Muse, "Invincible"

DATELINE: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 (BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS)

It’s a beautiful fall morning in New England. The sun is warm, a brisk wind is blowing, and the light is that perfect kind of refracted yellow-orange you get around here only in October. Lila has a soccer game later, so I’m taking her out to Concord to school. As I’m settling into the driver’s seat, Beck’s “Loser” (Apple Music, Spotify) fires up on my Classic Alternative streaming channel. And just like that I’m reminded all over again that My Beloved Cleveland Guardians are down three games to one to the Yankees in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, facing elimination later tonight. Not that this is ever not close to front of mind. It’s just that the morning carried so much possibility I could have been excused from sweating the baseball, for at least a minute.

Yo[, Classic Alternative streaming channel]! CUT IT.

Soon enough Lila joins me in the car and we ride off to Cumberland Farms in Lexington. Again they’re out of cinnamon rolls. I haven’t been able to get one since the ALCS started, which is surely a coincidence but even so these two misfortunes had at the very least to step across the folds of my brain and shake hands. Oh, so you’re on shift this week, too? Great to meet you, Brother. Keep after it, and sure enough we’ll break him.

Off we go down the Hayden Avenue chute to the highway, and I’m having a lovely convo with my daughter. The streamer continues to shuffle up songs, and four minutes into “So Lonely” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Police, Lila comments that the songwriting is a bit lazy. True: he is just singing I feel so lonely over and over. Ah! Well, I’ve got a song for you, I say, and I get her to cue up “Synchronicity II” (Apple Music, Spotify) over my phone’s Bluetooth connect. But quickly enough we’re back chatting again, and Lila fails to register Sting’s genius here as she talks right over it. Fine, I tell myself. We’ll take this up another time.

I drop her off at school and begin the drive through town back to Route 2. I put “Sync 2” back on again for my own benefit and am loving it. Windows up, volume maxed out, bellowing along with Sting. Suddenly there comes this line—

Every single meeting with his so-called “superiors” is a humiliating kick in the crotch—

And I’m thrown back again into thinking about the ALCS and the Yankees.

Goddamn it all. I decide to switch over to some Mission Persons, and in particular that Spring Session M record I’ve been playing a lot this week. One of the deeper-cut album tracks comes on. Good God, I’m thinking. This drummer! He’s like Stewart Copeland from a minute ago, but on speed. But now Dale Bozzio’s lyrics are flicking fingers at the lenses of my sunglasses, commanding my attention, and once more my baseball blues come surging back into view:

Who’d have thought from such a simple start this would get so involved? Who’d have thought that this would ever end being unresolved? And for now I think I’ve had enough so let’s call it a day.

All I have left to give are my tears. (Apple Music, Spotify)

Later in the afternoon, just before sundown, I go for a five-mile run. Up the hill to the reservoir, down past the athletic fields on Grove Street, up Huron to the Fresh Pond loop trail, down a spur to Concord Avenue and then home. No podcasts today. I need music, some beats to pump my legs. I’ve got a program of about a dozen songs I picked on the spot to carry me through this work. Not coincidentally, there comes a point where I’m bounding down Elm Street with my arms spread wide, alternating airplane- and Jesus-style—palms out/ palms down—as I go. The Pet Shop Boys’ majestic “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct” (Apple Music, Spotify) is in my cans, and it’s glorious. A teenage soccer ref is pedaling uphill in his yellow shirt and black knee socks; he looks at me funny as he passes by. Move along, kid. You don’t know what I’m up against.

In the tub for a soak forty-five minutes later, I have The Three Body Problem streaming over Netflix. A horde of alien invaders is bearing down on Earth, while underequipped Humankind is wracking its best brains to dream up a plan of defense. Feels familiar. You know what else is a Three Body Problem? Goddam Soto, Judge, and Stanton.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind to earlier in the week.

DATELINE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 (BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS)

The clock hasn’t quite struck midnight, literally or figuratively, but it’s well after 11 PM. My virtuous and plucky Cleveland Guardians were swept on the road and in the blink of an eye have gone down two games to zero in this seven-game series. The last two nights are memorable for not much more than a flurry of wild pitches, stranded runners, botched plays in the field, and mashed home runs by New York’s torture panel: Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton. I’m pained and concerned as a sports fan, sure, but there’s a bigger-picture problem here, in terms of what these results say about justice, or a lack of it.

