2025 Major League Baseball Season Preview for REAL LOVERS ONLY

Baseball is the sport of choice for major depressives and romantics because it withholds gratification, stretches out languorously over hot afternoons, edges, teases, makes you desperate then erupts suddenly, demurs, drags. You’ll sweat. The sensations will become briefly electrifying. You’ll take a nap. The organ groans playfully, with feeling and recognizable creaks. A summer gathering. It is the most literary sport because of the bright, false dirt on the little pants and the single human man with a stick or on the hill endeavoring to save the day and the sun on all the faces and the green scream in your eyes waiting, praying, and the ghosts. Arriving each year amid the first gasps of spring’s forgiveness and falling away six months later when the trees, grown cold, rain dead leaves on the sidewalk, baseball is part of a ritual of coming alive again, defrosting for a too short summer of long, sticky, praiseful days.

There are sports that pack a higher fun-per-minute quotient (not to ME, a baseball sicko, but objectively, sure), but none which possess quite the same meditative properties. Even with the pitch clock prodding the proceedings toward a slightly less glacial pace, games are subject to no pre-agreed time table and remain liable to run to three hours or more, and each year every team plays at least 162 of them between March and October. These many fond hours watching a story unfold and bloom alive in context of and contrast to its ancient history accumulate in my bloodstream or as riverbed silt deposits to my bones and take on a medicinal quality. I have never found a better mood stabilizer, a more soothing companion. Obviously, still, sometimes I’m screaming at a laptop or with a live crowd, yes, but that’s good, too. The hills and valleys and all our tiny battles, triumphs, minor deaths.

In These Trying Times, aka the 21st Century, aka The End of Something, maybe, probably more like the bloody continuance of horrors unending and only ever reshaped by the advancements and decays of the day, well, right now, today, as opposed to any other period in history since the advent of the sport nearly two-hundred years ago, we enjoy the bonus benefit of baseball being woefully out of style, unpopular with young people, uncool, wrongly but understandably regarded as something only for pickled old white men, not hip, not going viral online outside of very niche spaces. We—thirty-three-year-old lesbians who know there are two Max Muncys in MLB, specifically, but also just Baseball Fans Born After 1980 writ large—are free to pursue our strange, geriatric passion with little regard at all from those outside the insular baseball universe. While it would be great, because baseball is great, if MLB put the money and effort into appropriately marketing the game to people who are not white and not seventy-two and not currently wearing a moisture-wicking name brand golf polo, like, in the meantime, there is a funny and precious pleasure in being deeply emotionally invested in something the broader culture cares less and less about all the time.

Baseball returns and there’s banners on the nosebleeds and old favorites on the field next to excited kids and it is cloudy in Los Angeles today, but I still feel fortunate here on the edge of another beginning. My most expensive skincare product smells like hot dog water so in a sense I’ve been microdosing baseball all winter. My haircut is growing out wrong and I need to wear a hat. The dawning is here, and it will feel old again almost before we’ve savored it and that’s all right because these sacred ministrations are a dance our bodies know already, and it is good and just to fall thoughtlessly into the spinning. Sorry that baseball triggers my most Catholic impulses. Genuflecting for strike outs, fingering a rosary in my head. It calls me to candles and superstition, which, along with shame, comprise the bulk of what one is exposed to in a Catholic youth education like the one I received. Baseball to me is like praying but better because it’s more honest and despite having just as much to do with luck. But the serenity and its shattering can be supernatural experiences on the right warm night. I like myself and everyone else most in the moments when the long climb has been accomplished and I am perched over a delirious forever swell of sky and the baseball diamond whose neat paint lines conceal lawlessness and whimsy and old me in my shorts, splotched pink and mustard-mouthed, may lean forward to watch the pitcher come still and explode.

Today is the first day of the Major League Baseball 2025 season and I am predicting big dingers, helmet nachos that could feed a small country, combined no hitters nobody will care about, Shohei Ohtani’s dog attending games, too many blown-out elbows, horny triples, animals on the field, men racing against time and history, best friends, young guys stealing lots of bases and strange, amusing things happening at the two minor league stadiums that have been conscripted into full-time major league use this year due to the violence of greed (GAP empire heir and overall shit for brains nuisance John Fisher, in his despicably negligent steerage of the Oakland As, will have the team playing at a Triple-A stadium in Sacramento as a stopover before a dubious move to Las Vegas) and environmental collapse (Tampa Bay Rays will play their home games at the Yankees’ spring training stadium because a hurricane wrecked the fuck out of their park).

I look forward to the National League being, on the whole, dramatically better than the American League again. I’m excited that the Orioles moved their fence back in again to facilitate more dongs given up and got. There are walk-offs coming and some will hurt and that hurt will be a more than acceptable trade-off for the stupid, animal delight of the ones that go right and feel so good. As always, I am going to watch pitchers, the amazing ones, the odd ones, the ones that kind of suck but sometimes don’t, the new ones, the reborn ones, all of them in mesmerized reverie and be awed and frightened by their weird bodies and what they’ve chosen—or been chosen by fate and genetics—to do with them. It will be a pleasure to see which incredibly old guys can still heave it over the plate in an affront to god and nature and in turn to watch baby children born as recently as 2006 smile and celebrate hitting one out for the very first time and to see their families cry and laugh jumping up and down with contagious joy on TV. How steadying to eat soft serve from a tiny helmet. What a fanciful thing to root for laundry. The pointlessness creating a point unto itself, braiding people together briefly to care for and nurse a delusion rewarded only every now and again.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

The great Roger Angell, as ever, already said it best, but this has not stopped his acolytes—among which I count myself, indulgently—from trying and failing to say it all again still. That feeling, that feeling, that buoyant and invaluable, slippery feeling of communal euphoria, intimate and shared, leaves one little choice. In lieu of further attempts today, and “baseball names” being a special interest of mine, I’ll leave you with this list of names that make me say, “Thank god that person is good at baseball!” Bubba Chandler (Pirates), Jac Caglianone (Royals), Adley Rutschman (Orioles), Masyn Winn (Cardinals), Janson Junk (Marlins), Kody Funderburk (Twins), Ty Adcock (Mets), Brennan Bernadino (Red Sox), Vinnie Pasquantino (Royals), JJ Bleday (Athletics), Jackson Merrill (Padres), Drew Smyly (Cubs), Rowdy Tellez (Mariners), Joey Loperfido (Blue Jays), Colt Keith (Tigers), A.J. Puk (Diamondbacks), Bo Naylor (Guardians), Freddie Freeman (Dodgers), Bryson Stott (Phillies), Hayden Birdsong (Giants), and the Spencers Strider and Schwellenbach (Braves). Happy baseball season!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

forever and ever amen