Why sports matter The game isn’t about the whole truth. But it tries to tell true stories.

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• published: 09 Jul 2016
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Why sports matter The game isn’t about the whole truth. But it tries to tell true stories. It’s 3:52 a.m. as I’m writing this. It is the second column I’ve written for this slot since midnight. I wrote the first one before I checked the news, and the other one can wait. My body has decided I’m not sleeping tonight, and my brain is catching up to it. My heart hurts, and not just figuratively: For the last two hours, I have felt it try to escape my chest upon with every beat. It needs space right now that I cannot give it. And so we’re here, on a Red Sox fan site, the day after a senseless act — and for the emptiness of phrase, these acts are without sense, in the truest sense of the word — and we are going to pretend that here in our tiny nook of the Internet that everything is fine except for maybe the starting rotation and parts of the bullpen. I was going to write to you about exactly how much time David Ortiz has left in his major league career, or why the All-Star game is better than the Hall of Fame, and it would be neat and tidy and that would be that. But I just can’t. Not today. Not after this. You know what happened by now, and what happened before what happened, and what happened before that. In 38 years I’m not entirely certain I had seen someone be shot to death with my own eyes, on video or otherwise. I’ve seen it three times since Wednesday, and I still have most of Friday to go. I agree with Jeb Lund that this is mostly the result of choices we’ve made, in the aggregate, over 20 years, but the problem is in the pronoun: the ‘we’ who decided this is not the ‘we’ who have to live with it. ‘They,’ whoever they are, broke it, and ‘we,’ whoever we are, bought it. With this type of bill of lading, I can’t quite stick to sports here, but I do have a sports story that I think is helpful to understand why sports fans are often so ‘bad’ at ‘sticking to sports’ in cases like this, and why their interests often spread far beyond the diamond, sometimes against their better judgment. Sports deal in sequences of events that present themselves as facts, and if you follow them on the field, you’re at least capable of doing so away from it. Anyhow, the story — which my wife told me and which I’m not going to fact-check — is that some budding crime reporters (in Japan, in this case) are assigned to cover baseball specifically so they can master the technique of creating and crafting a narrative out of the available facts, not unlike a detective might. If this is true, it shows the interdisciplinary nature of sports, baseball in particular, and shines a light on why people like me don’t ‘stick’ to it: The dynamics of being a fan or analyst are equal to the dynamics of being an observer to just about anything, dingers or not. The advantage in sports is that it’s mostly a meritocracy, and the facts and narrators tell similar stories, but there is still always room for disagreement. This is why we argue over the All-Star game or Hall of Fame or call sports radio to say, as I heard earlier tonight, that the Yankees’s pitching is better than the Mets’, only to be hung up upon: We cannot help ourselves, even given the exact same set of stats and sequences of events. It sounds crazy to say, but it’s basically saying we all know 1 + 2 equals 3 and somehow still disagree about why. In the ‘real’ world, another shortcut phrase that basically describes everything that is not, in some way, sports, it’s nearly impossible to get anyone to agree on a set of facts, let alone a narrative setting in which those facts take place. The aggregate story that emerges can bear as much relationship to the truth of the thing as a Wendy’s menu does to a Red Sox box score, and this is the baseline with which we’re working. It can still be better or, incredibly, worse. As of right now, before the sun comes up on the East Coast, it seems like things are bound to get worse. The nation feels like a powder keg that has armed itself to a degree in which detonating the charge seems inevitable. In the face of a threat like this, what do sports ‘matter,’ really? What are they worth. Here’s what they are worth: Everything. If they are the opposite of what is ‘real,’ they are that way because of their benign finality, and their simple, incontrovertible truths. We play and follow sports because it is the opposite of attempting to organize or make sense of things when the narratives don’t match the facts, and probably never can.