(If you don’t know them, go give Bad Astronaut a listen, from whose “Killers and Liars” I stole this riff)
The Philadelphia Phillies have died.
Well, that’s to say that the 2025 Philadelphia Phillies have died.
Well, that’s to say that the 2025 Philadelphia Phillies are down 0-2 in a five game series and are as good as dead. Metaphorically.
This has caused me no end of garment rending, to the point that my dear wife (to whom I’ve given this horrible fandom as well as my two kids, who also have the disease inside of them now) kind of checked in with me last night as one does when one’s spouse has lost their best friend to cancer. Friends asked about me. It was a whole thing.
This is because I feel the Phillies deeply. I may follow the Eagles more closely, it’s certainly possible, if only because 17 games is easier to follow than 162, but if there’s a slight imbalance in the scales of affection, the Phillies are the tilt. Wasn’t always this way! But after hanging on every game in 2009 when I had the time, the space, and the lack of children, really made the team a part of my psyche at a core level. Add onto that that in 2010 I started writing semi-regularly for blogs and other networks about the Phillies and about baseball, and the connection starts to make some sense. I relate moments of joy to the game, yes, but also moments of struggle — I can recall getting countless rejection letters to graduate school in my first attempt at a PhD and seeing the Guardians (they weren’t that then) beat up on the Yankees 20-2 on TV cheering me up. I can recall a cop coming to follow up on a noise complaint in 2009 and checking in to see what the score was on the TV before leaving. I can remember watching Raul Ibañez’ towering fly fall short in Game 5 of the 2011 NLDS on my in-laws microscopic TV, by myself, huddled close.
And let’s be real, none of this is particularly novel — you’ve heard this story before in various different tones, about how and why people are obsessed and committed to this weird game that’s centuries old and feels it. But what I also feel about baseball, and what I haven’t really seen discussed, is a sort of fear of death, what we might in a scholarly tone call an eschatological tone that accompanies it. People talk about the bad feelings they have or the sense of inevitability when they see a scenario pop up that they’ve replayed dozens of times in their heads. Grant Brisbee, I think, was the first person to introduce me in prose to the concept of confirmation bias, what I feel like we should probably just call baseball bias. We imagine we’ve seen it all before because the bad times stick harder in our brain, is the short version.
But that sort of dread isn’t eschatological, exactly. Thanatos isn’t exactly lurking around the dread one feels when your reliever can’t find the strike zone. No, moreso this is the kind of thing that we find in the everyday: recognizable inconvenience and frustration and inevitability. Murphy’s Law, so to speak. What I’m realizing, and what I realized I was feeling while I grappled with how incredibly, internally awful I felt watching the Phillies blow it again, is that the feeling wasn’t sadness but mourning. And the mourning wasn’t about the team itself — don’t accuse me of doing the “we feel things more heah in PHILLY” thing, I’m not doing that and you can’t prove it — the mourning felt baked in.
This is the part where it gets a bit hinky and philosophical, so be forewarned, but death is something that is, metaphorically and fundamentally, baked into everything. You can see it if you look, the fact that we have mortgages that don’t really go over 30 years, that we are always talking about “generational” wealth, with a kind of forward looking eye, that we consistently forestall an apocalypse we envision but cannot accept living in. Hegel described this by saying the Owl of Minerva arrives late (at the falling of dusk), that history always comes after the action is over. Walter Benjamin spoke of the angel of history, aligning it with a Paul Klee painting that seemingly looks backward while speeding forward, a metaphor for the collection and forgetting that is life under the threat of forgetting (which is, itself, a dying of sorts).
That’s all to say that there’s a long history about how we as humans look towards the inevitability of death with a knowing occlusion. Religion is part of this, yes, but faith is more about what happens after or an explanation of what’s happening during life. What death is is harder, colder, something we know is going to happen, something we intentionally plan for, but something for which we genuflect after acknowledging, agreeing that “heaven forbid something happen.” It’s a dialectic of sorts — the synthesis of the holy and the profane, the metaphysical and the everyday.
