Baseball Brings Us Together. A Meditation on Friendship via Baseball

I traveled to Houston this past weekend to meet up with my friends from high school and to go to the Rangers series. I reflect on how baseball brought this group--and many others--together.

Apr 17, 2023

The Astros lost 2 of 3 this weekend to the Rangers. Luis Garcia gave up hard contact on Friday night. On Sunday, the 7th inning got out of hand thanks to an error by Jeremy Pena, a slow hook from Dusty, and a bad pitch from Hector Neris.

I had a great time watching it.

How did I manage that? It wasn’t what I was watching on the field. It was who I was watching it with.

Me, 2nd from the right. My friends from high school. And the Crawford Boxes.

I travelled from my home in New Jersey to my hometown on Friday and met up with five of the guys I went to high school with. We had tickets to all three games against the Rangers, a rented condo in EaDo, a little more bourbon and beer than advisable, and whole bunch of time for reminiscing.

I graduated high school in 1991 in a class of 125. Many of those guys I haven’t seen n years.1 Heck, there are a healthy number that I haven’t seen since graduation. But these other give—they’re my guys. And why have I kept up with this set of guys. One big reason is baseball.

One of the reasons I became friends with these guys back in high school was baseball. Sports is one thing that drew us together in high school. It’s a topic we wanted to talk about and think about back then, and separated us a group from our classmates more interested in music or movies, or what not. We have opinions on those subjects—especially back in high school—but we all like sports.

I played in a computer baseball league in high school with a lot of these guys, and can still remember a bunch of my players—that Bonds guy was pretty good for my team.

And just as baseball brought us together, baseball has helped to keep us together across the years and, especially in my case as the one of the six who does not live in Texas, the distance. In 2017, we started a full text thread between four of us. I quickly added the one who also lived in the Northeast—we’d meet up every year to watch an Astros game when they visited Yankee Stadium before he moved back to Texas. One of us saw the other at the ACL festival a few years ago and added him.

And what do we talk about on our text thread? That it started in 2017 is a hint. Yes, we talk a lot about the Astros. We talk about the holes in the lineup and who’s not performing; we talk about whatever the Yankees or their fans have done to embarrass themselves, and whatever outrage the national media has foisted on the Astros with their East Coast bias. And, of course, there is much hooting and hollering during the playoffs, especially last season.

Baseball is the reason to keep us together.

This weekend was more of the same. It’s not clear to me why we hadn’t figured out to go to a game as a group before this, but once the idea was broached, we were all enthusiastically for it.

Baseball was the reason for us to gather in real life.

And gathering for baseball allowed us to talk about all sorts of different things. Conversation topics ranged from the ridiculous—high school shenanigans and crude jokes—to the serious—the experience of the guys with older children about how to talk to them about social media and sex, accounting for all the changes in the world since we were in high school—to the nostalgic—who had heard from other guys in our high school class—to something that combined all three—our own aging. To give you a hint of our collective age, that discussion included what we all did when our AARP solicitations came in the mail this year.

Baseball may have been one of the things that brought us together years ago and keeps us together today. But this weekend reminded me that baseball was an avenue to more than just talking about baseball.

It was an avenue to finding good people—guys who I know care deeply about being good husbands and fathers. It was an avenue to finding a set of people who one can have both ridiculous and serious conversations with, in the same conversation. It was an avenue to having people in your life who you haven’t seen in person for years, yet you can immediately both act like you’ve been talking in person for all that time.

It was a better time hanging out than watching baseball. But the hanging out was more important this weekend.

I usually talk about baseball from an analytical perspective. I have been attracted to that side of the game since, well, since I was hanging out with these guys in high school. Often, I use my analytical perspective—and the knowledge that a season is long—to argue that fans should shy away from their emotional reactions to losses or losing streaks.

But as valuable as I think that perspective is, I’m an emotional person too. Baseball connects me with so many people. It connects me with the people I play fantasy baseball with, even if we all approach baseball from an especially weird angle. It connects me with the friends I have made on Twitter—some of whom have become friends in real life. It connects with me with the people I interact with here on Substack in the Notes function or in the comments. It connects me with lots of the people I meet in the non-electronic world—whether they be the Yankees or Mets or Phillies fans who tend to populate my town and social group in New Jersey or the Red Sox fans connected to my New England-bred wife.

And this weekend, baseball provided me one of the best connections it offers—to old friends. To people who have long understood me and who I have long understood across the years and distance and absences and events.

So I know it was not a great weekend to be an Astros fan. Trust me, I know. I watched all 27 innings.

But for one series, I didn’t really care about how the team performed. I had a great time being a baseball fan.

Orange Fire

Discussion about this post