Volume 5, Issue 21: I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano

"I don't just hate this man. I hate all men."

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The world is heavy, and scary, and the news is hard, and the years pass, and your loved ones slip through your fingers, and sometimes everything can seem like it is spiraling out of control. We are headed into a six-month stretch of American life that will be inexhaustible in its ability to erode your will and disorient your sense of reality, which is particularly alarming because this stretch may just result in everything you and I and everyone we know have ever understood or valued to change in ways that are irreversible. It can knock the wind out of you.

We all have our little remedies. Many attempt to tune it out all together. Some turn to their faith. A certain, inescapably loud few steer into the skid and become angrier, more militant and unyielding. Walking the streets of New York City this week, it appears to me that the drug “marijuana” may be becoming a popular refuge. My strategy has been a simpler one. I go back to basics: I write about baseball.

I am able to write and talk about baseball professionally—in addition to everything else it does, baseball provides my family its medical insurance—but I’m never really able to think of it in that sort of dispassionate way. To write about baseball, something I’ve purposely made an even larger part of my life this year than it ever has been before, is to combine the two activities that calm me down, that allow me to step back from the world and get a little perspective, to be able to catch my breath. To write about baseball is to go to my happy place. I would not say that my baseball writing is inherently my most ambitious writing; you’ll find that in my books, or in this newsletter, or maybe even in my work for New York. (I actually find a lot of “ambitious” baseball writing too self-conscious, often more about the writer themselves than the fans they’re ostensibly supposed to be writing for; baseball is a sport in which a lot of middling writers use to try to make themselves seem more cultured and philosophical than they actually are. But let’s move on.) But that does not mean I take my baseball writing any less seriously than my other writings, or I don’t work just as hard on it. I just try to keep it simple. My baseball writing is much more straightforward than most of my other writing: This team is playing well, this team is not playing well, this player is on a hot streak, this one has fallen apart, isn’t that stadium gorgeous, that sort of thing. I do not always take my biggest swings in my baseball writing. But that makes me value it more, not less. It becomes my place of peace. Baseball writing might be the writing that provides me the most utility. I always feel a little bit better after I write about baseball. I hope it does that for the reader as well.

So, as we ease into this holiday weekend, as we enter a summer that feels somewhat like a final refuge before plunging into the abyss, I hope you will take a little break with me and indulge a silly little baseball list for the long holiday weekend. I am simply going to rank the Leitch family’s favorite teams.

This is a potentially perilous exercise, being a professional baseball writer as I am and all. It will lead to charges of bias, or preferential treatment, or petty score-settling. But my counter to this is twofold. First, these are immutable laws passed down from Leitches (and Dooleys) for generations; it is less a personal choice than a coat of arms, a genetic code chiseled into tablets of stone—we are simply following those who came before us. But moreso: Not only do the Leitch family’s personal feelings have nothing to do with my baseball writing, it would ruin all of the fun of it if they did. To write emotional, irrational polemics about narrow, unmoored grievances is exactly what I don’t like about baseball writing; the fun of it is getting lost in the details of it all, not making it as dumb and blinkered as everything else. Put another way: Trust me, no one is harder on the Cardinals than I am.

This list, which came out of a conversation with my son while attending the (very exciting) Mets-Giants game at Citi Field last night (we actually doodled down the list in my scorebook), is simply an answer to the question: If these two teams were playing in an important game, who would you be rooting for? It is not more complicated than that. It should not been seen as a value judgment on any of these teams, or your personal fandom, and it also should not be seen as an indicator as some sort of overarching agenda for or against any of these teams, either professionally or ideologically. It is just an honest accounting. We are raised to like this team more and this team less. It can be because of a devoted fanbase, or geographic preference, or just the color of the uniforms. It should be taken with the seriousness it deserves, which is very little.

I hope you will indulge it on this holiday weekend.

1. St. Louis Cardinals. This one is rather well-documented. I only got into sports at all because I got into the Cardinals first. It would be OK if either of my children chose to cheer for a baseball team other than the Cardinals as long as they understood that it would quickly be required of them to find another house in which to live.

