Volume 4, Issue 29: Story to Tell

"The world is always on the brink, love is dumber than you think."

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Tonight, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the St. Louis Cardinals will celebrate the 40-year anniversary of their 1982 World Series Championship. Twenty-one players from that title team 40 years ago will be there, from Ozzie Smith to Keith Hernandez to Jim Kaat to current Cardinals coach Willie McGee, alongside family members of the late Bob Forsch, David Green and Darrell Porter, the 1982 World Series MVP and one of my favorite baseball players of all time. Manager Whitey Herzog will also be in attendance, now 90 years old and as ornery as ever. They’re even giving out a bobblehead of Porter and Bruce Sutter celebrating the final out of that Game Seven World Series win over the Milwaukee Brewers, a moment called beautifully by late Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck in 1982 and terribly by me in 1997. I’ve already ordered mine from eBay.

1982 was the first year I watched baseball. My father had struggled to sell me on the game before that year, often groaning as his bookish son struck out at T-ball games and spent all of recess sitting on a rock reading Mom, the Wolfman and Me. But that 1982 team was too joyous for even his nerd son to resist. We went to a game at the old Busch, sat in the bleachers, watched Ozzie do a backflip when he ran on the field and realized, instantly, that we now had something to do together for the rest of our lives. St. Louis was—still is, I suppose—two hours from Mattoon, so I’d spend Sunday mornings frantically trying to finish all my chores and lawn work so we could hop on Dad’s motorcycle and head southwest on I-70. That 1982 team was the first team I followed from start to finish, the first one I fell asleep listening to on the radio, the first one I’d spent every morning scouring the boxscore in the Journal-Gazette to see if they’d won on the West Coast the night before.

Of all the ways to fall in love with baseball, watching a team that stole 200 bases, had a star player whose nickname was “The Wizard” and, oh yeah, won a World Series is a pretty great one. I did not like sports until that 1982 Cardinals team. After that: I was, obviously, hooked for life.

And now it has been 40 years.

I have many friends and colleagues who do not care about sports. I do not blame them for this. Honestly, they are the smart ones: They’re not wrong. Logically speaking, sports are a complete waste of time. They do not enrich our lives intellectually or emotionally, they do not make the world a better place, they are not a productive use of one’s particular sliver of the emotional economy. They are run by people who are concerned only about their own bottom line and constantly used to justify all sorts of corporate welfare. Cheering for sports teams often requires one to side with some truly odious people; as I’ve written before, I’m not sure it’s possible to be an ethical sports fan. As I wrote in that piece:

Every sports fan, at some point in his or her life, has to answer a fundamental question: Why am I doing this? Why am I, a grown adult with autonomy of movement and total freedom to choose what occupies my mind and soul, spending a large percentage of my leisure time watching a group of millionaires whom I’ve never met and have nearly nothing in common with — in a building built from public funds that should have gone to schools and parks, owned by a shadow billionaire corporation that is using all the money I’m giving it as a real-estate land grab it’ll flip as soon as it’s politically expedient to do so — play a children’s game? Why am I doing this? Being a sports fan means signing up for shady capitalist practices, engaging in ugly tribalism, and very often, cheering for many human beings who stand for the opposite of what you believe in every possible way.

Sure, there are heartwarming stories and moments that come out of sports—I’m a sucker for this one, and probably this one even more—but they are the occasional byproducts of sport rather than their primary utility. They are not what we watch the games for. No one goes to a sporting event because they want a heartwarming moment. If one happens, great, But that’s not what we’re there for. We’re there because we want our team to win. It is a basic concept of sport, the basic concept: If my team wins I am happy, and if my team loses I am sad. There is nothing else in the world that cut-and-dried. That simplicity, in an endlessly complicated world, is intoxicating. It’s irresistible. And I’d argue it’s ultimately good for the soul.

When I sat down last night to watch a key NL Central game between the Cardinals and Brewers, I had one singular focus: Go Cardinals. Win the game. The world is full of complexity, with infinite choices leading to infinite different outcomes. For three hours, I just wanted one thing: A win. (And I got it.) When those three hours are over, I go back to my life and the things that actually matter—where things are so much harder. The games then become solace. They become one of the few places where everything makes sense in retrospect. It’s why sportswriting is so fun. When a game is over, you can write about the result, what led to the result, what might have turned out differently and what overarching context has changed because of the result—and you’ve got a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. And you can do all this from the perspective of someone who can pretend they knew what was going to happen all along. To be a sportswriter is to be the ultimate omniscient narrator.

But I don’t love sports because I get to write about them. The experiences are entirely different, first off; to write about sports (and really about anything) requires a certain dispassionate perspective to do the job correctly, but to watch a game involves the opposite, basically steering into every emotion at every moment. The reason I love writing about sports is because I love writing about things I care about—I’m pretty terrible at writing about things I don’t, all told. Writing about the things you love strikes me as the point in the first place.

