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MLB IN LA - The baseball season has been over for a couple of weeks now, but I’m guessing that Game 7 of the World Series will be replayed countless times in the mind’s eyes of many Dodger and Blue Jay fans -- in two very different ways.
For the Blue Jay fans, former MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti’s famous quote about baseball comes to mind: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”
For Dodger fans, a very different quote reflects the loop in our heads that may fade but will never disappear. As writer Daniel Okrent once said: “The fun of recalling something that you saw five days ago or five years ago or a lifetime ago – knowing that it’s there to be plucked back into your life in an instant – oh, God, that’s rare.”
The shared experience of watching Game 7 with my brother, Richard, while we were texting with my son, Vincent, who is in New York attending his freshman year in college, is something I will never forget, I never can forget. It was an evening of pure tension, pure stress and then pure joy. And I know that very real joy from November 1 will always be there to be plucked back in an instant.
Baseball may be the greatest game ever devised for any number of reasons. Not even MLB’s most unfortunate tweaks can completely ruin it. And for all the Ted Lasso-esque cliché-ness of statements like “Baseball is life!” it’s simply not fair to say that baseball is “just a game.” Neither is it a mere diversion from all the hard things in life. As I was reminded last Monday as a dot among hundreds of thousands at the Dodger victory parade in downtown LA, baseball is so much more than a game. And the Dodgers are so much more than a team. What they mean to Los Angeles and Southern California is hard to describe.
In Ken Burns’s monumental documentary Baseball, writer George Plimpton commented on Brooklyn’s having lost the Dodgers:
“A deep, deep sadness. You know, there’s a theologian named Michael Novak who’s quoted as saying that ‘a community is better off losing its opera house, or its museum, or its church’ – here’s a theologian speaking – ‘than its ball team.’ Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers were taken away.”
Knowing what the Dodgers mean to the Los Angeles region and feeling it palpably in the shared joy of a World Series celebration parade, it’s almost impossible to disagree with Plimpton and Novak’s sentiments.
Last year I attended the victory parade with Vincent, encamped for hours, waiting for the team buses carrying our baseball heroes outside another one of our happy places, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. This year I had no one to go to the parade with: Richard didn’t want to brave the crowd, and Yamani, my fiancé (who is only a baseball fan through me), had a doctor’s appointment she couldn’t move.
But there was no way I was going to miss the celebration. My son asked me to FaceTime with him, and I was determined to attend for both of us. As it turned out, Face Timing was a virtual impossibility because the mobile network was overloaded thanks to the mass of humanity.
I arrived early, this time positioning myself across from Disney Hall, on the corner of Grand and 1st, in front of the LA Opera’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was easy to chitchat with the other assembled Dodger fans, to relive Game 7, to share the exhilaration of our E-ticket emotional rollercoaster ride and to express our hopes for a happy reunion on Grand next year to celebrate a Three-peat.
How could I not feel at home with the hundreds of thousands celebrating the incredible path to the second title in a row, people from all walks of life who love baseball and the Dodgers just like me?
As an elected official, I have often spoken about the importance of Community, with a capital “C.” About how we are all part of different, diverse communities, some of which overlap and some of which have absolutely nothing in common. When I have spoken about the importance of Community, I’ve almost always mentioned that Community is an extension of family and Home, and that Home is a sacred place.
Ultimately, baseball is all about coming Home.
Michael Novak was right, and I feel sorry for Brooklyn (and Montreal) more than for Toronto, though the Dodgers have been in LA almost as long as they were in Brooklyn. The Dodgers have already made their home at Dodger Stadium, Blue Heaven on Earth, for 20 years longer than the Dodgers played at Ebbets Field. But for those in Brooklyn who are old enough to remember, including some transplanted Brooklynites who eventually made their way to Southern California, the void and sense of loss can never be repaired.
A friend who has lived and thrived in Southern California for decades recently remarked that while many people talk about where they were when JFK was shot, he remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn.
When the Dodger buses finally passed by, excitement filled the air, with the players and Dodger management seeming to share in the giddiness and joy they had brought to the hundreds of thousands of Dodger fans lining the parade route, likely from each of the 88 cities in LA County, as well as from further afield. It felt more like the largest family gathering imaginable than anything else.
I missed Vincent, but I took videos to share with him and gathered some of the confetti from the parade as a keepsake for when he comes back home from college in December.
The Dodger World Series victory and the parade that celebrated the achievement are a reminder of just how, in the words of Walt Whitman, “the game of (base)ball is glorious.”
In a world of polarizing politics, in which people seem more accustomed to shouting at each other than trying to talk with one another; in a world of increasing silos and isolation; in a world of cancel culture and disillusionment, baseball is a uniter. There is nothing that brings Los Angeles (meaning the greater Los Angeles community) together like the Dodgers. Nothing.
If baseball and a shared love of the Dodgers can be a conversation-starter, if we can talk about baseball and relive shared memories together, then maybe, just maybe, we can talk about other issues, including what divides us; maybe we can start talking about the Dodgers and move on to other issues; maybe a shared love of baseball and the Dodgers can help us to humanize each other and allow us to find common ground, bridging our differences and working towards e pluribus unum.
As The Sporting News wrote in 1931: “Great is baseball. The national tonic. The reviver of hope. The restorer of confidence.”
This country needs baseball now more than ever.
Even after back-to-back World Series victories, Los Angeles needs the Dodgers now more than ever.
(John Mirisch was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 2009 and served three terms as mayor. He is currently a garden-variety councilmember.)
