Michelle Martin

Wait ’til …

October 2, 2024

I started this baseball season in Arizona, sitting on a grassy hill in bright sunshine when everything was possible.

One of my adult children and I went to watch the White Sox in spring training, and after three games in three days, we were tired, a little sunburned and hopeful that the team could finish the season with something less than 100 losses.

As everyone knows, that optimism — limited as it was — was wildly misplaced.

It wasn’t long into the season when we started to cover our eyes as close games reached the seventh inning, started t’e many other games early on. There was still a spark of hope then, and tickets were still expensive.

But I went to many games over the last six weeks of the season, starting with a game on my birthday when the Sox took a 2-1 lead into the seventh and ended up losing 10-2.

I went to one game — a weekday day game — for which I bought an upper deck ticket for $1. I sat about 15 rows behind the third base dugout; the upper deck was closed.

When I made plans to see the team in Detroit on the final weekend of the season, I assumed that they would have already surpassed the record for games lost during a single season in the modern era. They had tied the record of 120 set by the 1962 Mets days earlier.

But to the surprise of pretty much everyone, the team rallied to sweep their last home series, their first three-game sweep since April.

So I spent the last weekend of the season in a windy and rainy Detroit, watching the Sox set the record for futility while their division rivals punched their ticket to the playoffs on Friday, before winning meaningless games the next two days.

And you know what? It was fun.

It was fun to be in a packed ballpark, even with the ribbing I took for my Sox hat. It was fun to get away for a couple of days, to spend time on the train and watch the scenery roll by.

Writers far better than me have waxed poetic about baseball, how it’s a game of failure, how it mirrors life with its lack of a clock and the sense that there’s always time for a comeback. But for me, baseball is like life because it’s often boring for long stretches, but those stretches are punctuated by moments of the sublime, or deeply disappointing. It’s like life because sometimes it’s hard — this season, hard to watch — but it’s still good. The field is still green, and the hot dogs somehow taste better, and no matter what, there’s always next year.

Topics:

  • family life

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