Any sensible person who watches a game of baseball will know in their soul that, between the foul lines, it is possibly the most perfect game ever designed. As practiced in the broader world, under the auspices of Major League Baseball, baseball is utterly corrupt. Broken and unfair. MLB’s thirty teams are scattered across the United States and a swatch of Ontario, subdividing that space into fan bases and revenue markets of wildly different sizes and influence, and by its rules one team can—and does—spend five times as much or more on its players as another’s.

Low-level cheating—e.g., scuffed balls, corked bats, and spitters—has been broadly tolerated over the years and is part of the lore of the game. More serious and sophisticated offenses have led to reforms that include steroid testing, foreign substance checks for all incoming pitchers, and the transmitters catchers now use to signal pitch calls without risk of interception. But nothing has been done to solve for the pay gap, the single most significant unfairness in all of American sport, which has the effect of lifting six to ten teams into a privileged tier that garners a 90% share of the attention, interest, care, and concern of the national media and—as many of us believe—league officials.

So let’s spend a minute or two on the Yankees now. It’s Baseball-Meets-Eugenics in the Bronx these days. New York’s roster, assembled by a general manager whose last name is literally Cashman, comprises a conga line of Greek gods shimmying seriatim up to home plate to shatter your hopes and dreams. One chiseled frame after another after another, until you get to Aaron Judge, who at 6’ 7”, 282 lbs. isn’t an Olympian so much as a Titan—or Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. There is nothing inspiring about this team or its story. The stadium where they play is a grand and imposing edifice and probably worth a visit, except that it exists in a moral gravitational well that for seven months of the year repels all virtue, grace, and good taste. Last week Kate suggested I ride down to the Bronx to see one or both of Games 1 and 2 at Yankee Stadium. I told her that if I did, I was likely to get arrested or hospitalized, and possibly both.

Twenty-five years ago Boston Red Sox and their fans got in the habit of calling New York the Evil Empire. In this story, the Sox were the Rebel Alliance, a ragtag bunch of heroes geared up to fight fascism with rickety stunt fighters and a tagalong smuggler of questionable character (we’ll call him Han Schilling). Yet by the time the Red Sox payroll ballooned to $200 million and Boston won four championships of their own in fifteen years—including by knocking off a whip-smart Cleveland team in 2007—the insurgents had themselves become the Regime, and the far better analogy wasn’t to Star Wars but to that last passage of Animal Farm:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Still, New York was never put entirely out of the picture, and my guys have an uncanny knack for running into them in the playoffs. And make no mistake: a playoff series against the Yankees is hell on Earth for Cleveland fans.

Let’s start with a first principle, which is that a fan’s experience of postseason baseball is brutal and exhausting, regardless of the matchup. Fleeting moments of joy embedded in hours and hours of dread, with your team constantly on the verge on crushing disappointment (while it’s batting) or catastrophe (when it’s not). Up come your boys and down they go, in the blink of an eye. Then the opposing team takes its at-bats, with a new and distinctive eternity for you to suffer through between each pitch.

A fan’s warped experience of time is amplified when the Yankees are involved, because whenever they’re in the ballpark—whether it’s 1927 or 1961 or 1998 or 2022 or 2024—they rarely ever swing and miss. Oh, from time to time strikes will be called, causing them to piss and moan at the home plate umpire, another constant across the decades being their sense of entitlement. But more often than not it’s called balls, foul balls, dribblers through the infield—all of these setting the stage for towering home runs from their mutant werewolves. Waiting and waiting and waiting for the inevitable moon shot from a player who wouldn’t sign with your team in a million years: that’s a very particular kind of excruciating. No other sport is as suspenseful, as poised on a knife’s edge, as baseball. And far more often than not against the Yankees, the blade ends up twisted into the guts of the other team and its fans.

Those of you who aren’t Clevelanders, try this thought exercise: imagine investing yourself in a baseball team for seven months. You’re tentative at first—you’ve been burned before. But through spring and early summer your team fashions itself into a contender, and as it closes in on a postseason berth, you start to convince yourself that this iteration of the 26-man roster might actually have it in them to go All the Way. Yet always out there lurking is New York, boasting a $300 million roster loaded with players on nine-digit contracts. You know you’ll have to face them in the end—in this respect the Luke/ Darth Vader analogy actually holds—but you push that prospect out of mind. You’re on the bandwagon, after all, hurtling downhill at ever greater speed toward this Pinstriped Wall. By the time October comes, it’ll be death on impact.

