Volume 5, Issue 60: Bust Out

"It's bittersweet this period, you're glad they're growing up but you're sad to lose them."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

When I was in high school, like my oldest son will be in precisely 18 months, I wanted to make my mark. I wanted, more than anything else, to be remembered. I knew I was going to leave my hometown of Mattoon after I graduated—as with many ambitious kids who grow up in small towns and dream of leaving to be a part of the larger world, this was both my signature personality trait and overarching narrative of my entire high school experience, surely to the annoyance of everyone around me—and thus had to do everything before I left. I was a joiner. I tried out for all the school plays, I ran for class president, I signed up for every club I could, I played for the scholastic bowl team and multiple sports teams, I went to every extracurricular activity …. I wanted to know everyone and I wanted everyone to know me. It wasn’t about being popular or anything like that; that was always going to be outside my reach. I think it was just about wanting to feel special. All kids want to feel special. That was how I tried to feel special. Forgive me. I was a teenager.

But if you were to walk through the halls of Mattoon High School today, nearly 32 years after I graduated, despite all my efforts back then, you would find only one shred of proof that I was ever even there.

On the wall next to the gymnasium, where the Green Wave beat Effingham just last week, you can find this:

You can probably tell from my reflection in the photo that I haven’t been back to my high school since Covid.

The 1993 Big 12 Conference Baseball Champion Mattoon Green Wave were inducted into the Mattoon High School Hall of Fame seven years ago; they actually invited me back to give the acceptance speech, which I published here. That was probably more of an honor than I deserved. I was the backup catcher to the backup catcher on that team, my spot on the roster mostly reserved for warming up guys in the bullpen, computing everyone’s ERA, ticking up the team GPA, coming in as a defensive replacement late in blowouts and making jokes and spitting sunflower seeds in the dugout. The other players on the team were nice guys, but they were not my natural friend group; when they were out drinking in cornfields on Friday night, the other members of the scholastic bowl team and I were watching Woody Allen movies and listening to Paul Simon. You could not come up with a less representative member of the 1993 Mattoon High School baseball team than me.

But I loved baseball, and I was a part of that time, which honestly—it really did make us brothers. One of the best thing about youth sports, particularly for bookish kids like I was, is that they force you to get outside your comfort zone, to interact with people who aren’t exactly like you, to work together with people who see the world differently than you do to accomplish a common goal. To learn how to get along with—to befriend; to support—people whom you would not naturally gravitate toward, who would not naturally gravitate toward you, is an extremely valuable life skill. And it’s one that feels in far rarer supply today than it did in 1993. I’m a better, more well-rounded person because of it.

I batted 23 times my senior season, two of which were at the old Busch Stadium.

I remember all of them. I remember the double I hit into the right field corner against Argenta-Oreana, scoring Alan Hill. I remember striking out against Charleston after taking two meatballs down the middle because my third-base coach gave me the take sign so the runner at first could steal, and the runner never did, and then I struck out on a nasty curveball in the dirt. I remember getting hit in the head by a pitcher for Rantoul; his face went pale, and he ran up to me, grabbed my arm and nearly burst into tears apologizing. (I was fine.) I remember being plowed into at home plate by a chunky farm kid from Arcola, I remember dropping a perfect bunt down the third base line against Stephen Decatur, I remember being thrown out at third trying to advance on a wild pitch against Champaign Central.

I remember riding the bus back from Kankakee and playing cards with Kevin Trimble, Doug Allen and Jason Morgan. I remember driving Charles Tipsword home from practice every Tuesday and Thursday. I remember pulling in to practice blasting Nevermind and getting made fun of for it by my Garth Brooks-obsessed teammates. I remember staying up all night packed into our assistant coach’s hotel room outside Busch Stadium, playing cards, eating pizza and talking shit. I remember when we lost in the super-regionals that year, it was an upset, everyone we thought we were going to make it all the way to state but honestly it had been a long season and we were all kind of sick of our head coach and graduation was coming up soon and truth be told we weren’t all that sad it was over. Even though it was over—definitively, and forever, over.

I close my eyes and these details appear, clear as day. I do not remember what classes I took in high school, I don’t remember the name of the girl I took to sophomore year Homecoming, I don’t remember applying to college, I don’t remember any elections, I don’t remember much of anything that was going on in the world at the time. But I can tell you about each of those at-bats, and those bus rides, and those dudes.

