Losing, Loss, And Jose Fernandez: David Roth's Weak In Review

If you live someplace long enough, or if you just live long enough, you will find yourself writing your own city over the real one that exists around you—applying your memory of a certain apartment or streetcorner or bar so that it fits into or translucently over what has taken up residency there since. You could say this means the world is full of ghosts, yours and mine and everyone else's, moving through spaces they no longer inhabit, in actions long past. Most of the time, I'd say that "ghost" isn't the right word at all, and that this sort of memory has much more to do with life than death. Our memories mark the spaces we pass through like emotional graffiti, and show that we lived there. We're all over the place, all of us.

But sometimes ghost is the right word for it. There are streets that are different for me, in the city where I live, because the people that used to live on them are no longer alive to live there. I don't quite avoid them, but there is a feeling I get when I find myself there—looking up at a familiar window while walking by, to see the light on or not—that comes from a different place than the warm spread of recognition you get upon returning to someplace familiar after a long time away. That other feeling is colder, and sadder. I feel it as a dropping away, a sudden lack of purchase on solid ground. There's a feeling you can get while walking out into the water at the beach, further out, when the curling cold of deeper water begins to make itself felt around your ankles. If you can swim, this is something you can recognize and reckon with; it's just a way of knowing that there is a very great difference up ahead. That is the feeling I get on the streets where my friends no longer live.

The bottomlessness of actual loss exists in a different emotional universe than the winning and losing we see in sports. It's not that the wins and losses aren't deeply felt in their own right, but they're also a safe way for people to play at real life's riskier extremes of experience, both high and low. There is nothing in winning a game that feels like falling in love, to pick one higher-order real-life triumph, which is absolutely fine; it would be exhausting to feel that sort of high that often. There is nothing in losing, either, that equates in any real way to loss as we know it out in the world. The experiences of winning and losing that sports give us are valuable, and endure, but they are just made of safer stuff, and have a different purpose.

This has been a rough year for the boundaries between our games and our world, if most notably so for the sort of people who are invested in the idea of sports as a safe space within the broader world, and somehow innocent of any broader context. I think that is naive in the most overdetermined and unconvincing way, and that it absolves a lot of things that aren't remotely worth absolving, but mostly I think it is childish. Not childish in a pejorative sense, but childish in that it reflects a yearning for a world that's too sealed and too small to fit anything like adult life.

Anyway, whether or not this is a good or reasonable thing to want, it is also an impossible wish. There is no keeping the world out of sports, just for the simple fact that the games are played in the world, by people who live in it, and that the broader non-negotiabilities of life govern the games at a level of authority that supersedes the smaller rules ordering the games. Here's another thing we're playing at, with our rules and reviews and umpires: in the safe simulacra of these games we make, with the bearable stakes for winning and losing that we build into them, we also introduce the idea that all of it is in some way controllable, and controllable by us, ourselves.

On Monday night, in the first game the team played after the sudden death of 24-year-old supernova ace Jose Fernandez, every player on the Miami Marlins wore Fernandez's number 16; every jersey had Fernandez's name on the back. The team will retire the jersey, which meant that, on the last night that anyone on this team will wear Fernandez's number 16, everyone wore it. It seemed, to read about it, like a nice gesture in the face of something too big to do anything but gesture at. Fernandez was by all accounts a miracle of a human being, even beyond his astonishing talent for the game—not just joyous and magnetic in the ways that were visible from watching him at work, or even celebrating a teammate's homer. He was a brilliant worker, and maybe even a better celebrator, somehow, but other testimonials filled in the rest, and revealed a person who was kind and gracious and grateful in a magnitude as outsized as his talent.

There's something abstracted in writing all that, both because I didn't know Fernandez in any way beyond feeling a half-vexed awe at the way he shredded the baseball team I care about and because, in watching the Marlins play three games against the New York Mets this week, the raw and un-abstracted reality of his loss was so unmistakable and crushingly visible. I have never seen a game like the one the two teams played on Monday night, and I'm not sure a game like that has ever been played. It was heavy and intensely sad, and the fact that there's a box score for it, and that it registers in the standings as concretely and insignificantly as the ones immediately before and after, seems somehow tacky.

I was unprepared for the disorienting effect of every Marlin wearing the same jersey. Especially on Adam Conley, who started the game, the effect was jarring and sad. Conley and Fernandez are roughly the same size—same height, anyway, although Conley is 30 pounds lighter and lacks Fernandez's depth and density of build—but the man in the familiar jersey was throwing with the wrong hand, and throwing it differently, and not the same. There was something both haunting and haunted about all of it, and what came after—spindly Dee Gordon hitting a home run in Fernandez's jersey and circling the bases in tears before being embraced by a swarm of teammates also in Fernandez's jersey, beefy Justin Bour bellyflopping into third in Fernandez's jersey, the ball circling the infield after strikeouts from one Fernandez to another—seemed simultaneously loaded with significance and insignificant to the point of insufficiency.

Just amazing, — MLB (@MLB)September 26, 2016

You know what happened after as well as I do, most likely, which is to say that we all know only the shape of it—the team circling the mound after the win, the captains saying something we couldn't hear, the team leaving their hats behind in tribute before retreating into the locker room and lives. I don't really have anything to tell you about this, honestly, although I can tell you that I have thought about it all week.

These are not deep or novel thoughts, if I'm being honest, even by the generous standards for depth and novelty that I apply to my thoughts. I think it's terribly sad. I think that I have never seen loss—which is so private and inward and inherently isolating, and which we all suffer and survive in different ways—so clearly or so crushingly in a game. I know that what I felt, watching at home, was a distant echo and a faint chill compared to what happened for each of those players. There is not really much to say about loss, finally. Describing it doesn't tame it. There is a grace, as Robert O'Connell noted, in the way that the rote and boring normalcy of baseball crept into even that most abnormal game. The relief of that is a reminder of why we need our games, and why we need the illusion of order and the safer, smaller extremes of emotion we feel within those games. But I don't know what to do with this yet, and none of it really even happened to me.

I suspect that this particular loss will wind up like any other, for people near to it and far from it—that it will become part of the landscape of life, and share space with brighter things, and brighten up itself into something more legible than what it is now. I can't say what that will be, but I will say what I want from my own ghosts of loss, and wish for everyone else: that out of that airlessness might come, in time, something that looks progressively more like life.

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