And god, what is baseball if not that, right? A synthesis between prayer and sheer luck, between faith in a baseball god and of the “good bounce.” If you watch postgame shows after losses, in football we see men grimly address the screen and say that execution, grit, and desire are all that’s needed. They point to the field and say what is wrong or right about the playcalls and the debate becomes what is to be done from here. It’s very materialist in a way, with the paeans to god and Christ after the fact a bit hollow and perfunctory, but always there. (If anything the paeans to Allah shocking people from Muslim players is perhaps a more interesting instantiation of this problem, but that’s far afield).
After losses in baseball, the men at the desk stare into the screen and each others’ eyes and wildly ask “well why did THAT happen?” And often when there is no answer, they fixate on theories, becoming the arguing scholars of religious lore: the bunt did it, they didn’t bunt that’s what did it, it was gutless baserunning, it was gutless hitting, it’s the hitting coach, it’s the guy who has faith in his guys, it’s the guy that has no faith in his guys. On and on forever.
In the end, the actual reasons for the loss in both cases don’t matter overmuch. This is theater, as my father the consummate thespian would say, and theater has expected roles and statements to be made. No one expects the talking heads to actually fix the team or change the outcome of the next game. They are there to be a Greek Chorus to the spectacle of sport. But the football commentators are in on the bit; they know they’re acting. It’s not clear watching, say, the Phillies postgame crew that they realize they have no control, that the baseball gods are dead or deaf, and that they cannot influence the play.
But why all the aggressive attempts to speak to the higher powers and change the outcome? Why the energy of debate? Many of my well meaning friends have told me to stop caring so much about sports because it’s unhealthy for me. They’re right that it’s unhealthy, but the not caring part isn’t really going to happen. I could try very hard to not follow or keep up with sports, but the outcomes mean something to me very deeply. Now, do I personally have any stake in, say, Bryce Harper’s future emotional health or whether Bryson Stott can look himself in the mirror? No, not really. I expect they’ll embarras me by becoming like, the junior republican senator of the Nevada Post-Collapse Syndicate or whatever. One must be realistic. No, it’s not that I need it for the players themselves; I care about the win because I care about the players as icons.
Icon in this sense should be understood in the religious sense — a figurehead for something sublime or divine that cannot be materialized otherwise. It’s not actually the players we’re pinning our hopes on, it’s the ineffable “That” behind them. And as such, it’s not so dissimilar from pantomime, tragedy, or funeral, where we go through ceremonies we understand and expect an ending from, but still feel disappointed when they end. In this sense we hope for a reassurance from our heroes, a resolution that postpones or replaces the detestable ending. And we feel crushed when it doesn’t happen.
In football, we can say this boils down to issues in the regime, in the players, in mindset. In baseball, it’s harder; that ineffability makes the pasttime more like church, where we worship the mystery of it all, and the playoffs like a divine return. But far from an apotheosis, a championship isn’t any different from a playoff exit. There is joy, yes, and it is special and memorable. But the season still ends. Death comes, and there is a final period to close the chapter. We don’t get something new when we grasp the ring, just a reminder that what we’ve done and seen has happened and will again.
(Sometimes I wonder if my family feels the same big things about sports as I do. At times, I think my wife feels this way about baseball, in spite of herself. My kids get annoyed, but they are more curious about the ins and outs and mechanics of the sport. Like a child’s approach to mortality, kids don’t so much ask “but what if it never happenes” or “what will it be like when I die,” rather than “what’s the deal with all of that and how does it function.” Unlike with death, which is interesting and terrifying to all, I don’t know the whys and wherefores of why my family loves sports. Perhaps it’s the connection to me. Perhaps it’s how cool the uniforms are. More of option one with the people closer to my age maybe.)
Coming to terms with this is coming to terms with mortality itself, so no rush. For you or me. But I think it helps explain the passion and panic and misery we feel watching this all unfold. I used to think sports were tribalism, and maybe that’s still right, but moreso, they’re a method for making sense of that ancient enemy we can’t outrun. Every team wants to become “immortal” and the champions are — in the way a photograph is immortal. But that’s all. We don’t ascend, transcend, resolve. We are back to opening day, we repeat with differences.
And that’s life and it’s baseball: every day the same. But different. Until there are no more. Beautiful, sad, and inevitable. But beautiful most of all.