My parents knew nothing about this. They weren’t a part of it at all. It didn’t even occur to me to include them. I realize now that they were on the outside—trying to get a glimpse.

Baseball didn’t seem like one of the biggest parts of my life when I was in high school. It just felt like something to do, a place to go after school, a reason to go run around in the dirt like a dumb boy for a few hours. My true friends were in the honors classes with me, playing Trivial Pursuit on a Friday night, writing stories for the student newspaper. That’s what I thought would last. And in many ways those things have.

But it’s the baseball that proved eternal, the one artifact of my time there, the one piece of proof that I ever walked those hallways. I am 49 years old and remember very little from being 17. The baseball, though? The baseball I remember.

*************

This weekend, my oldest son William, now 13, now a teenager, is playing his first games for the Clarke Middle School baseball team.

It is a short season, much shorter than our old junior high teams; the middle school teams down here are built more as a feeder for high school and travel teams than self-contained programs themselves. (There’s not even a tournament at the end of the year.) William, a lefty, is a pitcher and an outfielder, but he is a seventh grader on a team mostly populated by eighth graders; I expect him to get more playing time than I did, but not dramatically so. I don’t even know if he’s going to play baseball after this year. He’s an excellent tennis player, and that’s the same season as baseball; eventually he’s going to have to make a decision. Maybe he’ll end up playing neither. I don’t know. It’s his call. This is the time when decisions start having to be made, decisions I can’t make for him, decisions that I don’t really have anything to do with.

But I know he will remember all this. I see him run out to the field, playing catch, running drills, shagging flies, hitting the cutoff man, dusting the outside corner. I see him with teammates who are friends, and teammates who are not his friends, kids he has known since he was three years old and kids he just met a few weeks ago. And he is out there making his own memories, learning his own ways to interact, how to fit in, but also how to stand out—how to find common ground with people but also be your own person. He is out there doing things that may not seem like a big deal to him right now but will be with him forever, things that will, in a flash, out of nowhere, reconstruct themselves right in front of him, that will feel like they just happened yesterday.

Baseball is already more serious than it was when I coached him in Little League. The coaches are paid, professional adults, whose job status is directly connected to their ability to win games. Some of these players are already being sorted and classified, and even scouted. They are playing on grown-up, regulation fields now, 90 feet, 60-foot, six-inches, like big leaguers. This is the real deal.

But I hope you will forgive a dad for still getting excited by the simple pleasure of seeing his son hit a line drive up the middle.

I sigh, watching from the outside, trying to get a glimpse, seeing that this is the start of all of it. William, and his little brother, are reaching the age where their childhood will begin to fade into their past, when they memories they make will be the start of something, a connective tissue, a story they tell themselves to understand themselves, a story they will hold onto and forever build upon. Certain things will stick. Certain things won’t. But it is their story. What will last? What will define them? What will be the foundation? What will just fade into backstory? What will last as the proof that they were ever there?

Those stories will be theirs—and theirs alone. It is remarkable to see them start to be told. Maybe someday William will look back at this baseball team, and he will close his eyes, and he will remember every at-bat. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe someday it will be something else entirely. But the things he is doing now will be a part of his story for the rest of his life. I learned so much about myself, and about other people, from playing baseball in school. I do not know if baseball will do the same for him. But learning who he is, where he fits in, what will last—that’s the story he’s launching, whether he realizes or not. It is a story for me to witness—from the stands, not the field. It’s his story, not mine. I just get to watch. And be a fan. Someday he will come back to his high school, and his middle school. Who knows what parts of him will still be there? I never imagined baseball being my lone legacy at my high school, after all. But one thing I do know? He’ll carry this all with him, wherever he goes, whatever he does, whoever he becomes. I hope he wants to do all of it. I hope he holds onto it forever.

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

1. A Second-Half NBA Primer, New York. Go Knicks.

2. The Ten Most Indispensable Players in Baseball, MLB.com. I think having baseball is going to be extremely helpful the next few months.

3. Stephen King Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with The Monkey.

4. MLB Season Preview: The Biggest New Addition in Each Division, MLB.com. The Cardinals couldn’t be on this; you have, uh, to add someone.

5. Harrison Ford Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Captain America: Brave New World.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Paddington in Peru” and “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.”

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

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I are back weekly.

HOW CAN I HELP?

