October 13, 2020
cleave – verb : split or sever (something), especially along a natural line or grain
I miss baseball.
Oh, I know MLB is deep into the playoffs of its COVID-abbreviated 2020 season. But I’m not watching, nor do I care who’s playing or who wins.
I want to care. I just don’t.
Baseball was a massive part of my life for the better part of 40 years. I played it as a kid, and was pretty good at it. I lived in Houston for 5 years, until I was 7, and was an Astros fan. I have very, VERY few memories of my time in Houston, but the most vivid (and happiest) memory I have of those years is this:
Rain was pouring down that night in 1979, and a large puddle had spawned in our backyard. My brother and I, along with our best friend who lived in the house directly behind ours, all took turns taking baseball slides through that muddy pit of water. And as we ran across the yard for each squishy plunge, we would yell out the name of a Houston Astros baseball player.
“César Cedeño!”
“Enos Cabell!”
“Jose Cruz!”
“Terry Puhl!”
Future hall-of-famers these were not, and the internet tells me the 1979 Astros finished 89-73, in second place and out of the playoffs. Still, I adored the game and my team even as a young child.
(Magic content is coming, I promise.)
My family moved to Colorado that fall, and for the next 11 years I made do with a few yearly trips to Mile High Stadium to see the minor league Denver Bears. We did catch a major league exhibition game that was played in Denver one spring in the mid or late 80s. It was at that game that I caught my first (and so far only) foul ball, off the bat of a player that hit 2 home runs that day. As we drove home from the game, I turned that ball over and over in my hands, determined to follow that hitter’s career for as long as he played baseball.
When I woke up the next day I couldn’t remember his name.
That memory is so important to me, though, that I’ve spent hours scouring the internet as an adult trying to find details about that exhibition game, in hopes of finding out who hit that foul ball. As deep as the internet goes, however, I’ve never been able to find even a single mention of that game.
In 1993 Denver finally got Major League Baseball, and the Colorado Rockies supplanted the Astros as my favorite team. My investment in baseball waxed and waned over the subsequent years, peaking in 2007 when the Rockies swept their way through the playoffs, only to get swept by the Red Sox in the World Series.
(Still not quite at the Magic content portion – sorry!)
Around 2008 or 2009 I discovered fantasy baseball, and played it for years with more passion than success. I even ran my own fantasy league for a few years.
And then in 2018, my interest in baseball cratered. The Rockies actually made the playoffs that year, but I had already checked out of the season before then, something I had started doing every fall for several years.
Some reasons seem obvious: the Rockies have never figured out how to maintain success playing baseball a mile high, and the June Swoon (when strong starts turned into horrific nosedives) had become a yearly Rockies tradition. Team ownership and management have long been utterly incompetent, and I’m now convinced they aren’t willing or able to build a team capable of winning a World Series. And though the Rockies have traditionally played better at home than any other team in baseball, year after year it seemed me and the family would attend the games where the Rockies starter got shelled by the 3rd inning and any hope of a victory had evaporated, leaving us to endure inning after inning of hopelessly bad baseball with only $6 nachos to make it bearable.
But the Rockies have been poorly run since their inception. Even in their worst years I still followed the game, finding secondary teams to root for. That didn’t explain my failing interest. As dopey as it sounds, I think the game had just turned into something I didn’t recognize: too many strikeouts, too many home runs, infield shifts and excessive pitching changes, players making ever-escalating salaries that boggled the mind.
Despite the nagging feeling that baseball had passed me by, last year I was determined to reignite my interest in baseball. I failed. Before the season even started the Astros sign-stealing scandal snowballed, and my second favorite team supplanted the New York Yankees as the most hated team in baseball. And as the games began, it became instantly obvious the Rockies were pitiful and hopeless. I quickly tuned out, and had no regrets about doing so.
The Rockies finished 2019 with a putrid 71-91 record, and then proceeded to do NOTHING to improve the team going into 2020. And yet the team’s owner predicted a 94-win season in 2020, which would have been a franchise record. Shockingly, the Rockies started the shortened 2020 season 11-3 (best record in baseball at the time) before losing over 2/3 of their remaining games to finish with an abysmal 26-34 record, missing the playoffs in a year when they were expanded to include over half the teams in the MLB. Pathetic doesn’t even begin to cover it.
What does ANY of this have to do with Magic?
(Finally, Magic content. Probably too little, too late.)
The Magic doomsayers are loudly baying across the internet, declaring the imminent demise of the game. For, like, the 73rd time since the game’s inception. Only it’s definitely true this time! Wizards has really gone and messed up one too many times!
That people are predicting Magic’s death is not new or newsworthy. But this time around I am seeing a pretty significant number of players that have admitted (if they can be taken at their word) to getting out – selling their entire collections, moving on to other games or hobbies. And yet, here they are still popping up in online threads about the state of the game to bemoan Magic’s predicament and trumpet their decision to cut and run. I’m paraphrasing, but I keep seeing comments like these:
“Sold everything months ago and don’t regret it for a second.”
“So happy I got out.”
“Haven’t played in ages and don’t miss it.”
“Uninstalled Arena earlier this year, and no interest in trying it again.”
So then what the HELL are they doing on a Magic subreddit after all this time, posting in threads about the state of the game?
Cards or no cards, these people are still caught in Magic’s web. Are they lurking for the sole purpose of reading grim news that reaffirms their decision to stop playing/buying/engaging? Does finding out that Standard is still a disaster or that Wizards is still making questionable decisions bring them joy? Are they watching from the sidelines, hopeful to witness the game’s inevitable and impending demise to help justify their own decision to bail before the coming implosion?
I don’t get it. These players hate Hasbro/Wizards, they hate the state of the game and/or where they see the game heading, they don’t miss playing, they’re thrilled to have sold off all their cards, and yet here they are, commenting almost giddily about not being involved with Magic anymore. It’s…nonsensical.
And yet…
I kind of get it.
I will load up ESPN.com throughout the baseball offseason to see what moves (if any) the Rockies make. Next spring, I may even convince myself that I’ll get back into baseball – watch more games, check out daily boxscores and standings and stats each morning, try to learn which players are on which teams now. It won’t work, but for a few brief weeks in April I might think otherwise.
The baseball I grew up with is not what I see in 2020, much like the Magic so many players have loved over the years isn’t what they see in 2020. I don’t really get it – I still love Magic and think it has a long, healthy life to live – but I also kind of do.
Come next spring, will I finally be able to sever the stretched and fraying thread that binds me to baseball? Or am I caught in the game’s clutches, unable to truly leave it behind?
Casual Magicking 