Wait’ll next year

The New York Mets broke my heart yet again, but this year, it hit different.

It came down to the last game of the season – for the second year in a row. Last year, just when I thought all was lost, the Mets found a way, won the Eastern Division, and made it to the pennant race.

This year, despite all their incredible talent, they didn’t even make the playoffs. Any real baseball fan knows that if you don’t have pitching, even with multiple sluggers on a team, you’re just not going to win. I just kept hoping against hope that they’d find the same magic they did last year, but that hope was dashed last Sunday, and I sat stunned and heartbroken as I watched the players disappear into the clubhouse.

Yes, it was an up and down year, but there were so many moments – especially in the beginning of the season – when I had such hope, and I was holding on to that like a lifeline, in the midst of one of the most painful and challenging times in our country’s history. These days, hope is a rare commodity.

The nature of baseball is that we’re a team, and we support each other through thick and thin, As the character Terence Mann says in movie Field of Dreams:

“The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past…It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

I was probably putting too much on a baseball team, but having to let go of that lifeline – that hope – has been a particularly disheartening thing to do when our democracy is waning, and that “good” is difficult to locate. At a time when cities are being occupied by troops, and we are in the midst of a government shut down, we don’t have the potential of a walk off, or a come from behind rally that will restore us to what Jefferson called the “Empire of Liberty.” Just like longing for a new season, it feels like it will take forever for it to come.

So I’ll watch the playoffs, and the World Series, because I’m a baseball fan, but it just won’t be the same. True love means that I’ll support my team again next year, but in the long 5 months until pitchers and catchers report in February, I’m going to have to find something else that brings me joy, and helps me hold on to hope.  I’ll join with my democracy team and work towards electing members of Congress in 2026 who will help re-establish our cherished republic.

As we say in baseball, “Wait’ll next year!”