I'm Actually Fine With the Heartbreak
Spoiled dreams, and finding peace and silver linings in the Philadelphia Phillies breaking our collective hearts again.
The first job I ever wanted was “bulldozer man.” I think what I meant to say was “construction worker,” but that’s a little wordy for this stage of life. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, most small kids pull from the limited pool of things they know about, let alone things they are interested in, and extrapolate the job from there. Kids tend to keep this simple. It would’ve been weird if you had asked 4-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said “I’d like to be the content director of a B2B publication while also freelancing in the arts and culture vertical mostly as a hobby as a result of the crumbling digital publishing market.” You typically get more “doctor” and “astronaut” and, yes, “bulldozer man.”
Eventually as my vocabulary and interest in dinosaurs grew, I decided I would be a paleontologist, not knowing that I was better off with the lack of student loans and union benefits associated with bulldozer man.
After that, I decided I’d be a professional baseball player. I think it lined up with when I was playing tee-ball. I could hit the ball without needing the tee often, I thought Ken Griffey Jr. was the coolest man in existence, and still had a child-like understanding of the job market. So, it was settled.
I have this strangely vivid memory of declaring my future job out loud one day. My parents have always both been supportive of pretty much any endeavor I pursued, to the point where they wouldn’t always tell me if I wasn’t especially good at something, but I think on this particular day my dad’s brain went on autopilot, and he responded to 5 or 6-year-old me by basically breaking down to the percentage why being a Major League Baseball player just wouldn’t work out. There are X amount of kids who play baseball in the world. Y percent of them will play in high school. Of that, Z percent will go to college, and an even smaller percent will get drafted by a Major League Organization. And, at that point, it’s far from a guarantee that you actually get called up to the show at all for even a plate appearance or two, let alone for any meaningful years. I think I sort of just blinked. My Big League ambitions were short-lived anyway because pretty much immediately I realized that, despite loving baseball, I was very shitty at it 1.
All of this is to say that the odds of being a Major League Baseball player at all are astronomical. To be one of those players who wins a World Series is almost laughable.
And that’s what I’m using today to cope with the fact that my beloved Philadelphia Phillies all forgot how to bat at the same time and crashed out of what was surely Their Year against their most despised rival.
Baseball teams cannot subsist on vibes alone, it turns out.
I like to think I’m pretty good at not letting bad sports outcomes impact my day too much. Last night watching the game, I pretty much knew it was over. Even if they had pulled off a comeback, there were a lot of games between that point and the trophy, and this team just thoroughly lost the juice. That said, when the final out came, I still had to immediately turn off the TV and do some deep breathing – not to keep from throwing something or anything like that, just to mentally reset from “I am putting all of my emotional eggs into the Phillies’ basket” mode and into “I am a normal man who lives a normal external and internal life and baseball isn’t a real thing” mode.
I think I did OK.
And after meditating on it for a few minutes and hours, and getting a decent night’s sleep, I have gotten to the point where I can see that the Phillies losing is actually a good thing in some ways. Would it be better if the team was still riding the wave they were pre-All Star break where they were hitting home runs almost to the point of being bored by it and hitting so many extra-base hits that it felt like it didn’t even warrant celebration anymore? You bet. Did I want to go to a parade mere steps from my house? Absolutely.
Am I going to survive? Yes.
And here’s what I came up with:
YouTube TV’s stream is almost exclusively political ads, so I’m glad that I get to avoid them. But more than that, I’m somehow even more excited that I don’t have to hear the jingle for Wheatley Vodka or see the “We Have Walton Goggins At Home” actor they used for the commercial anymore.
I follow a lot of Philly sports and Philly people on social media, and many of them are pessimistic at best, psychopathic at worst. If I don’t want to see any of the doomsaying, I need to not log on in the first place. So there’s a great excuse to limit my screen time, or at least use it for something more worthwhile, like Duolingo Spanish.
I get to watch the rest of the postseason as a neutral. The huge scope of baseball, I think, allows for second-favorite teams or soft spots for other teams that other sports don’t. Rarely, if ever, do American League teams become thorns in my side, so I can root for teams like the Tigers without compromising any of my morals. I can also root against the Mets and Pete Alonso’s stupid body with aplomb.
