You Won’t Believe What You Get If You Click To Read This Post

An essay. You get a long essay about the nature of being a baseball fan, children, and the mixed emotions I have about fostering in my son not necessarily a love of baseball (because I don’t really have mixed emotions about that) but, more precisely, a love of spending time thinking about baseball, to the exclusion of the universe of other things a kid can spend his hours thinking about. Not that it’s really within my control, but still. (And that’s too long a title, so instead you get the nonsense clickbait title that I went with.)

My son turns one tomorrow. I can probably count on zero hands the number of more serious and thoughtful posts I’ve written on NotGraphs, but the site is going away very soon so I figure it’s now or never. My son turns one tomorrow, and it has been a very long year. He was born three months premature (28 weeks, 2 days gestational age), at a hefty 2 pounds, 14 ounces, and spent 7 weeks in the neonatal ICU before coming home. I’ve written elsewhere about the trauma of all of that.

Since then, he’s fortunately been healthy and happy, and is an awesome little man, doing really well. But it has been a very long year, and a year in which I have had virtually no time to pay attention to baseball, beyond what I’ve done to write four posts a week over here. I don’t think I’ve watched more than six innings of baseball all season. I completely neglected one of my two fantasy teams, and half-neglected the other one, paying enough attention to not embarrass myself during the draft and then make a handful of not-terrible dump trades in May once my team was clearly out of the running. I’ve since dropped that team for next season, because it is not fun to be a barely-interested fantasy baseball player. When it switches from a pleasure to an obligation, what’s the point?

Bringing me to a larger question I’ve found myself thinking about a few times over the past couple of weeks: do I want my son to be a baseball fan to the extent that, for a long time, I was a baseball fan, and, if not, what did my mom do when I was growing up that I shouldn’t? Because I can’t even imagine starting to count up the hours I spent as a child engaged in the world of baseball in some way. The pile of programs in my childhood bedroom tells me that I started regularly going to Mets games when I was 3, in 1982. I have one program from 1982, three from 1983, and then about 10-15 every year from 1984 until I went to college twelve years later. The Mets were always on TV at home. My mom probably watched 40, 50, 60 games a year on TV, although I guess that has to have been only after we got cable in 1989 or 1990.

I was an insatiable reader as a kid, and I think it was hard for my mom to ever refuse to buy a book I wanted — so the number of baseball and baseball-related books I have is pretty much insane. If it existed in the 1980s or early 1990s, I probably own it, possibly new but especially if it ever turned up in a used bookstore for $1. Green books and Red books, The Scouting Report, Who’s Who, The Complete Handbook of Baseball, the Bill James abstracts and then his Player Rating books, autobiographies of players, managers, and umpires, books by Craig Wright, Brock Hanke, John Benson…. I started a fantasy league in 7th grade, adding up the columns of stats by hand from the Tuesday and Wednesday USA Today editions, putting together a weekly newsletter on my Commodore 64. I entered seasons upon seasons of stats by hand into Micro League Baseball, designed stadiums in Earl Weaver Baseball, did whatever it is one spent time doing in Tony LaRussa Baseball, and, later, spent way too much time simulating seasons in Baseball Mogul. I played Starting Lineup on a battery-operated plastic stadium. Statis Pro baseball.

I had (and still have) baseball cards, boxes and boxes of them. We went to baseball card shows, too many of them. (My grandparents made their living selling stamps and coins, so baseball cards were in that same world, and the idea of going to them as an 8-year-old and bargaining over piles of commons seemed entirely normal.) With the baseball cards, I actually lost interest a few years before my mom did — she kept wanting to go to shows, wanting to buy me more cards, even after I pleaded that I had more than enough. Oh, and I also played Little League baseball — but, of course, I was terrible at it. And the computer games and the books and watching the Mets on TV was a lot more fun than standing in left field picking weeds out of the grass and worrying about somebody hitting the ball toward me. I was a tiny kid. Baseball, even Little League baseball, was too much of a contact sport for me.

For a little while I decided I wanted to collect baseball yearbooks, so we went to a Phillies game, mostly because Veterans Stadium had a shop where they sold yearbooks from the other teams. I found a haul of cheap yearbooks at a used bookstore once, but that made it too easy and I lost interest. If only Amazon and eBay had existed back then. Does anyone even collect anything anymore? What is the point of collecting something when everything is completely accessible for a few bucks, with the click of a button? Why collect things? Why buy things at all, really? (But the path from extreme-consumer-of-written-baseball-material to ascetic-owner-of-as-little-as-I-can-justify-buying is for a different post, I suppose.)

In the end, it was a lot of time, a lot of energy, almost certainly too much of my mom’s money… and probably only a moderate amount of joy. I knew a lot about baseball. I thought a lot about baseball. I spent a lot of time in high school writing 25-man rosters in the margins of my notebooks. And I did very well in my fantasy leagues until… I don’t know… freshman year of college? When I started the slow losing of interest and passion….

I think it’s that once I stopped going to games and stopped watching them regularly on TV, it was hard to care quite so much. I still cared… for a while. And then, gradually, I cared mostly just about fantasy baseball, as an intellectual pursuit, even after I stopped caring what teams were winning and whether I had read everything that anyone was writing about baseball, whether or not it was worth reading. And then, as my “important” fantasy league devolved into long e-mail debates about proper value of dump trades and accusations of collusion, that became a lot less interesting, too.

And then my son was born. And caring about anything except for what was going to happen to him in the NICU became too much. And, in a lot of ways, anything related to baseball, or, even more so, fantasy baseball — gosh — started to feel awfully pointless.

A website delving into some very, very fine details about the game of baseball is a terrible place to write a post that seems to be concluding that being a baseball fan is pointless. And I don’t know if that’s what I’m actually concluding. I honestly still can’t decide if I miss caring or not. I would miss reading about baseball if I stopped doing that completely. But I don’t miss watching it on television, I don’t miss having a rooting interest in the postseason, I don’t miss having fantasy teams (yet). And, if I can help it, which I probably can’t, I don’t want my son to grow up thinking about baseball, reading about baseball — and, certainly, playing computer games about baseball — anywhere near as much as I did, especially because so much of it was so, so solitary.

And maybe that’s where I’m going with this. Maybe what I regret isn’t really about baseball, but about how my way of being a baseball fan was always a very solitary one. Fantasy leagues are a little bit social, sure, but so much of it is you and the roster, you and the stats, you and the spreadsheet, you and the box scores. Reading is solitary. The computer games I was playing were pretty solitary (I did have one friend I played baseball computer games with sometimes, but that’s one. One.). Too many things that kids do are solitary anyway. (Homework, mostly, I guess.) Being a baseball fan, for me, became too lonely, I think.

I should end this post. Partly because I only now realize while writing that it’s 11:40 in the morning, I’ve been awake for most of the past 6 hours (not by choice…), and I actually have no idea what postseason games were played last night, if any, and who won them. And that seems like a decent note to end on.

Thanks for reading to the end, if anyone did. Sorry there’s no big conclusion. (Maybe tomorrow. I’m running out of opportunities. And Hopeless Joe should probably sign off with a bang at some point too.)