Baseball and the free city
The beauty of the Dodgers and Los Angeles' ungovernability.
I became an Angeleno years ago but am not a Dodgers fan. Being a Dodgers fan would be spiritually wrong. Early in life, as a native Missourian, the furies reached through the veil and decided I would root for the Royals. This is how I learned from a young age that life is tragedy. (Why was I so hopeful about Mark Teahen at third base? Why are Cardinals fans so smug?) Switching teams, or dolloping on more fandoms, would ruin the point of sports, which is to suffer. The embrace of agony is what makes baseball a civic religion, with Old Testament clergy who excommunicate fans for insufficient offerings of stadium development tax credits.
But sometimes baseball’s proper proportions of “mass suffering” to “fleeting ecstasy” fall out of celestial balance: Your team wins, a lot. Somehow my friends and neighbors in L.A. get to root, over and over again, for winners. With the game’s greatest-ever player, Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers seized victory again last night thanks to a completely different Japanese phenom, Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Watching good players make my city happy creates a sense of disorientation. Where did these guys even come from? Will we ever run out of fireworks? Oh it seems like LAPD brought out those riot horses really fast? The story of L.A. baseball fandom is that the face that meets the police baton was deliriously happy.
The ungovernability of Los Angeles and the beauty of its baseball make strange alchemy in 2025, the pride of the free city under siege. The big stars are immigrants while masked federal agents creep around the corner. At any moment, our streets become a fourth branch of government. In Pericles’ famous consolatio for Athens mourning its war dead, the civic openness against danger marks a great city of the world:
We have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own. … Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.
There’s that word, “we,” the most powerful incantation of immigrant republicanism. “We” is such a put-together concept. The Dodgers team itself fled Brooklyn, same as I am a migrant from the Midwest. The world flows into Los Angeles. There’s so much sun here, it’ll make you think there’s rest for the weary.
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Mark Teahan had a couple of good years!