By Ronald J. Hansen
In April, I saw my cousin Mike at a family funeral. It was the first time I’ve seen him in … well, years. I don’t even know how long it had been.
In short order, Mike and I were like brothers again, talking sports, joking, and, of course, throwing a football, even though I was two weeks removed from hernia surgery. There are some bonds that just don’t disappear, no matter how long they’ve been ignored.
Baseball is the same way.
It’s a game that has absorbed all my attention, and then gone utterly forgotten for years at a time. I’ve found my way back to baseball this year, and I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s because in the year since my dad died I’m retracing his interests. Maybe it’s because the teams I care about the most — Cleveland and the Mets — could have seasons worth remembering. Maybe it was just time.
To be clear, this time is different. It’s not a full-blown, all-consuming obsession. I have to work far too often for that. My wife and 11-year-old daughter deserve my attention, and sometimes they even want it. And the truth is, I’m just a different person now than the 22-year-old who blotted out the world for the World Series.
This time I’m thinking less about the game or the players or the history. This time it’s about thinking about where baseball fits in my life. I’ve thought more about how the Mets and mid-century modern design are intertwined in my mind than who is in their pitching rotation.
Before I went to my aunt’s funeral, I went to a game in Cleveland for the first time in at least a decade. The stadium looked different to me. Yes, they’ve modified Jacobs Field — excuse me, Progressive Field. Sadly, I’m happier about renaming the ballpark after a corporate sponsor than renaming the team after statues. Maybe someday I’ll be happy with Guardians. But honestly, the team felt unfamiliar to me.
There was something profound about returning to Ohio State University for the first time after I graduated. It had been years by then. The campus changed a bit. The faces were all new, but at a school as large as OSU, I can’t say I ever really recognized most people anyway. It just felt different seeing it as a degree-holding adult.
It was the same when I went back to Cleveland in April. The stadium had changed. I hate what they’ve done to the upper deck in right field (though that is reverting to something less terrible, I’m told). I like what they’ve done to the outfield concourse and behind home plate, where they added a restaurant. The biggest change in Cleveland, however, was the fans. In Year Two as inanimate objects, more than half the fans still wore their old gear.
Maybe it’s because they hadn’t found the right hat or shirt, or maybe they just like holding onto the team’s past. The change has been painful for me. I accepted change by the time it happened, but can’t get behind the new name when Spiders was a far better, actually meaningful alternative that we ignored in favor of something with no real meaning at all.
Attendance figures suggest that a lot of people in Cleveland are as underwhelmed by the team’s new identity as I am. At the same time, I don’t want to stand on the wrong side of history. When I looked at the fans wearing the old team’s name and logo, the adult in me looked at them and tried to theorize why they did it. Was it a political statement? An act of rebellion against what they view as oppressive political correctness? I hope not. Was it because they didn’t have the means to switch apparel just because the team did? The Cleveland area is poor and old and new threads aren’t cheap. Was it because they loved the old team just that much and don’t want to forget it in the way a widow carries her husband’s picture long after he’s gone? I don’t know. Maybe a hat is just a hat.
For the record, I wish the Cleveland team well. I hope they win the World Series because, god, does that city deserve it. But as the trade deadline approaches, I feel as unattached to them as I did before. It’s complicated. Trevor Bauer’s shocking misogyny didn’t begin in Los Angeles. Mickey Callaway, the former pitching coach for Cleveland and manager for the Mets, had many complaints of sexist behavior in Cleveland and New York. These things bother me a lot more than the team’s old name and logo. Like I said, I think about baseball in a different way now.
No. 2 is a tricky thing in sports. In competition, nobody wants to be second. But is it all right to like a second team? Is it okay for it to be in New York? Not just a rich team, but the richest team? Is that allowed? I hope so, because that’s what the Mets are, and they are my baseball alternate universe.
Why the Mets? That’s a fair question and, in truth, I don’t have a good answer. I liked them as a teen. I liked the script Mets logo. I liked Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. I liked “The Odd Couple” movie and the Mets are part of the story.
I liked a lot of National League teams back then, in part, because they were all equally foreign to me. The Giants and the Astros were on that list. I also liked the Yankees for a few years, but that was easy to explain: I liked their history. I liked the combative spirit Billy Martin brought to the game and the colorful exaggerations of the lives of people like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle.