I love sports because they’re the only real thing that has always been there, for really anyone who invests in them. To watch sports every day is to be invested in an alternative universe that makes sense only to you, one that you follow every day, one whose storylines are inextricably intertwined with your own life. It is, in many ways, your own story. If you’re a Cleveland Browns fan, you invest a large percentage of your life in the possibility of them someday winning that long-elusive Super Bowl. If they get one, it will be one of the greatest days of your life; if they don’t, hey, there’s always next year.

I may be a Cardinals fan—and therefore understand that all Chicago Cubs fans are inherently public menaces and should probably just be locked away for the betterment of larger society—but even I cannot resist the stories of, after the Cubs won their World Series in 2016, fans heading to the wall at Wrigley Field to write the names of family members who devoted their whole lives to seeing the Cubs win a title but died before they had the opportunity. That’s a practice that had nothing to do with anyone who played for the Cubs, or the jerks who own them, or any of that. That’s about family, and community—about memory. Sports are a way to remember.

This is universal. My brain fires a specific synapse when it hears the words “Tommy Herr,” or “Kenny Battle,” or “Bonnie Blair.” I will remember being 14 years old at Memorial Stadium in Champaign watching my Illini beat eventual national champion Colorado and finding the roar of the crowd so loud and all-encompassing that I would float away on it all the way back to Mattoon. I watched the Cardinals win the 2006 World Series at a freezing Busch Stadium with my parents during a period of intense personal transition, a period I didn’t have to think about at all, because I was there and I was with them and the Cardinals won the freaking World Series.

And now I get to watch games with my sons, as they make their own memories, as their own stories begin. They’re both already older than I was when I fell in love with the 1982 Cardinals. They are both already well on their way.

It’s 40 years of sports fandom, of being invested, of caring too much, of losing perspective, of having a place to escape. I do not know if watching sports all the time is the most efficient usage of my time. (I doubt it!) I always must be careful not to become too helplessly lost down their rabbit holes. But I also know I’d be adrift without them. I’m glad my dad made me keep going to games until I got hooked. I’m glad Ozzie Smith did a backflip on the field. And I’m glad the 1982 Cardinals won the World Series, making a seven-year-old kid in rural Illinois deliriously happy—and changing his life forever. The men left from that 1982 team are all older now. Many of them will limp onto the Busch Stadium field tonight, no longer the eternally youthful superstars as they are forever locked into my brain. Some of them died years ago. They have their own lives, with their own failures and demons and heartbreaks. They are, after all, just men. But I will watch them, the ones that are left, be honored tonight, and I will remember, not just who they were, but what they sparked, who I was, who I am now, who I always have been. I’ve spent literally years of my life watching and obsessing over sports, largely because of those men. That season wasn’t the start of their story. But it was the start of mine. It was the start of a lot of people’s.

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In honor of the 1982 Cardinals, here’s Episode Twelve of the late, not-particularly lamented “The Will Leitch Show,” in which I spoke with Keith Hernandez about that ‘82 team, Just For Men hair dye and cutting off the tip of my left ring finger. I have all of these on YouTube but have set them all to private in case Sports Illustrated ever tries to pull a copyright claim on them. But I made this one public, for Keith, for those ‘82 Cardinals, and for my own amusement. Go Birds.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Child Separation Policy Was the Worst of the Trump Atrocities, Medium. And there were many to choose from.

2. Mets Fever, Catch It, New York. The best part of this piece was getting to embed Mr. Met videos from the old Conan O’Brien show.

3. Where Will Donald Trump Be in Five Years? Medium. I see four legitimate possibilities.

4. The Five Next Juan Sotos You’ll Be Sick of Talking About, MLB.com. The only way you’re going to get me tired of Shohei Ohtani.

5. Your Friday Five, Medium. I think it would derail my week if I made this my Friday Six.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Bullet Train,” “Prey” and “Luck.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I wrap up all the madness of the deadline. Fun times could be happening here.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we did our big SEC preview. Weekly shows have commenced!

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Secret History of the US Government’s Family Separation Policy,” Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic. I wrote a whole Medium piece about this this week, but you really have to read the whole thing. I think it’s one of the most shameful things our country has ever been a part of.

Also, here’s a great sports column by The Athletic’s Dana O’Neil on the idiocy of wanting to change the NCAA Tournament.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Bangers and Mash,” Radiohead. I think it’s good to go through a two-week stretch every couple of years where you just listen to a shit-ton of Radiohead. In the middle of one of those stretches right now. This is an all-timer of a Jonny Greenwood song.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

So we have officially reached the “digging through the edits” on the next book. I prefer to work analog on these things, so I spent my morning yesterday printing out this 422-page monster at the UPS Store.

So, you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, stay tuned for NEWS.

Best,
Will