How Baseball Helped Improve My Mental Health
I Can't Believe It's Not Therapy (TM)
Hey everybody; it’s been a while, but I figure it’s Election Night in the USA and therefore naturally no one has anything else to do or read or watch and thus will be captivated by my Substack post and devour it with the appetite of a hundred starving piranhas.
My last post was about baseball, and I’ve been wanting to write a lot more about that, because frankly, this year ought to have been nothing but chaos and stress and rage and grief (because of…*gestures vaguely at universe*), and thanks to baseball, for me, it wasn’t.
Yes, I’m aware that my team just lost the World Series, possibly in one of the most embarrassing performances in history. But that does nothing to diminish the sheer amount of joy that the Yankees gave me this year, that this sport gave me this year, and I wanted to commemorate that.
And I wanted to share a few things about baseball that I think really, genuinely, truly helped me find the sort of mental equilibrium that has served me well during these relentlessly chaotic and uncertain times.
What kind of game is it?
People have been describing baseball for as long as it has existed, often in grandiose and extravagant terms. I have a book on my shelf called “A Great and Glorious Game” by former Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti (yes, he is Paul Giamatti’s dad). Players and coaches will talk about how it’s the greatest game, the best game, and so on and so forth.
But more often than that, you’ll hear players and coaches talk about how it’s “a brutal game;” “a cruel game;” “a game of failure;” “a game of resilience;” “a game of adjustments” — because, as I explain to the baseball illiterate on a regular basis, even the most elite hitters in baseball are expected to succeed only 30% of the time. Most players these days are closer to 25%. That’s a 70-75% failure rate. The failure rate has a passing score; the best hitters have an F-minus-minus-minus.
Baseball is the house, and the house always wins. You fail, and you fail, and you find ways to adjust so that you can fail just a little bit less, fail a little bit better. And that, in baseball, is success.
But for me, what strikes me most about baseball is not quite that. Yes, it is a game of failure and a game of resilience and a game of adjustments, which carry their own lessons in that vein. But — and I don’t think I’ve ever heard people talk about it like this — the reason you can still succeed is because baseball is a forgiving game.
That’s not to say that it’s easy or that you can get away with anything. And it’s definitely not to say that the fans are forgiving. (I’m pretty sure Yankee fans right now are calling every radio station on Earth and several on the moon trying to get every Yankee player and coach kamikazied into a volcano.)
But the game is built in such a way that it does not remotely expect, much less demand, perfection.
How so?
Well, firstly, the season is SO LONG. 162 games long. One hundred sixty-two games. Even the best teams in the 100+ year history of baseball have lost 50-60 games in a season. 50-60 games! It takes football teams a decade to lose 50-60 games! And in baseball you do that every year. No matter how good you are.
Functionally, that means that if you had a bad game yesterday, no one will remember it — if you have a good game today. Even if you have a bad month, no one will remember it — if you have a good one next month. If you lose a game, even in the playoffs, it doesn’t matter as long as you win the series. (As Casey Stengel said, “They don’t pay me to win every game; just two out of three.”) The page keeps turning; you move on, and move on, and move on.
Secondly, within each individual game, the same dynamic is at work. Every player will get numerous chances to impact the game. You can strike out in the first inning, and then get 3 hits your next 3 times up. Or you can hit 2 home runs and strike out your third time up. If you’re the pitcher, you can miss the strike zone completely 3 times on any hitter, and if you make your next pitches, you can still get the outs. Arguably the best thing a hitter can do is hit a home run, and arguably the worst thing a hitter can do is hit into a double play — and it’s not unusual for the same hitter to do both of those things on a fairly frequent basis. It’s not unusual for the same hitter to do both of those things in the same game.
The slate gets wiped clean every time. What happened last time doesn’t dictate what happens this time. The game forgives you and gives you opportunities to earn that forgiveness, every at-bat, every game, every series.
My favorite game this year? It wasn’t a playoff game, or even a Yankee game. It was a random mid-season game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago Cubs. (I have my digital YouTubeTV DVR set to record any baseball games it can find, because like I said: joy.) It was a miserable muddy rainy day, and neither pitcher could grip the ball, and fielders could barely see what they were doing.
The Reds loaded the bases in the top of the second inning. With 2 outs, the Reds’ batter, Luke Maile, hit a fly ball to right field, which would normally be an easy-peasy catch for Cubs’ right fielder Seiya Suzuki.
But with the rain pouring down right into his eyes, Suzuki dropped the ball. 3 runs scored. And then the next batter got a hit, and Maile scored. 4-0 Reds. Bam, just like that.
Worst day ever, right?
HOLD ON.
In the bottom of the inning, the Cubs load the bases. With 2 outs. Same as the Reds did. And guess who comes to the plate.
That’s right: Seiya Suzuki.
And what does he do?
THAT’S RIGHT: HE HITS A GRAND SLAM HOME RUN. BAM. 4-4, TIE GAME.
(I swear, all of this happened. On live TV.)
I don’t even remember what happened in the rest of the game, to be honest. A ton of other ridiculous things, probably. But that entire sequence, it just encapsulated what I love so much about how baseball is built, the stories it can tell, and the opportunities that it can create.
Throw out the mistakes you made before; you can do better, and you can be forgiven.
Perfection is not expected or demanded.
All of which is so different from the mentality that pervades so much of our culture.
Our culture these days feels so deeply unforgiving. Stop me if you’ve met these people: The ones who will dig up and decontextualize anything remotely controversial to discredit anyone they dislike. The ones who speak in absolutist slogans and buzzwords and declarative sentence memes. The ones who decide they dislike people based on one possibly misquoted comment, or a series of decontextualized comments that they insist constitute a pattern. The ones who define every person they dislike by their worst moment and demand eternal atonement that can never be achieved. The ones who excoriate people for using the wrong lingo, regardless of intent; the ones who have no tolerance for mistakes, no matter how inadvertent; the ones who fly off the handle and assume the worst motives behind every word; the ones with no capacity for forgiveness.
We all know this personality type, and have seen how they’ve taken over the general online discourse. It’s a hardline, take-no-prisoners, extremist attitude, and I have seen the impact it’s had on so many people.
I have seen so many friends, of a whole range of ages, riddled with anxiety not only about what they say or post, but also about what they think. So many folks are terrified of how our thoughts might make us bad people, if they don’t conform precisely to the moral perfection demanded by the hardliners, and the hardline mentality that we’ve absorbed. Because mistakes are unforgivable. Make one wrong turn and you’re marked forever. Or at least, that’s how it feels.
Baseball is nothing like that.
Baseball takes note of your mistakes (everything you do is documented) but genuinely lets you move forward. It doesn’t merely say “let’s move on” but really just keep you on never-ending probation and remind everyone over and over of that time when you did That Thing.
Baseball means it. It embodies it. It lets you be your better self without holding your worst self over you at all times. Lets you know that life goes on, mistakes are made, and as long as you’re still standing, you can move forward from here.
I needed that so much this year, and I’m betting I’ll need it a lot going forward. And I’m guessing you do too.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
This piece is an extension of my Jewish American Heritage Month series (previous posts: Baseball and Star Trek), and if you’re interested in reading some more Jewish American content, you can check out my novelette “Moon Melody” in Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora, or my snapshot memoir, Millennial Quarter-Life Crisis: A Mosaic of Thinky Thoughts.