Speaking of the Mets, their whole schtick of using Grimace as a rally mascot has turned me off to McDonald’s more than “Supersize Me,” the PETA DVD I got at Warped Tour not knowing it was a PETA DVD, and colon cancer ever could. So, thanks, Mets, for removing any temptation I had before when an advertisement popped up on my social media feed.
I can spend more evenings in October trying to get into spooky movies. For the longest time, I couldn’t watch horror movies. I think it’s just that I don’t like jump scares or excessive gore, and I’ve been going back and watching classics and new movies alike that would be described as “thriller” but are, in essence, horror movies. (Don’t yell at me, genre sticklers. I’m trying my best here.) My heart rate will still spike while I’m watching TV, but it won’t be watching the Phillies try to get out of a no-out, bases loaded situation.
I won’t buy a bunch of stuff, including the deeply cursed City Connect jersey. I had made a pact earlier this season that if they made the World Series I would buy one of these horrific jerseys, specifically the Trea Turner jersey to fully lean into the design with the fucked up 7. I don’t have to pretend I like them or watch the team ever wear them again. They are so bad that minutes after they debuted online, the city literally shook. Had the Phillies made a deeper postseason run, or even looked convincing in the time they did have, I 100% would’ve bought shirts, hats, whatever. I’m an easy target for this sort of thing. Not to mention I would’ve been spending money going out to watch the games with friends, which leads me to my next point.
I have no good reason to drink alcohol right now. Plenty of people toy with the idea of Sober October. I’m not necessarily committing to that, though my alcohol intake has drastically declined since I got sick/turned 30, I did still think “Well if the Phillies get to the NLCS/World Series I’m not gonna not have a couple beers.” The Phillies’ ineffectiveness at the plate has erased this dilemma from my life.
I get to do this all again next year. If there’s one thing sports fans, particularly in this neck of the woods, have, it’s short memories. They have scars, sure. But once it starts getting warm again and we’re all back at the Bank in March, we’re going to forget all about this and return to blissful Philadelphia psycho mode, declaring this particular group of himbos – even if they trade/release/sign new himbos – the greatest group of himbos this city has ever seen.
Real quick, while I have ya here, I got more of my homework published over this past week. The big marquee story was that SPIN asked me to do their October cover story, which is pretty cool. I read SPIN growing up, so being asked to do the cover story (albeit a digital “cover”) was nifty. It was on the band Glass Animals.
I went to their show at the Mann to take in the whole thing, and being a reporter for SPIN means that you get really close seats. I felt bad kind of. I never listened to them all that much, and people around me and in the countless rows behind me were clearly extremely pumped to see this band — not to mention the fact that they paid to be there.
After watching the show up close, during the encore I decided to explore the big amphitheater’s lawn area to see what things were like up there, and decided I’d find some people who really seemed into the band but didn’t get close up tickets, and give them mine for the last song or two.
It was an easy moment of altruism, like when I hit a certain age and I’d give little kids my arcade tickets on the boardwalk, before I hit another certain age and decided, to quote Michael Jordan, “fuck them kids,” and that I wanted to use my tickets to buy candy or something.
You can read that story on Glass Animals here. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.
Also over at SPIN, I convinced them to let me interview Balance and Composure about their new album with you in spirit, which was a comeback album we fans of B&C never thought we’d get. It was a really thoughtful conversation with guitarist/vocalist Jon Simmons about some pretty deep topics that unfortunately I had to condense down to about 1,000 words. But they have always been an important and formative band in my musical evolution, so I was very happy to land that gig.
You can read that here.
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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The Tisburys.
There was one part of baseball that I was OK at, and that was catching fly balls. In adulthood, you don’t get as many chances to catch fly balls as you did when you were playing organized baseball. Sure, maybe you and a friend are playing catch and you decide to throw some high up to each other, but it’s not quite the same. That’s why I want to create a batting cage but it’s the opposite: You just go somewhere and catch fly balls. Maybe there’s even a thing that simulates different situations, like, you’re in left field and there are runners on first and second with one out, and you have to throw the ball into the appropriate base in a timely fashion. Could be fun for guys like me who were bullshit at the plate but reasonable in the outfield. Not unlike Johan Rojas. Go Phils (derogatory).