Volume 5, Issue 49: Pax Soprana

"Apparently what you're feeling is not what you're feeling, and what you're not feeling is your real agenda."

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In October 2011, the United States marked its 10th year of war in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi was murdered by rebel forces amidst the deadliest stretch of the Libyan Civil War and an earthquake in Turkey killed more than 400 people. It was a bloody month, with pain and sadness and strife, like all the rest of them.

But I didn’t notice any of that. In October 2011, I was engulfed in my own world, entirely occupied by two parallel experiences that would change my life entirely. The first was that the St. Louis Cardinals were trying to win the World Series. I spent nearly every night that month at Foley’s, the New York City bar for expat Cardinals fans, watching our team with hundreds of red-clad screaming people who, for that month, were best friends. Foley’s, the since-shuttered baseball ball in midtown Manhattan, had hosted Cardinals fans for years, and in October 2011, it got so crowded with them that Foley’s had to hire security and extra doormen, which still didn’t stop us all from spilling out onto the street. It was a fortnight of toasted ravioli, buckets of Bud Light, rally squirrels, vanishingly little sleep and an endless succession of moments of frenzied delirium.

The second parallel experience is that I was about to become a father. My wife was eight-months pregnant during the 2011 World Series, and while we knew the baby wasn’t due until mid-November, the possibility that he might arrive in this world any second now surrounded every waking moment. We’d gone through all the classes, we’d built the crib, we knew our doctor’s exact schedule, we’d packed our go-bag; all we were doing now was waiting for him to show up. Our son was no longer a theoretical, a little blueberry growing into a kumquat, but a physical being about to enter the world and change it forever. He even had a name already, William Bryan, named after his grandfather, a man who I’d watched so many Cardinals game with I wrote a whole book about it. I couldn’t wait to watch games, games like these, with young William someday. I was so eager to start, in fact, that during the World Series I set up a dummy account in which, in a superstitious fervor familiar to any sports fan, I would send a text to “William” after every half-inning the Cardinals were ahead, thanking him for being their good luck charm.

Those texts above were sent on October 27, 2011, which was Game Six of the 2011 World Series, also known as the David Freese game, also known as the greatest sports experience of my lifetime.

When your team wins a World Series like the Cardinals won the World Series in 2011, there is, essentially, nowhere else to go. Down to your last strike, in your own stadium, with a St. Louis native who grew up a Cardinals fan at the plate, doing that, it was Peak Cardinals—really, Peak Sports Fan. It just can’t possibly get any better than that. I’ve been annoyed and frustrated by the Cardinals since then, but I can never be truly angry with them, or feel like my fandom hasn’t been rewarded, because That Happened. My relationship to the Cardinals changed during that World Series; since then, I’ve known that all the investment I put into them, all the years I’ve spent obsessing over them, did in fact pay off. It was all worth it. It changed everything

William was born 25 days after the Cardinals won the World Series that year. That changed everything much, much more.

The world was still going on outside of the St. Louis Cardinals and William Bryan Leitch during the fall of 2011. It did not pause for us. But it did not feel derelict to keep that world just outside of our periscope. Our world was enough. Our world was plenty.

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Last night, in December 2024, with the world swirling more out of control than I could have ever imagined in October 2011, I watched the Illinois men’s basketball team play Northwestern—a school that likes to consider itself Illinois’ rival but will never rise to such heights, because it is too stupid of a school with too many stupid students and even more stupid alums—with William’s grandfather, as I have so many times. William is now 13 years old, he has a little brother, a little brother who just got his braces off this week. William also has a phone of his own now, which means, when he doesn’t come with me over to his grandfather’s, I can text him during big games like I did 13 years ago. But now he can text back.

Last night was an extremely frustrating loss to a stupid little school in their stupid little podunk arena, and I was grousing at both William Bryan Leitches throughout.

It has been, fair to say, a tumultuous couple of months, and as much as I have tried to keep things steady inside this house, not always successfully, the outside world can’t help but seep in around the edges, up through the foundations, through the cracks in the walls. I’m not sure what the world is going to be like moving forward, and I do believe that the period we’re living through right now will end up being thought of us a pivot moment, one when we had a chance to go one way but ended up going the other. November 2024 is going, I suspect, to be one where we look back at in a similar fashion to November 2016, or September 2001, or November 2008, or March 2020—how nothing was quite the same afterward as it was before.