   

2. Baltimore Orioles. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Orioles—the bird is cute!—and I’m a sucker for any dedicated fanbase that has suffered for years but will absolutely lose its mind if its team ever breaks through. (This is more of a thing in the NFL, see: Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland). I haven’t been to Camden Yards in more than 20 years, which is one of my more serious failings as a human.

3. Oakland A’s. I love a dingy old ballpark, I love the other team in a major metropolitan area and I love unusual color schemes on uniforms. It should not be forgotten how wild this fanbase could get, back when they were not being actively punched in the face. I suspect I will like them even more when they play in Sacramento, but probably less when they finally make it to Las Vegas.

4. Detroit Tigers. Classic old-school uniforms, Rust Belt mentality, deeply underappreciated great American city. Note: This might be a Magnum P.I. hat thing.

5. New York Mets. I always surprise myself with how much I like the Mets. Their fans are all-time fatalists—they’re either the greatest team who has ever played or a toxic curse, a historical pox, on their fans and their families—but that makes them more charming to me, not less. Also never forget how much Mr. Met has been through.

6. Toronto Blue Jays. I wouldn’t say I find this particular incarnation of the Jays all that lovable, but this is a fantastic fanbase that deserves better than it has received in recent years. Also if you go to a game here you will probably run into somebody from Rush.

7. Chicago White Sox. The black uniforms are great, as is the old SOX logo with the little batter on the hat, and I actually think it’s cool that they gave Michael Jordan a shot. (If it had been the Cubs, it might have turned me against Jordan forever.) Plus, they’re Obama’s team.

8. Seattle Mariners. If I ever hit a home run in an MLB game, I would like someone to hand me a trident.

9. San Diego Padres. I might make them No. 2 if they played every game in this uniform:

   

10. Los Angeles Angels. As I said, I’ll always have a bias for the other team in a metropolitan area. Also, this is a Rally Monkey safe space. They fall a spot or two for dropping “Anaheim” from their name.

11. Pittsburgh Pirates. This would be a top-five team if they weren’t in the Cardinals’ division. I’m not sure there’s a fanbase that deserves a World Series title more.

12. Los Angeles Dodgers. I’ve got a soft spot for them, even when I know I shouldn’t. What can I say? The stadium is gorgeous, it’s right off downtown, it’s stuck in time in the best possible way (I keep expecting the public address announcer to be Bob Hope) and the Dodger Dogs really are better.

13. Philadelphia Phillies. The softening-up of this fanbase—they actually embrace their underachieving free agent signings now—is an underreported story: Phillies fans are getting downright cuddly!

14. Colorado Rockies. A weekend in downtown Denver for a baseball weekend is a weekend that will never be wasted.

15. San Francisco Giants. My favorite stadium to visit, they get knocked down a few spots just because, well, let’s face it, all three of those World Series wins were pretty cheap and uninspiring, let alone having them all happen right after one another. There’s no way they cared about that third title nearly as much as they did the first one.

16. Cleveland Guardians. It’s sure a lot easier to watch them—or write about them, or even be actively not embarrassed by their existence—now that they’ve changed their name. I’m hardly a hard-liner about this, but woof, that logo was rough.

17. Minnesota Twins. I’m still sore about the 1987 World Series. Also, I preferred the Metrodome. It was at least different.

18. New York Yankees. I can’t quite hate the Yankees as much as I’m supposed to. This is a team that tries to win every year—I’ll take that, even if it turns them into villains, maybe especially if it does. The uniforms alone give you a good feeling. The new stadium still stinks though.

19. Miami Marlins. The new tradition of going to a Marlins game every spring break has softened my antipathy to this fanbase’s apathy, but probably because it’s so easy to get a cheap, right-behind-home-plate ticket.

20. Boston Red Sox. As a fervid Boston-sports-fans-are-bad-and-consistently-make-the-world-worse hardliner, this is as high as I can go for a Boston sports team. (The Red Sox are, in fact, the least objectionable Boston sports team.)

21. Kansas City Royals. This is unreasonably low and is solely a consequence of the 1985 World Series, for which they will never be forgiven.

22. Tampa Bay Rays. I find it telling that the Rays have been good for almost 20 years now and I still don’t know anyone who has ever once gotten excited to see their team play the Rays.

23. Houston Astros. As a longtime proponent of “the banging scandal is no big deal and kind of fun, actually” viewpoint, this ranking should be considered more an indictment of the state of Texas than anything specific to this franchise.