As established, we’re compiling the stories of individual people who are trying to find ways to make the world a little bit better in whatever fashion they can, no matter how small. Send yours to howcanonepersonhelp@gmail.com. Today’s entry comes from Megan, from “a mountain in Colorado:”

I have ordered seed for compact tomato plants, and marigold and basil for each tomato seedling (good companion plants for tomatoes!)

I hope to have dozens of these little trios to give to friends, family, neighbors and strangers—so (hopefully) dozens of folks can experience the joyful satisfaction of growing food.

And maybe next season they'll do the same, starting plants—or begin to garden. Or share what they are able to share. Nothing grand, just a small start.

We have gotten so many of these already. Please send me yours.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“It’s the Fall That’s Gonna Kill You,” Damon Linker, Notes From the Middleground. This is a comprehensive, human look at what it has felt like to watch the first month of this administration. A great bit:

The image that keeps popping into my head over the last month is one of riding swiftly downstream in a barrel, its speed and direction out of our control. As we glide past dangerous, protruding rocks, a massive drop looms somewhere ahead, its deafening roar growing slowly louder with each passing day. I know there will come a point in the journey when the current will rapidly accelerate, just before the final plunge over the edge into a blackly uncertain fate. How far off are the falls? How far down is the drop? What awaits us at the bottom? A deadly boulder field? A deep pool of water to cushion us when we land? There’s no way to know and so nothing to be done but to give in to the inexorable current and hope and pray for the best.

Lord help us all.

If you’re looking for something more hopeful—while still being realist, and serving as a call to arms—here’s a rousing, terrific Hamilton Nolan piece.

Hamilton sure has come a long way since profiling me for [checks notes] PR Week magazine 18 years ago.

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

“Rock and Roll,” Led Zeppelin. I am actually going to see a Led Zeppelin cover band with my parents at the Georgia Theater this Thursday, and I’ve been deep diving Led Zeppelin all week. I am reminded of Chuck Klosterman’s great bit about Led Zeppelin in “Killing Myself to Live.”

Whenever I find myself in an argument about the greatest rock bands of all time, I always place Zeppelin third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This sentiment is incredibly common; if we polled everyone in North America who likes rock music, those three bands would almost certainly be the consensus selections (and in that order). But Zeppelin is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they're popular in a way the Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience. …

Led Zeppelin sounds like a certain kind of cool guy; they sound like the kind of cool guy every man vaguely thinks he has the potential to be, if just a few things about the world were somehow different. And the experience this creates is unique to Led Zeppelin because its manifestation is entirely sonic: There is a point in your life when you hear songs like "The Ocean" and "Out on the Tiles" and "Kashmir," and you suddenly find yourself feeling like these songs are actively making you into the person you want to be. It does not matter if you've heard those songs 100 times and felt nothing in the past, and it does not matter if you don't normally like rock 'n' roll and just happened to overhear it in somebody else's dorm room. We all still meet at the same vortex: For whatever the reason, there is a point in the male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect actualization of the perfectly cool you. You will hear the intro to "When the Levee Breaks," and it will feel like your brain is stuffed inside the kick drum. You will hear the opening howl of "Immigrant Song" and you will imagine standing on the bow of a Viking ship and screaming about Valhalla. But when these things happen, you don't think about Physical Graffiti or Houses of the Holy in those abstract, metaphysical terms; you simply think, "Wow. I just realized something: This shit is perfect. In fact, this record is vastly superior to all other forms of music on the entire planet, so this is all I will ever listen to, all the time." And you do this for six days or six weeks or six years. This is your Zeppelin Phase, and it has as much to do with your own personal psychology as it does with the way John Paul Jones played the organ on "Trampled Under Foot." It has to do with sociobiology, and with Aleister Crowley, and possibly with mastodons. And you will grow out of it, probably. But this is why Led Zeppelin is the most beloved rock band of all time, even though most people (including myself) think the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are better. Those two bands are appreciated in myriad ways and for myriad reasons, and the criteria for doing so changes with every generation. But Led Zeppelin is only loved one way, and that will never evolve. They are the one thing all young men share, and we shall share it forever. Led Zeppelin is unkillable, even if John Bonham was not.

Anyway, yeah, should be a fun show.

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.

One of my best friends from college is celebrating her 50th birthday today at Madison Square Garden, surely watching our Illini get smoked by Duke. Happy birthday, Joan. I’m sorry our team is falling apart.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will