But the beauty of sports—the reason I watch, and why I’m so glad my children do too—and the beauty of the focus on the little things happening in your house is that November 2024 can eventually be, when they look back, something else. It can be the month they watched an eight-overtime Georgia-Georgia Tech game, or the month Wynn made 10 saves in his soccer game, or the month they went to New York City and watched their dad run a marathon and got to stay up late and drink cokes and eat chocolate cake. They can live through these times, and all the hard times that are coming. But they have a place to go to escape—a place that is just theirs.

These places become their own stories. After all, the Cardinals haven’t won a World Series since 2011, which means now William has a Cardinals plotline of his own. I imagine him being 94 years old, watching a Cardinals team that still hasn’t given him a World Series, knowing that the most exciting World Series imaginable happened right before he entered the world … and sharing that story with his children as well. (I do very much hope this doesn’t happen.) The world surrounds us, and we have to take part in it, and do our part to try to make it better, but the stories we tell, and live, from our distractions, and our personal stories, and the plotlines and milestones that arise and blossom from the part of our world we keep small and contained, they’re what keep us human, and grounded, and ourselves. They are not all that matter. But they do matter.

As we prepare for what awaits, we can take our solace, and our comfort, and our escape, in our worlds of diversion, of frivolity, of goofy texts about basketball or bad television or sudoku or which one of your friends looks the most like Timothée Chalamet. The world is larger than that. But day-to-day: That’s what our actual world looks like too. It is, after all, also history. I know Muammar Gaddafi’s death was a bigger deal than the Rally Squirrel was. But not in this house it isn’t. I think that’s OK. I think it is healthy.

I close this admittedly disjointed newsletter—it was a truly terrible Illini game last night, you might be able to tell that I’m still mad about it—with an excerpt from Jay Jaffe’s June 2020 obituary for the great Foley’s baseball bar, about the combining of those two massive storylines converging in October 2011.

Though it welcomed fans of every stripe, Foley’s was particularly popular among Cardinals fans. MLB.com’s Will Leitch recalled watching Game 7 of the 2011 World Series there with his wife Alexa, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant at the time, and not a baseball fan, but “she had gotten a little bit tired of me being gone every night for a month, so she decided to join us for Game Seven.”

In the seventh inning, Alexa was tired enough to leave, but the bar was so packed that Clancy helped her depart through a secret exit, and Leitch hailed her a cab. When he went back inside, “The bar was so crowded, and the anticipation so tense and intense, that the commotion of our leaving set off a cacophony of murmurs and rumors. Oh my god Will Leitch’s wife just went into labor. Shaun had to rush them out to the hospital. Word spread throughout the bar: Lady in labor! Did her water break? Will they have to deliver the baby on the subway?”

After the Cardinals won, “I discovered that the story had cemented into lore as: Will Leitch’s wife went into labor during Game Seven of the World Series, and he sent her to the hospital and came back in to watch the end of the game. And everybody understood. I was in no hurry to correct them; Shaun says he still tells the story that way.” The baby was actually born on November 21.

There are people who were at the bar that night who still think I missed the birth of my first son to see the Cardinals win the World Series. I wouldn’t be shocked if, someday, William tells the story that way too.

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 Was Back in the “Reasons To Love NYC” Issue This Year, New York. It had been a few years, it was good to be back. I only wrote one paragraph, on Jalen Brunson, but you should read the whole thing.

2. Juan Soto Could Make the Mets NYC’s City Team Again, New York. Are we on the cusp of a Mets epoch?

3. Which Free Agents Should Return to Their Old Teams? MLB.com. Verlander back in Detroit would be fun. (The Tigers might be my AL team next year.)

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “The Brutalist,” “Maria” and “September 5.”

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Georgia Tech game and previewed the Texas game.

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Friday’s shows this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Good Traitor,” Kate McQueen, The Atavist. Set a good chunk of time aside for this one, it’s worth it.

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! (Got some more of these out this week, stand by.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Masters of War,” Bob Dylan. I saw the Chalamet Dylan movie this week, and while it’s still under embargo, I will say that one of the strongest moments in the movie is this song, which, for all the times it has been covered by so many artists, is still best when it’s just Bob and a guitar.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

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

Obligatory.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will