Next Year Is Now
Just like that, the return of the Mets and baseball are right around the corner, and even if Carlos Correa won't be in Flushing, that means it's time to feel good
By Addy Baird
There’s always this weird moment when the baseball season ends, where I suddenly realize I have nothing to watch on television. Thrust into a terrifying and sudden limbo, my consistent evening viewing suddenly is ripped away. The rhythm of near-daily night games gives life a steadiness, grounds me from March through October. It’s one of my favorite things, and then it’s gone.
Every year around that weird time, I find myself returning to the words of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who famously cautioned that baseball is a game designed to break your heart. The first paragraph of Giamatti’s essay “The Green Fields of the Mind” has been quoted to death, milked to the land of baseball cliché — but it was the second paragraph of that lovely essay that struck me deeply last fall, when my heart was breaking.
“Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time,” Giamatti wrote. “Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.”
It’s a perfect description of how suddenly listless I felt after the Mets season — in perfect Mets fashion — ended disastrously, heartbreakingly, after two shitty wild card losses. I had counted on this stupid team to do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy (all the best qualities of time), and then they were gone. And I’m gonna be honest with you guys, I got a little depressed for a minute.
It’s silly — it’s just a game! But when it ended, I turned off the TV wordlessly and didn’t talk about the Mets for like, two full weeks. I closed the Discord app and scheduling snafus/the grace of the universe kept us from ever recording the final Willets Pod episode of the year. I didn’t think about baseball for a while, which would be fine, other than the fact that I am currently engaged in a large baseball-related writing project, but whatever. Fall slipped away, the whole time with something of a winter about it. That’s the thing about seasons, right?
I wanted to check in and say hi to my Willets Pen friends because I just wanted to know if you guys feel it. The vibe is shifting. The days are getting longer — I mean, literally there’s more sunlight than there’s been in months, but metaphorically also it feels like every day on Correa watch felt the energetic equivalent of at least a year. When I first wrote this post, before Correa watch was dead, I wrote: Of course, I have written many delusionally hopeful things in this publication in the past, but doesn’t it really feel like something is about to work out on that front?
But you know what: I think it’s actually good we don’t have a shattered ankle at third base. Losing a(nother) star is GOOD ACTUALLY.
This delusional hopefulness is the other thing I’ve discovered to be one of the great joys of baseball fandom. There’s always next year. And now we’re there. Next year is here, and there’s a whisper of baseball in the air. While I try not to think about the, you know, horrible climate catastrophe offering me this great gift, it’s been stunningly beautiful in DC lately, with blue skies and unseasonably 60 degree days, and I can’t help but feel something of a spring in them. Something of baseball in them. If you listen carefully, the breeze carries lightly carries the tune of SNY’s opening theme… baaaaa ba ba ba ba baaaaaa…. Our time is coming, Mets fans.