The truth is, there’s just more history to inhale for the Yankees than for Cleveland. I read the only two books on Cleveland players I could find. But my attachment to Cleveland reached its peak when I left home in 1992. As fate had it, I began my career in Kinston, N.C., which was Cleveland’s Class A affiliate at the time. I think being a Cleveland fan simultaneously created a thin bond with my new home and a clear sense of superiority over it, too. I wasn’t aiming to stay in the minors forever.
So the Mets were another, on-again, off-again interest of mine. The first time I really became entranced by baseball was the spring of 1986. Again, I can’t say why. It was my senior year of high school. My intramural basketball team went undefeated. The Cleveland Browns won their division the year before. I had not been crazy about baseball for a few years then, but, for whatever reason, the game captivated me. And the Mets were this brash team that added a charge to the game. That was clear from the start of the season.
I bought my first Mets hat that year and took it with me to Virginia, when I moved in with my uncle after graduation. I bought Micro League Baseball and spent my summer nights playing a baseball tournament with that impossibly slow game’s historical teams, which included the 1969 Miracle Mets. (They didn’t get far, as I recall.)
I remember talking baseball every day with one of the guys I worked with at Chesapeake Bay Seafood House. He was an Orioles fan. As a side note, Cleveland finished with a winning record for the first time in my life and had the best hitting team in baseball. I got to see almost none of it because I was in Virginia. The Orioles lost, I believe, 42 of their last 56 games and sent manager Earl Weaver back into permanent retirement. I concluded my proximity may have had something to do with how teams played.
I started college at Cleveland State University in late September. I know I bought books and notebooks and other supplies. But what I remember buying as much as anything else that fall was a gray Mets jersey. It was like the ones the team wore back then with the orange and blue “racing” stripes on the shoulders and ribs. (Years later, my first credit card purchase was a baseball encyclopedia that set me back about $40 or so. That wasn’t cheap, but I inhaled the stats.)
Then came the 1986 baseball playoffs.
Yes, they were epic and unforgettable for everyone who watched. But for me, they were even more so, because I watched the games not just as a casual fan, but as someone who was a student of the game. I wanted to know more about what kind of pitch to throw at each point. I tried to understand who was hitting well and whether it was likely to continue. It was a lot to take in, and the games were gloriously tense.
The Mets, the team I kind of adopted as my National League favorites at the start of the season, won the World Series. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had another team I really cared about that has won the series since. I’ve seen Cleveland lose in agonizing fashion. And I’ve enjoyed entertaining baseball over the years as a casual observer of other teams, notably the 1991 playoffs.
I’m middle-aged now, and baseball has come and gone in different cycles for me several times. I was devastated when Cleveland was a strike away from winning the 1997 World Series over the Marlins, a team that was dismantled a few weeks later. How cruel to lose to a team that didn’t even want to be good, I thought. It was another gut punch in 2016, when Cleveland lost to the Cubs. The only team with more futility than Cleveland was the Cubs. America couldn’t root for Cleveland in one of our few moments of excellence.
That loss still hurts but for different reasons. For one, it was the team’s last hurrah as I grew up with them. The logo disappeared. Then the name did, too. Then came the wretched new name. The team had a record winning streak in 2017 and face-planted in the playoffs. They never got back.
But it hurt more because during the 2016 series, my dad told me he didn’t understand how the rules worked for extra innings. My dad knew baseball’s rules better than anyone I ever knew. He would note the infield fly rule before the ball hit the glove. He loved playing baseball as a kid. By 2016, dementia was stripping out his memories. I knew he was fading when he didn’t know how extra innings worked. When Cleveland didn’t win in 2016, I knew that it was never going to happen for him. It was already too late.
He died last year a week into a new baseball season. The past year has been a succession of firsts; the first Father’s Day without him, the first birthdays, the first Christmas. As the calendar rolled around to spring training this year, I felt a new appreciation for an old love.
In a few weeks, I’m taking my 11-year-old daughter to New York for the first time. She will love seeing “Harry Potter” on Broadway. I can’t wait to see Citi Field. I’m planning to get myself another gray Mets jersey. There are parallels to how I felt back in 1986, but that’s not the thing. Baseball is different now, as a game with a pitch clock (!) and to me as a source of distraction. I love it for memories of summers past and connections to a new cast playing an old game.
(Written in August 2023)
