My colleague was practically giddy. The Pirates shared the best record in the National League with the Atlanta Braves. Though he’s a lifelong Pittsburgher, I hadn’t known Brandon was such a fan.
Now ... he doesn’t feel that way. “Sorry about the Pirates,” I said the other day. He sighed, shrugged and became philosophical. He hadn’t expected the good play to last, he said, the team’s still rebuilding, they have a long way to go, have some good players, need to keep them and get a few more, been hit by injuries, got to spend more money, maybe they still have a shot at the playoffs, next year they’ll be better!
I sympathize. I grew up in New England and am a life-long Red Sox fan, and know the pain your team can inflict. Just search “Buckner 1986 Mets.” Things are better now, of course, with four World Series titles this century. Not to rub it in.
We’ve lived here for decades and though childhood loyalties don’t change, I cheer for the Pirates — and the Steelers and the Penguins — in solidarity with my friends and neighbors. (In baseball, however, my real local love is the Washington Wild Things.)
Why do we care so much about our city’s professional team’s? Should we? It makes sense to cheer for your local school’s teams, made up of kids from the town, some who may be your kids or friends of your kids or the children of your friends. We do that naturally.
But cheering for a heavily commercial and calculating business (profits before winning is the rule), made up of players picked up on the market who’ll leave for another team (and city) if they get a better deal, why do we do that? We might as well cheer for a bank to make more money than the other banks.
One of the great baseball writers, Roger Angell, had an answer. The stepson of E.B. White, who wrote “Charlotte’s Web,” and Katharine Angell White, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, he lived and worked at the highest level of America’s literary culture, and he loved baseball. The two are not unrelated.
“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons,” published in 1972. “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.”
My wife gives me a gentler version of that look. Some people don’t understand how you can tie your emotions to the events on the field.
Angell answers the almost unanswerable question behind the almost unanswerable look. It leaves out “the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.”
I think that’s right, but that he misses another answer, just as strong but more important. The almost unanswerable question leaves out the joys of sharing as well as the joys of caring.
You share a commitment with all sorts of people around you, some very different from you, some people you can’t talk to about anything serious because you’ll fight. But you can share your loyalty to the team, and that may create a space in which you can talk without fighting.
The libertarian and the socialist, people in MAGA hats and people in pussy hats, native Pittsburgher and transplant, can bond for a while admiring Mitch Keller’s pitching and in feeling relieved and grateful the Pirates have Mitch Keller, in being happy Andrew McCutchen’s back, in dissecting Derek Shelton’s decisions to yank a pitcher or keep him in, in feeling distressed that Oneil Cruz got hurt and annoyed that he made such a bad slide, and in wanting to know why he ran for home at all.
Loyalty bridges all sorts of chasms, even moral judgments. I’ve even sat in the stands of PNC Park cheering for the Pirates with a Yankees fan.
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to share a commitment to a professional sports team. I don’t have a good argument against that claim. Except that they’re our city’s teams, and we are each other’s neighbors, and reasons to feel such harmony with each other are too rare and too fragile.
David Mills is the associate editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: dmills@post-gazette.com. His previous article was “Four scenes from a marriage, including a near death experience.”
First Published: May 22, 2023, 9:53 p.m.
