I went to high school at The Newman School, located near the corner of Marlborough and Exeter, about three blocks away from the Copley T-Stop and the Boston Marathon
finish line. I interned at NESN, which is located right in Watertown and was locked down for much of Thursday night. I went to college at Boston University, I have and will again live in Allston, I work in Government Center,and I grew up in Winthrop, just a short T-Ride away.
For me, everything about the Marathon Monday saga felt personal. I was somewhere between the Mile 24 and 25 markers when the bombs went off, too far away to hear or
feel or smell the tragedy. I was three miles away from the wild police chase in Watertown, close enough to hear the sirens but not the bullets.
You couldn’t tear me away from Twitter or the news on Thursday night. I stayed up until 5:30 am watching, making sure my girlfriend and I were safe where we were located, hoping and waiting anxiously for the death or capture of those responsible.
And in the middle of all this terror, in one of the scariest and most surreal moments of my life, I tweeted about Julio Borbon. Because baseball.
We all know that we use sports as a distraction: that’s an angle that’s been covered a thousand times before and that is certainly very true. But I’ve been thinking more about why baseball means so much and is so helpful to me when tragedy strikes. About why the simple “NY<3 B” sign projected on a building 450 miles away made me tear up. And I’ve come to a conclusion that is to me perhaps more cathartic than simply claiming baseball as a distraction and nothing more.
As wee see with Will Middlebrooks right now, failure is part of the game. Photo by Kelly O’Connor, sittingstill.net.
As many others have stated much more eloquently before, baseball is a game of failure. If you succeed three-out-of-10 times, you’re an All-Star. Batters strike out in key situations. Pitchers give up towering homeruns. Routine ground balls find their ways between legs. You don’t need to me a major leaguer to relate to this. If you’ve ever played baseball at any level above t-ball, you’ve made an error, or you’ve grounded into a double play, or you’ve walked in a run. Maybe all in the same game.
Yet what’s most important is that the majority of us get back on the diamond. We work harder, play smarter on the field, think of our past triumphs and focus on how to best recreate them. We tell ourselves it will be ok the next time we walk up to the plate or toe the rubber or take the field. We carry on and try again.
That, I think, is why baseball can help us get over Marathon Monday and its aftermath. Yes, sports are a distraction and yes, any sense of normalcy can help at a time like this. But baseball is uniquely positioned to help because the game, at its core, is about overcoming fear: physical, mental and everything in between.
Everyone who’s ever stepped in a batters box has been scared at some point. A screaming line drive to a third baseman or a bad hop to a second baseman or a foul ball that knocks a catcher’s mask off: these scenarios invite a visceral, physical fear as well.
Everyone who’s ever stepped onto the field has been afraid of failure, too. You’re afraid to choke in a big moment. You’re afraid to let your team down. You’re afraid you won’t perform up to your abilities, or that your abilities just aren’t good enough to begin with. We’ve all had these thoughts.
But we push that fear to the back of our minds and we stand on that field and in that batter’s box and on that mound and we play. More often than not in baseball, we fail at what we’re trying to do. That’s scary, but we do it anyway, because we love it.
And that is how baseball is helping me, one week later. Baseball taught me how to conquer fear, and it’s why I’m ok right now. I will not be afraid to take the T to my job in Government Center. I will not be afraid to go out near large crowds. I will not be afraid to go visit my old stomping grounds at Copley again. And you better damn well believe I will not be afraid to head to the Marathon next year, with those I love close behind.
So yes, that the Red Sox are playing baseball again is helpful simply because it allows us to take our minds off of Monday’s events. But it’s useful too because we will see Will Middlebrooks, mired in the worst slump of his career, fail. We will see Andrew Miller walk in the winning run. We will watch John Lackey struggle through his recovery, and Allen Webster see his first pitch get rocked, and Jarrod Salatalmacchia overthrow baseballs into shallow right-center field. And we will root for these players anyway, because they will not let those failures define their games or their careers or their lives. They won’t give into that fear.
And as the city recovers and as those wounded recover and the families of the victims recover, we won’t be afraid either. The Marathon Monday aftermath is all about the triumph of rational thought over chaos. It’s about the futility of anger and hate and violence. It’s about the complete and utter failure of two evil men to destroy our way of life.
It’s about defeating fear. Thanks in part to baseball, I think that’s a skill I started to learn long ago.