The prospect of facing, and most likely losing to, the Yankees in the playoffs is still more objectionable because of what I wrote earlier, about justice. There’s a suffocating smugness in Yankee Stadium. If you’ve seen a game there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, watch the TV broadcast’s shots of the crowd. Here’s a guy holding up a fake check for six hundred million dollars payable to the aforementioned Soto, who is on the cusp of free agency. Here’s another guy throwing a beer can at a TBS camera to resounding applause from the rest of his section. These fans don’t deserve a 28th championship. They need to be broken and humiliated.

I should say a word here to some lovely people I know who support the Yankees. If you’re reading this, you know who you are. I don’t want bad things to happen to you, personally. But let’s introduce some moral clarity into the discussion. Rooting for New York is like rooting for the volcano to wipe out the settlement below. There’s nothing noble or defensible about the practice, and whatever brought you to it, you always had a choice. You could have walked away. Even born-and-bred New Yorkers could dial back their entitlement a smidge and follow the Mets instead.

Lumpen Yankee fans are largely incapable of developing true character, because as low as they go on the regular, they are ultimately rewarded for their bad behavior. When their heroes fall short, as from time to time they must, here come their “supporters” to heap scorn and blame and abuse on them, because the only acceptable performance is a winning performance. We aren’t paying you $25 million to hit .220, they shout, as if they spend their days hand-dredging canals to help the Steinbrenner family make payroll. Back in the 1990s I went to a midweek getaway day game in the Bronx. Got seats in right center with a work colleague. Of course I took a ton of abuse for wearing my Indians gear, none of which was novel, clever, or amusing. But whatever: I was dealing with it. Three of the bleacher bums gathered the sense that I knew a thing or two about baseball, so they turned and asked me who the player was in center field.

That guy? I said, pointing. YOUR center fielder?

Yeah, they said. Who is he?

That’s Chad Curtis, I said.

They turned away from me and yelled, HEY, CURTIS: YOU SUCK!

Clowns. Know-Nothing buffoons stoking gratuitous conflict, performing fake masculinity, and fist-bumping to celebrate moments of casual harassment, racism (ask Steven Kwan), and occasionally even assault. All the elements of Trumpism, but with a working business model. Turn the firehose on them all.

(1) The massive competitive advantage the Yankees have, by virtue of their payroll; (2) their entitled and contemptuous fan base; (3) the fact that the national baseball media complex revolves around them, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and occasionally the Cubs and Mets; and (4) my team’s 76-year championship draught—when my Guardians have to face New York in a playoff series, I am confronted with all of these objectionable conditions at once. And as hard as I try to keep myself in a healthy head space, I find myself instantly filled to the brim with white-hot indignation and spite. I start to convince myself that unless the Guardians can win four of seven games, we do not live in a just world. And not just that: we live in a cesspool of corruption where not only do the bad guys win—we’re told time and again it is important and essential that they win.

Consider that MLB.com posted this article last week ranking the four possible remaining World Series matchups in order of “excitement.” You know: because it’s super-important to have the league’s own website tell us how much it would suck if America had to watch Cleveland rep the American League in late October. But they’re only taking their cues from their bosses who run the sport, and the spreadsheets say Yankees vs. Dodgers, Aaron Judge vs. Shohei Ohtani is what’s best for baseball.

By rights, then, the song I should pick for this post should be Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” (Apple Music, Spotify). But let’s hold and see how the rest of this week goes.

DATELINE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17 (CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS)

Off-day between Games 2 and 3, as the teams travel to Cleveland. I’m feeling a bit better this morning. Spent maybe an hour ranting on Facebook before bed. Dropped maybe a dozen one-liners—gallows humor stuff, some of it better than others. E.g.:

Prediction: St. Jude throws out the first pitch Thursday … and it skips right by Bo Naylor.

Oh, and don’t expect a flyover before any of the home games. The USAF is worried about all the vultures getting sucked into their engines.

Look: this sort of thing is palliative for me. If it’s not your bag, don’t read it.