24. Texas Rangers. As you will also see here. Texas and Florida are just not places the Leitches were meant to spend much time.

25. Atlanta Braves. They’d shoot up about 15 spots if they were honest and just called themselves the Smyrna Braves. (This current team is also, unquestionably, the most likable Braves team since I moved to Georgia. I still think their fans care about 20 times more about whatever college football team they happen to cheer for.) Also if I ever catch either of my kids doing The Chop, I’m sending them to boarding school.

26. Milwaukee Brewers. This is absurdly, ridiculously low: I love the Brewers, and their fans, and the guy in the mustache who jumps down the slide. But they are in the Cardinals division, and they are good, which means, at the end of the day, I’m cheering for them to lose nearly every night.

27. Arizona Diamondbacks. As an Arizona Cardinals fan, I should have a natural warmth toward the Diamondbacks. But I realized, to my surprise, that during both of their World Series appearances that I was fervently cheering against them. I think I might just not take them seriously as an actual franchise. Maybe it’s the uniforms? They always look like the opponent in a baseball movie that doesn’t have the rights to use actual MLB logos.

28. Washington Nationals. Has there ever been a bigger downgrade than the one from the Montreal Expos—a team whose logo, colors and mascot have never failed once in 45 years to make me smile—to the generic emptiness of the Washington Nationals? I once played NBA Live as the Oklahoma City Thunder, before the game knew what their official logo would be, and they were just a generic default black-and-white color scheme. That team still had more individual personality and charisma than the Nationals. The only fun thing about this team is the Presidents race.

29. Cincinnati Reds. Division rivals, sure, but also one that no one really takes very seriously. The Reds are always up-and-coming, but they never end up going anywhere. They’re like the Cardinals, but Xerox’d about 40,000 times.

30. Chicago Cubs. Listen to Cardinals fans. We have been saying, our entire lives, that if the Cubs ever won the World Series, the world would come to an end. The Cubs finally won that series on November 2, 2016. Then, six days later … well, we tried to tell you.

    Have a Happy Memorial Day weekend, all. Please do not take any of this seriously (except for the Cubs part).
    

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

1. I Wrote an Obit for this Beloved Knicks Team, New York. I think they should just run it back next year.

2. This Week’s Five Fascinations, MLB.com. Julio Rodriguez, Tyler Glasnow, Lars Nootbaar, the Rangers and the Royals.

3. Seven Teams for Whom the Next Month Is Critical, MLB.com. The Cardinals are on this list.

4. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. The Phillies are hot.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, Grierson’s in Cannes, so he only makes a brief cameo, but I talked about “IF” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are waiting and seeing.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Joe Biden and the Inversion of Reality,” Brian Klaas, The Garden of Forking Paths. How does it make one feel to consistently see people maddeningly, stultifyingly wrong about basic, immutable facts heading into this election? Brian Klaas explains it well, and also how it really is partly the press’ fault:

Pardon me, let me just nip off and slam my head against a wall again (a favorite pastime of people, like me, who study democracy and feel intensely unpleasant emotions when contemplating its ongoing breakdown in favor of authoritarian demagogues).

These aren’t just slight misperceptions. This isn’t a few people in the population being sort of wrong about objective reality. No, this is something much worse.

This is the inversion of reality, which is the worst kind of misinformation that exists. Up is down, black is white, the stock market is crashing, except—no wait—it actually hit THE HIGHEST LEVEL EVER…again!

Related: Jonathan V. Last on when, well, Trump last week accused Joe Biden of putting out an assassination attempt on him and hardly anyone mentioning it at all. I bet you didn’t even know about it! It’s insane! It makes me want to slam my head against a wall too!

Also, I liked this interview with an author of a book about “liberalism as a way of life.” Affirming!

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!

(I am going to answer all of these when I turn in the book, which is very, very soon.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” Weezer. Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed of what has generally happened with Weezer, and then I listen to this song (among with quite a few others) and then I feel better. I think this quietly might be the best Weezer song.

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

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

I was on MLB Network on Friday, and I was stunned that they briefly used a non-union cameraperson.

Have a great weekend, everyone. The book is almost done. Thank you for letting me take this week off.

Best,
Will