Caring about the game

 LISTEN. What a nice story they told yesterday on Sunday Morning, about an old bucket of balls that means so much more. It's a story about connecting across the generations, which to my mind is what the human game is ultimately all about.

The World Series is now set, with the Dodgers' Game 7 win last night following the Rays' the night before, and to my delight and slight surprise I actually care. Same for the Titans' win in OT after a stunning last-seconds score to tie the Texans. It's good to care about things you don't really care about, that's another way of thinking about Moral Holidays. Sundays are good for those. But I already don't really care about who won. 

In our penultimate reading of Falter today in Environmental Ethics, Bill McKibben says that's not surprising. It's precisely because we expect the games to continue that any particular outcome, the thrill of any particular victory, the agony of any particular defeat -- exciting or excruciating though it may be in the moment -- quickly recedes into the annals of trivia. 

Our games "divert a preposterous amount of our time and energy" but their meaning eludes us. "Once the final game of the season has receded a few days into the past, even the most die-hard fan doesn't really care that her team won," we quickly shift focus from World Series to Spring Training. "What we remember are the stories... 'It's how you play the game' is the truest of cliches." 

And the cliche that Baseball (or tennis, or stock car racing, or whatever) is Life means just that, that we have stories to tell about how they or we played those games and somehow made ourselves think they mattered, made ourselves care. They do matter because we care, as Roger Angell so smartly said: “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…” (continues)