Now here’s a funny thing. That playlist I made when I was at the end of my rope with COVID-19 lockdown?¹ Turns out it’s fully adaptable to when you’re down 2-0 to the Yanks in the ALCS. Now here I am riding the elevator up to my office, I’ve got “Gimme Shelter” (Apple Music, Spotify) in my earbuds and I’m swinging my arms and wild-mouthing Merry Clayton’s RAPE! MURDER! backing vocals. Full-on elevator catharsis. According to legend, Clayton screams the way she does—it makes my hair stand on end, every time—because she was literally going into labor in the studio. Women talk a lot about how much childbirth hurts, but it doesn’t stretch over multiple days like a playoff series does. Plus their percentages are better: when it’s all over, most of the time you have a baby to show for it.

In any case, this is how you build yourself back up, during the off-day.

DATELINE: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18 (BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS)

I am beside myself. Game 3 of this series was one of the most gripping and ultimately rewarding sporting events I have ever witnessed. My Beloved Guardians peeled themselves off the pavement, ran the steamroller down from behind, and took two massive katana slash-cuts at its demonic driver.

Oh, they threw their usual garbage at us. We have exactly one supernaturally gifted ballplayer on this Guardians team. He’s not our best player—that’s José Ramirez, our pudgy five-foot-nine third baseman who might be the smartest, most attentive, and hardest-working player in baseball. Ramirez is a guy who wrings every last ounce of results from his above-average talent and below-average frame. By contrast, Emmanuel Clase, our closer, is a freak of nature with a cut fastball he is able to throw in the triple digits. His stuff is insane. Over the course of 74 appearances this year, Clase saved 47 games and gave up a total of five earned runs. So naturally two of the Yankees’ Übermenschen homered off him in consecutive at-bats, giving the Yankees the lead going into the ninth.

But it wasn’t over yet. And tonight we actually had an answer, in the form of Big Christmas. Here’s the Guardos’ Jhonkensy Noel, sending a missile into the left-field bleachers with two outs in the ninth.

But Noel’s bomb only tied the game. It took an additional swipe from David Fry—or as we like to call him, Big Game Dave—to put Game 3 to bed an inning later.

All this may come to nothing in the end, but at least tonight we made these bastards bleed.

DATELINE: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 (BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS)

It’s over. Two more home runs—one to Stanton, another to Soto—ended the season. Over the course of five games, Soto, Judge, and Stanton hit a total of nine Cleveland pitches over various outfield walls.

It’s after 1 AM on Sunday morning, and in this moment I am as convinced as ever that I will never see a Cleveland baseball team win a world championship in my lifetime. But you know what? I’m also not an ass-clown,² so that’s something.

The song for this post is “Invincible” (Apple Music, Spotify), by Muse. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Muse is a 21st-century update of Queen. If this isn’t obvious to you, check out “Knights of Cydonia” (Apple Music, Spotify) and it will hit you like a ton of bricks. Queen with synths, Queen with sci-fi themes, Queen with a political bent: that’s what Muse are about.

Of course, Queen is off the table today. “We Are the Champions” (Apple Music, Spotify) remains unavailable to a Clevelander, and though “Another One Bites the Dust” (Apple Music, Spotify) could work, that’s not an angle I’m interested in exploring. By contrast, Muse’s “Uprising” (Apple Music, Spotify) is a real banger and might have been a possibility, had our boys only stuck the landing earlier tonight and extended the series:

Rise up and take the power back. It’s time the fat cats had a heart attack. You know that their time’s coming to an end. We have to unify and watch our flag ascend.

They will not force us. They will stop degrading us. They will not control us. We will be victorious.

So COME ON.

But fuck that for now. We lost yet another round, and for sure we are battered and bruised. But defeated? No—not now, not ever. And why not? Because we are Guardians fans, and Guardians fans are invincible for no other reason than that we have love in our hearts. And we will be back next year, carrying the flag uphill for all that is good and right and fair.

Don’t give up the fight—you will be all right. ’Cause there’s no one like you in the universe.

During the struggle they will pull us down. But please, please let’s use this chance to turn things around. And tonight we can truly say: “Together we’re invincible.”

1. See “Always Ascending.”

2. Readers, please affirm this in the comments. I may have put myself out on a limb here.