died and I went to sleep until I was woken up by a skunk in my bed.

August 5th, 2021: I took a long road trip with a previous boyfriend around the state of Michigan, considering a move to Chicago. On this road trip, I had turned 30 in a hammock, wine drunk, eating Mac and cheese at a camp site that looked like a tree farm. On the last night, I had bought tickets to Wrigley Field and planned to watch a Cubs game. Arriving at the stadium, it began to rain and the game was delayed for 1, then 2, then 3 hours. By the third hour we were wet, starving, and hated each other. The game was finally cancelled.

June 03, 2024: It is the last day of the first school year for which I have ever taught full time, and I have watched a lifetime of traumatizing war videos on my phone in most of my spare moments, for much of that year. I have paid $10 for a ticket that benefits the after school program. It is for a 1:10 p.m. game, and I leave work 3 hours early to attend ( I don’t teach any classes on the last day of school). I watch the game distractedly, considering the net gain it might effect if I start a hunger strike with all my extra time. I ask the universe to send me a sign if I should hunger strike. A foul ball bounces next to my leg, and I am so distracted I don’t notice until a slender grey haired man in jeans and a baseball hat is standing up from bending over and picking up the ball from 5 feet away from me, where it had bounced and stopped.

October 23, 2024: A presidential election with no winner approached. The Dodgers and the Yankees were playing against each other in the World Series, and for late October, it was still hot outside. Boarding a train for Modesto to visit a friend, I download Youtube TV and successfully watch game one over a canned margarita in the dining car. The Dodgers have so far beat the Yankees in 3 landslide games,. Game one Dodgers win 6-3, game two Dodgers win 4-2, game three Dodgers win 4-2 and I start to root for the Yankees both out of pity and hope that the series won’t end at game 4. It doesn’t, and the Yankees gain a 3 point lead in the 7th inning .

The games have been somewhat unexciting to actually watch, with the Yankees seeming dispirited and giving very little strategically. They have a strong pitcher, 34 year old Garret Cole, who has been playing Major League Baseball since 2013. He is their strategy. As for the rest of the Yankees, they seem almost bored. I imagine them thinking, “We made it to the World Series, anything else that happens in extra.”

For me, Garrett Cole is the best part of watching the series. There was a time in Baseball where we didn’t have close ups to watch the facial expressions of players, but today we do, and Garrett Cole looks like a serial killer in that he lacks a shred of emotion in his pitching face. Hyun-Seok Jang draws a sharp comparison (as a hitter) with his round vaguely smiling face, looking optimistic as he approaches home. Garret Cole’s pitches are mostly immaculate, he is swift, decisive, and strategic. I learn so much about effective pitching from his alternating sliders with fast pitches, targeting just outside the range of what could be a ball, making the hitters second guess themselves as 100 mph baseballs fly past. He is relentlessly praised for his focus after the disastrous first base fumble between himself and Rizzo, in the fourth inning of game 5, where the yankees went from a 1 point lead to a 4 point deficit.

Freddie Freeman is up to bat with two outs, and the bases are loaded. He has hit a home run in each of the last five World Series games that he has played, and he successfully brings two points in with this hit. Two more roll in after, with Freddie running the bases with urgency on a broken ankle, with a broken rib and a broken finger, and Garret Cole is tasked with continuing the carry the team.

The last game of this World Series was compelling, and the 5th inning was a painful and pitiful thing to watch. Was there too much confidence? Not enough fight? What was psychologically happening with these players that they went from a lead to a game that was basically over in the fifth inning? I was watching my team win, yes, but I was also watching the most effective, healthy distraction I have ever found come to a close.

Hanging my elbows over the half door of a bar, my nails freshly manicured by the ladies at Silky Nail across the street, I watched the game on a tv in the far corner. I watched expressions of shame and defeat victory play over the faces on the screen, and felt horrified for everyone.

Walking home after the game was over, I thought about how I had watched more movies about baseball than actual baseball games up until probably this year.

It’s not that I ever scoffed at the philosophical tone often struck in voice overs for baseball movies. It’s just that they never felt like original thoughts I would have had. Having used baseball to get through three significantly difficult periods in my life, I was seasoned. I had now watched games play out and serve as metaphors for survival enough times that I was writing the monologue in my own head.

I marveled at how bravely the Yankees shouldered their defeat as they tugged out the last four innings. By contrast, Jang’s from the Dodgers was so buoyant, jubilant. He seemed detached from personal glory, like the way he strutted seemed like a nod to the team. It was palpable that there was something very philosophical about this sport.

Once you get that sense, it doesn’t feel like a waste of time to watch baseball anymore.