This morning I ran across an article by Patrick Dubuque — a man in whose last name every other letter is “u”, uniquer than unique since even unique isn’t unuque — reflecting on the dynamic in baseball prompting the Pirates to part with their two best stars, and the Marlins their entire star-spangled outfield. What’s a Pirate fan to do now that the Pirates have surrendered two months before the season starts?
Here Dubuque best capsulizes the problem:
In an age of playoff windows, a sine curve of rises and falls, the era of the single-team hero is dead outside perpetually competitive New York and St. Louis. The analysts who accept the systems, who seek to use them, will nod their head: The question wasn’t whether it was right to trade Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole, but how well they performed the necessary act. The liberal arts majors, the ones taught by their high school English teachers and their bank balances to question the natural state of universe, look at the same situation and ask: Isn’t there a better way?
He also makes this wonderful observation about baseball, the Constitution… and the EFL, had he been thinking all the way through the matter:
(H)istory provides the ability to see that every system is a bandage slapped on another bandage. Baseball (and the American government, while we’re barely still on the subject) aren’t perfect diamonds, or examples of divine intervention: They’re hasty fixes, slapped on top of each other, ranging all the way back to the Bill of Rights, and the first moment baseball decided that pitchers could try to get batters out.
Dubuque sees three options for the timber-shivered Pirate fan:
- Become a Giants fan. Or, if after all these years of Pirate futility you are hungrier for wins than you are for the rest of your superstar’s career, an Astros fan. Follow your favorite player to his new colors.
- Become a fantasy league fan, building your own team of favorite players, and root for them severally spread across the map.
- Become a fan of one player — a McCutchen fan, for example — and take your wins and losses on the micro scale of his accomplishments.
Dubuque acknowledges there are problems with each approach. As I see them, the first debases loyalty nearly to its dregs. It’s not as bad as always shifting your allegiance to the current front-runner, but it’s not far off. Wouldn’t it be best to be loyal, cradle to grave? But I have had three stages of loyalty: Dodgers, Tigers, Mariners. Now I root against the Dodgers (except MY Dodgers), and my ties to the Tigers are friendly but not fanatic. And even about the Mariners my fandom is almost as much a matter of weariness as warmth, as they wander into what will be their 17th wasted season since the 116 wins (and last playoff appearance). Wouldn’t it have been better had I stuck with the Doyers, Joel-Perez-style, or at least my first adult-chosen Tigers? Shouldn’t I go to THIS year’s Hall of Fame ceremonies for Morris and Trammell, rather than waiting for next year in the hope that Edgar will get in?
Why would anyone believe that something as wonderful as Edgar getting in will happen to a Mariners fan? Even Shohei Otani went somewhere else, to play in an ugly suburb of a grey and cluttered industrial wasteland. That was better than Safeco, between the mountains and the Salish Sea?
Assembling a fantasy team of one’s favorite players is impossible. Any player you like is probably popular with many, including other people in your league. And if your league is competitive, and if your favorite players are any good, somebody is going to snatch them away just to win, without a shred of human feeling involved. I suppose if your 25 most favorite players are marginal major leaguers — the Willie Bloomquist/Wade LeBlancs of the world — you could be happy in the basement. But most people are not so discriminating in their tastes. Instead we fantasy owners marry now and fall in love (maybe) later — a surefire recipe for fandom infidelity.
So can we pick one player and shut out everything else? I am sympathetic with this approach. After all, Andrew McCutchen once threw a baseball right to me — and I caught it! If I had a son in the major leagues, I would turn into a fan focused just on him. I would root for my son against any other team. I would root for him against any pitcher (or if he was a pitcher, any batter). But here’s the problem: I’d also root for him against any teammate that remotely threatened his playing time. In my mind, he would be surrounded by enemies, and I’d be rooting against them all. If he was a Cardinal, I’d be a Card Against Humanity. And what would that do to my soul?
And before very long I’d find myself rooting for him against Time. And he (and I) would lose. He would begin to list, and then to sink, and I would have to watch the waves of younger players swamp him, send him to the bottom of the bench, and flush him out of the game. I don’t know if I could bear it.
I opt for a fourth way. I have a fantasy team, but it is to my team more than my players that I am loyal. I wish I could work Adrian Beltre back into my team, I wish Kyle Schwarber would reward my loyalty. I wish I’d had all 10 years of Felix’ dominance. I wish I could justify rostering Ichiro (if any MLB team justifies rostering him). But these are just threads in the Wolverine tapestry. They give it texture and contrast. Finding Yelich in the second round was fun, made funner when he throve, and funner yet when he turned out to be personally fun to root for.
But I’ll probably trade Yelich for Brinson without batting an eye. I will follow Yelich the rest of his career with good wishes (as long as he doesn’t willingly join the Yankees), but the Wolverines are the thing here, and Yelich will matter mostly because he was a good and true Wolverine for four years. And five seasons of Brinson will probably help the W’s more than one more year of Yelich.
I root for the Wolverines as a team. I picked up Porcello when he fell in my lap, not out of shared humanity, but because he fills a gap. I will not mourn much if the Outs snatch him away: I’ll save $7,000,000 and some other player. If he survives the expansion draft, I will be equally content to keep Porcello or trade him in an instant for the right deal. And if I catch the Rosebuds, or even just gain on them more than expected, I will be about equally happy, with or without Porcello.
Maybe it’s not the way Jesus would run the Wolverines. He’d probably love all his players, and all yours, too, as human beings. I wish them no harm, and actively wish many of them well. But it’s the imaginary Wolverines franchise which counts, and which will provide the ties to bind me to baseball even through the coming long, cold, dark Yankee tyranny.