World Series Nerves and Notes

Some baseball wibbling

As regular readers of this are well aware, The Pip (who will be 13 in a couple of weeks) is a big baseball player, and a fan of the Yankees. The former comes with a predilection for weird superstitious rituals, the later gives those superstitions a focus, and if I’m being honest, I fall into some of the same trap. So, a couple of weeks ago when the Yankees were playing the Royals in the Division Series, I was following along with the Talkin’ Yanks livestream upstairs while using a heating pad to loosen up my neck, and Carlos Rodon was pitching a great game. I came downstairs for exactly one inning on the big TV, during which Rodon completely fell apart, giving up the only four runs the Royals would score in their one win of the series. I retreated back to the bedroom, because clearly I’m not supposed to be watching.

Last week, when the Yankees were in a tight game with the Guardians, Aaron Judge (The Pip’s favorite player) hit a game-tying homer, followed by a go-ahead HR from Giancarlo Stanton. They headed into the final inning with a two-run lead, at which point my phone started blowing up with text from The Pip downstairs:

So, you know, we have a totally healthy and rational relationship with the sport.

Anyway, the Yankees won the next two games (with The Pip and I following along via phone apps only) to advance to the World Series for the first time since 2009, where they will face the LA Dodgers. This is the heavyweight matchup the league was hoping for— the best records in their respective leagues, the biggest stars in the game (Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, etc.), the biggest fan bases in the country. It’s the kind of series that ought to get the attention of even non-fans.

As I’ve written before, I have an on-again, off-again history with baseball. I never cared about it all that much, but was pretty locked in for the Yankees run from 1996-2003. Especially the 1998 playoffs and World Series, which took place when I was in Japan for three months. I listened to all those games on Armed Forces Radio while getting ready for work in the morning, as the Yankees swept the Padres for the first of three consecutive titles (and the second of the Derek Jeter era). That’s left me with a real fondness for baseball on the radio, and I actually bought a cheap FM receiver earlier this summer so I could listen to games out on our deck.

This year is a locked-in year— most of my podcast listening these days is baseball-related— and I’m both obsessed with and nervous about the World Series that starts tonight. There’s a ton going on in terms of narrative— if they weren’t up against the Yankees, I’d root for the Dodgers in this one because their National League Championship Series MVP Tommy Edman is the son of a couple of my Williams classmates. (I teased The Pip about this, telling him that Edman is his real MLB player analogue: 1) he’s half-Korean, 2) he has a parent who graduated Williams in 1993, and 3) he sat out most of the 2024 season with a wrist injury…) I’ve been a Yankee fan longer than I’ve known the Edmans, though, so I have to root for him to go 0-25 in this one…

As befits a battle of top seeds, this is a really even match-up— one sports projection site I saw tweeted a set of probabilities for various outcomes (Dodgers in 4 games, Yankees in 5, etc.) and if you tallied up all their simulated odds it came to 50.0% for each team. That’s pretty nuts, and hopefully the series lives up to that.

As a fan, I am not remotely confident about this, though. The Yankees bullpen has been great through the two playoff series thus far, but I can’t really understand how, and keep worrying that they’re all going to regress to the mean. The offense has been inconsistent— Giancarlo Stanton and Juan Soto have been great, Aaron Judge has been off, some of the bottom-of-the-order guys have been good (Anthonys Rizzo and Volpe) and some have been awful (Jazz Chisolm and Austin Wells). In theory they should have a significant advantage in terms of starting pitching, but ace Gerrit Cole is going to start Game 1 after like ten days off, and he’s the sort of psychopath who needs to pitch on a regular schedule to be at his best, so that makes me very nervous. And the Dodgers line-up is a regular murderer’s row.

All in all, I’m a bit of a basket case about this, not just for my own sake, but for The Pip, who’s relatively new to intense sports fandom and less inured to the boom-and-bust emotional cycle. If the Yankees crash out, he’s going to be super bummed in the way that only a teenage fan can, and I’d rather neither of us have to deal with that. (And that Kate not have to deal with either of us through this…) There’s also a significant element of displaced anxiety from the whole stupid election situation cranking things well past eleven.

Anyway, that’s been my primary non-work-related concern over the last several days, which is why it’s what you’re getting blog-wise this week. And for the next week or so, I’ll be letting grown men playing a child’s game wield outsized influence over my emotional state.

But only following through phone apps and maybe the radio call. I’m not crazy enough to risk watching it on TV…

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So, yeah, that’s my current obsession. Would love to see the Yankees win another, but kind of expect the Dodgers in six. If you want to see how I react to whatever ends up happening, here’s a button:

And if you’d like to talk smack about either or both of these teams, the comments will be open (but keep it tasteful):