The text messages started pouring in during the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series, also known by me as the Everything Went Bad/Slumped Down in the Booth at the Bar inning.
My friends in Los Angeles were texting me — the token New York Yankees fan for most of them — as their elation grew, error after Yankees error, mental blunder after mental blunder, leading to greater and greater Dodgers mania.
With the game on the eve of Halloween, one of my friends in Los Angeles had placed lobster claw gloves on his hands before the fifth inning and did not remove them for the rest of the game, as he accurately determined that lobster hands were good luck. It clearly was based in fact, as the Dodgers hardly looked back from there.
For sports fans, the spiral of defeat-induced depression is manageable if you are a functioning adult. You are granted five minutes sulking time before raising your shoulders and saying, “It’s just sports,” so people know you are not a loser who cannot manage their emotions.
To deal with this as nearly everyone you know crowds into the streets of your hometown celebrating and sending you videos and photos of them celebrating makes it harder, but also easier in a way. I am happy that my — ahem, slightly bandwagoning — Dodgers-fan friends are happy even if they had no idea what the third disengagement rule was until Luke Weaver inexplicably tried one too many pickoff throws late in Game 5. I am happy for them! I want them to be happy, and I am glad that Angelenos are happy. I love L.A.!
What I am also telling myself as a fan is this: Losing is actually better than winning.
This takes some mental gymnastics, but I am convincing myself.
Losing, first of all, is really funny. Dodgers fans can celebrate winning the World Series all they want, but we all know that Game 5 of the World Series was not won by the Dodgers, it was actively lost by the Yankees, who forgot how to do baseball.
The Yankees’ fifth-inning defensive meltdown was pure, Charlie Chaplin-caliber slapstick comedy. The inning’s highlights (lowlights?) should be edited together and played with circus music.
The previous Yankees losses offered their share of hilarity too.
I was outside Yankee Stadium during Game 4, the only game the Yankees won, and spoke to some of the vendors about trends they were dealing with as the Yankees took loss after loss.
Sheyly and Blanca are both from the Bronx. They used to play softball at the field just across the street from Yankee Stadium. Now they work at the Yankees’ official merchandise store and told me that fans still wanted to buy Aaron Judge jerseys despite his inexplicable ineptitude at the plate — but they wanted half off.
“People are asking for discounts because of his struggles,” Blanca said.
“One guy told me if the Yankees don’t win he will burn down the store,” Sheyly said.
Scalpers were dealing with similar issues. Tickets that were initially going for more than $1,000 just to get in Yankee Stadium were plummeting in value as the Yankees took hit after hit. One scalper initially offered to get me in Game 4 for $400. By the end of the first inning, when Freddie Freeman homered to give the Dodgers the 2-0 lead, he was offering to get me in the door for $75.
There is pain in losing, too, obviously. After Game 1, as my cousin and I scrambled desperately out of Dodger Stadium amid the hooting of Dodgers fans following Freeman’s walk-off grand slam, I saw a 9-year-old Yankees fan leaving the stadium with his parents. He was disconsolate. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. All around him, adults yelped in joy.
That is sports.
Your joy is predicated on someone else’s pain. Really, there is no moral rationale for celebrating your team’s win knowing that, somewhere, a child is crying as a result. You are celebrating a crying child. The only ethical thing to do would be to support no team at all. Never turn on the television. And yet: I would have loved to celebrate as a young Dodgers fan wept. That would have given me great joy.
Which takes me back to why winning is actually darker than losing.
I remember the last time the Yankees won the World Series, in 2009. I was a 13-year-old Angeleno and had watched pretty much every Yankees game of the season.
I watched as Robinson Canó fielded a Shane Victorino grounder and threw him out at first and the Yankees began their celebration. I screamed. I was so happy. Quickly, though, the feeling dissipated, and I remember at that young age feeling disappointed.
“That’s it?” I thought. It was all over.
I could not quite figure out what a Yankees World Series victory really meant for me. How it changed things. This was the ultimate goal, and it kind of felt like nothing.
Losing allows you to come back even hungrier the next year. Winning makes you confront the nothingness at the end of it all.
Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself following the Yankees’ loss.
