Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me

Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me, a collection of honest, funny, and thought-provoking essays by author and journalist Stacey May Fowles, should be mandatory reading for anyone that’s ever found a sense of solace in sports. An extended version of her popular weekly newsletter, Fowles mixes the triumphs and crushing disappointments in life with the parallel highs and lows found in baseball at every inning. From heart-racing anecdotes of the Toronto Blue Jays’ biggest moments, to the unjust baggage that plagues female sports fans, Fowles delivers a collection of achingly real, relatable stories that will leave you both raw and craving a beer at the ballpark.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter photo.

Two years ago, some friends and I started our own private chat room on a service called Slack to talk about baseball. We did it because our non-baseball-loving friends on Twitter were tired of us yammering about bat flips and Moneyball and Troy Tulowitzki. I can’t overstate how well used this chat room is. We are in there every day and most of us keep a running conversation going during each Toronto Blue Jays game. We also use it to share baseball ephemera—weird facts, stats, articles, and photos. Recently, someone posted an old baseball card with Bill Murray on it. This sent us off on a chase to figure out why such a card even exists. It’s the sort of exercise that the internet is great for, and we gleefully threw ourselves down every rabbit hole we could find to learn about Bill Murray (who, it turns out, has been accused of some pretty horrible things and is probably an asshole), the history of baseball in Utah, and the many tendrils of minor- and indie-league stories from around North America. All told, we killed about two hours and seriously debated pooling $100 to buy a copy of the card on eBay.

Most of the rest of the time I spend online isn’t this much fun, by which I mean it is mostly terrible. It’s easy to be cynical about the web these days, because it can feel so far from what it was supposed to be. The “Information Superhighway” was going to open up the free exchange of ideas. It would set knowledge free and reinvigorate public debate.

Instead we got fake news and racist cartoon Pepe frogs and Donald Trump. Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media generates hundreds of thousands of YouTube views spreading hate and disinformation. A handful of Conservative leadership candidates slyly court the worst kind of people through dog-whistle memes. We built a global network of information and communication, then neglected to give it any substance.

I’ve been writing about technology and culture for two decades. I’ve never been an enthusiastic cheerleader, but I was always optimistic. I liked what the internet was doing for the world. But then came anonymous online forum 4chan and photos snapped of unsuspecting women called “creepshots” and a seemingly endless barrage of awful people who turned Levant, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos into rich internet “stars.” Over the last year, the columns I’ve written in these pages have been about how Facebook is bad for news and Twitter is bad for discourse and Uber is bad for everybody. The year before that I wrote about photos of dead people invading social networks and sexism on Wikipedia and, before that, 800 words under the headline “#Hate.”

I say this with all the irony my white male privilege can muster, but I’m tired. Maybe we made a mistake.

Were people always this awful, and the web has just dragged them out from under their rocks? In the free exchange of ideas, do the loud, bad ones win out just because they are loud and bad? If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan posited, the message is that decent people should go back to reading books and sending letters.

Or maybe this is the cost of knowledge: Some ideas are bad. Some people are shitty. But sometimes someone posts an old baseball card and you and your friends can spend a couple hours digging up scoresheets from Pioneer League baseball games, or whatever floats your particular boat. We built a global network of information and communication, and it’s our greatest invention. Sure, sometimes it means we need to have tedious discussions about the value of punching Nazis in the head, but it also means I get to talk about baseball. It means my mother gets to watch her grandchildren grow up in real time from the other side of the country. We have a modern Library of Alexandria and an endless archive of video and audio. We are connected to everyone we’ve ever met.

The web is still relatively young and finding its legs. I’m going to try to be optimistic that the best is yet to come and that perfect utopia still awaits. After all, it took television more than half a century to produce The Wire.

I remember when you did what you’re doing right now for the Phillies for the Jays. It was just last year. How could I forget? You were the reason—perhaps the only one—local fans continued to return to the Rogers Centre. The few bums that were in the seats were there for you, not for the team. When somebody had an extra ticket, the first question that anybody asked was, “Who’s pitching?” The only answer that meant anything was Doc Halladay. In a sports-mad city, you were the only thing that kept baseball relevant.

This season you’re ripping it up in Philadelphia, your first year in the National League, dominating the competition the same way you used to in Toronto. You’ve been on the hill four times so far and your record is a perfect 4-0. You already have two complete games and have given up a miserly 26 hits in 33 innings-pitched. Your ERA is under one. You’ve struck out 28 hitters and walked only three. There’s no doubt you’re the best pitcher in baseball right now and you’re probably the best player in the game, too.

The thing about you, though, Roy, is that you mean so much more to a ball club—and to a city, maybe even a country—than just what you produce. Everybody loves you for your humility and your blue-collar attitude. You’re a workhorse and a gentlemen. Players respect you, fans adore you. You may not be warm and cuddly, but your focus in unrivaled. Toronto couldn’t give you a chance to get what you ultimately wanted—a chance to win—so you moved on. It was the kind of break-up that was best for everyone involved.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t miss you every fifth day. Sure, the Jays got off to a hot start. But, really, they always do. We know they’re just a tease.

More so than any other sport, baseball is a pasttime. An American one at its heart, but there were times when the sandlot game gripped the whole country. I can remember the halcyon days when the SkyDome was packed to the rafters every day. When the team was loaded with players who had your competitive fire, Roy, people who had your character. Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Devon White, Kelly Gruber, Pat Borders, Paul Molitor. The list goes on. I remember how not just the city of Toronto but the entire country got behind the team. I remember living in Vancouver and watching as the Jays brought the World Series to Canada for the first time.

The Blue Jays could be called a national pasttime then. They created conversations across the country the way hockey and curling do. People watched for the sport itself and for the emotion that came with it. Today, Torontoians watch baseball to drink beer in the sunshine. Today, there seem to be more empty seats than filled ones at the Rogers Centre. Today, I couldn’t imagine a 10-year old in Vancouver getting behind the Jays.

You were the only thing that reminded me of those days, Roy. You might not have played on those teams, but you symbolize their greatest virtues. You were a bridge that connected the good ol’ days of the past to the sad-sack days of the present. But you still made the game—or at least the games where you were pitching—worth watching. I wish you luck, Doc, because you deserve better.

Baseball in Canada just isn’t the same. And, honestly, I don’t think it will be for a while.