David Roth's Weak In Review: The First Days Of Summer

There is a crystalline and horrible feeling that even committed baseball fans can get while watching certain games. It tends disproportionately to arrive during those four-hour ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcasts, the ones with five former big leaguers and one overmatched play-by-play dude sitting in the booth, harmonizing on Pitching To The Score or bunting while some paunchy pitching coach shuffles to the mound to say whatever such a coach might say to Nate Eovaldi (or whoever), 133 minutes and five innings into a baseball game, to get him to stop pitching like Nate Eovaldi (or whoever). This feeling is the sudden, certain realization that, for people who do not like baseball, every single baseball game feels like this. And oh wait now the home plate umpire is walking towards the mound. Not that fast, but he's walking, and trying to get the coach to stop talking. In the bullpen, a man with a goatee named Chad or Cody or Khad is starting to get loose. The prospect of a "Bar Rescue" rerun suddenly seems…if there is a word for "more than extremely appealing, actually," it seems like that.

For the most part, I love baseball and love watching it. But it is bracing, and a little terrifying, to see it as non-believers see it—as a chain of comatose rituals interrupted by bleary yawns. Anyway, baseball is what we've got, and it will be more or less exclusively like this for the next few months. My advice is to enjoy this, and not just because the hot and wildly inconsequential months now stretching out towards the horizon will give us no alternative. My advice to you is to enjoy it because it is good, and because you—and me, and everyone—needs a break from import and consequence and noise. Lord knows, we have earned the right, the privilege, to be kind of vaguely bored by sports for a little while. All of which is sort of a long way of saying that we are ready for baseball.

It already seems strange that this week started as more than that. There were the hotly contested Stanley Cup Finals to resolve, and a shockingly good NBA Finals, both of which were seemingly moving towards their resolutions in ways that defied narrative gravity, and generally seemed as if they still had something startling in reserve. And then, quickly, they wrapped right the fuck up, with the dynastic Chicago Blackhawks putting the Tampa Bay Lightning away at home, and the Golden State Warriors finally wiping out the depleted, Heroic Supernova LeBron James + People Available On Every Fantasy Basketball League's Waiver Wire iteration of the Cavaliers.

It was all over by Tuesday. No one even rioted. Chicago's hockey louts are used to Stanley Cup wins at this point, and as such were busy being gracious and triumphantly posting that one Guy Fieri Sunset image on Twitter. People in Oakland, who had cared so much and waited so long, were either too happy, too relieved, or both. No one so much as tipped over a park bench. The end of every meaningful sports thing—for the next few months, anyway—arrived rapidly, reasonably, and decisively. Suddenly, sleepily, it felt like the start of the baseball season.

This is not a bad feeling at all, as sportsfeels go. After months of escalating tension, and seasons shrinking down and killing off every team but one, it's a relief to be plunged into the cool blue insignificance of early-to-midseason baseball. This is not a thing that the people selling us baseball can or would admit in public; the people that sell us sports only know how to talk one way, and that is loudly. All that insistence that This Really Matters is going to seem laughable when it's being layered thunderously over Wade Miley giving up six consecutive doubles to the Tampa Bay Rays on some zombified Sunday night in July.

But while the baseball industry has to keep kayfabe on this, there's no reason why we have to. We can laugh at the bluster that baseball willfully blasts at us during its long, lazy middle months. Or we can just kind of lazily enjoy watching Prince Fielder running the bases; we can check out for an inning or two, or a week or two. The next few months of Major League Baseball lazily sidestroking towards September are going to provide plenty of time and space for all of that.

It's an article of faith among people that don't like or otherwise don't get baseball that it's boring, and there's no rebutting that, really. It's not that baseball is more dull or light on incident from moment to moment than, say, a college football game. Aesthetically, it's tighter—there are fewer outright flubs or moments of scurrying Chinese Fire Drill pointlessness. But also it either works for you or it doesn't. I can no more convince you that baseball is not boring, and is #actually quite cool and good than some rock-pedant could get you to enjoy a Steely Dan song by pointing out all the unusual time signatures and creative fills. You already know if you like it, and you already know why. Some people like to go up, and some people like to go down.

But being bored is not always a bad thing. We are, in our day-to-day lives, online and off, power-washed with a thousand different corrosive compounds of anxiety and salesmanship. All that pressurized, gamified, streaming real-time non-boredom is fucking exhausting. Baseball, which is sun-shocked and a little lazy before it begins to tighten up as the weather gets colder, is broadly outside of all that. It is not uncommercial or pastoral or innocent—there are ads everywhere in the ballpark, and in every corner of every frame of the average television broadcast. It's just a game. But it is a different thing, and the months that belong to baseball are different. They are warmer and slower. They are quieter and brighter. The world does not improve during these months, exactly. The world does not improve, period, just as a general rule. But the world feels a little further away at a ballpark, in the fresh air of some meaningless sixth inning. That doesn't sound exciting, I know. But it's the best part.