I will always remember 2021 as the year I fell back in love with baseball.
Growing up in the 1980s, I lived for the New York Mets. I watched every game I could. When the games were on pay cable, which we did not have, I’d listen to the audio and try to make out the video images through the squiggly distortion.
The Braves also rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump before Game 4. He was, of course, filmed doing the tomahawk chop alongside Melania, an obvious wink to his racist supporters.
My baseball glove was a monument to my love, covered in autographs. I would trace my fingers over the signatures of people like Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry while I would crouch in the field for Little League, ready to snare a ground ball at the hot corner.
But, as an adult, the sport became too much for me. Maybe it was the steroid scandals. Maybe it was the way that my teams, the Mets and the Yankees, proudly became propaganda vehicles for George W. Bush after 9/11. Maybe it was just too slow for the fast pace of life.
At any rate, while I still covered the politics of baseball in my professional life, my enjoyment of the sport itself fell by the wayside.
That has changed dramatically during the pandemic for the hokiest possible reason: my son. At age twelve, he started playing baseball for the first time after years of competitive basketball, and found he has a flair for it. He also developed an affection for perhaps the worst team in the sport—the Baltimore Orioles. They’ve earned their infamy from having the longest losing streak in baseball since 2005.
Before I knew it, we spent last summer buying $10 tickets to games and spending afternoons in the sun at Camden Yards, obsessively pouring over the latest statistical trends of “our team.” One great thing about being an Orioles fan during the pandemic is that you could go to games and never have to worry about social distancing . . . there’s always enough room to spread out at the Yards.
For me, this has been a blast, triggering all kinds of childhood memories while also making some new ones for my son and me. That is why the 2021 season ending on a discordant, sour note is such a downer.
Braves fans doing the "tomahawk chop."
That the Atlanta Braves won the World Series, crushing the Houston Astros, was bad enough. The last Major League Baseball team to use Native American mascotry also comes with the tradition known as the tomahawk chop, performed by thousands of fans as they bellow a warped, minstrel-like Native American “war chant.”
It’s a practice that didn’t belong in the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first. Yet as criticism by Native American organizations rose against the team name and the chop over the last decade, Braves fans seemed to grip it all the tighter, like a form of stubborn white identarian politics akin to the desperate desire to cling to Confederate monuments. Even though Atlanta is 47 percent Black, the team quite consciously moved its stadium to the outskirts of Cobb County in 2017, away from downtown Atlanta, inaccessible by mass transit—sending a message to the city about who exactly this game and this team are for.
The Braves also invited public anti-vaxxer and country music has-been Travis Tritt to sing the national anthem before Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. Tritt hadn’t been heard from in years, but his cancellation of small shows where venues asked for proof of vaccination has made him, in recent months, a hero in the Fox News universe.
The Braves also rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump before Game 4. He was, of course, filmed doing the tomahawk chop alongside Melania, an obvious wink to his racist supporters.
Baseball, since the days of Jackie Robinson, has attempted to market itself as the true national pastime and a symbol of community cohesion. Now it is happily serving as yet another political scythe used to divide and demonize. But I’m not giving up on the sport and neither is my kid. If this is what Major League Baseball wants to be, then we’re going to fight back and claim our space.
This is a game that should be for everyone.