The wheel of time has spun round once more to that most favored time of year -- early autumn -- and with the waning days of the ninth month comes my most revered ritual -- writing about the Chicago Cubs. Apologies to the less baseball-inclined among you.1
As the season wends its way toward its conclusion at the end of September, the Cubs cling to a slim division lead over the Milwaukee Brewers. The third best team in the National League is the St. Louis Cardinals, who are
It isn’t hard to imagine this season careening off a magnificent cliff, nor is it particularly difficult to envision a 2018 fandom rife with misery. The team has looked out of sorts all season. Our most beautiful sparkle-eyed MVP has missed almost half of the season with a mysterious shoulder injury. Our starting rotation is held together with roughly $38 million dollars worth of paper clips and chewed up bubble gum. Our big mid-season acquisition is a bat-first second baseman who apparently also tries to play second base with a bat instead of a glove.2
It could be a grim season. But reader, it is not, and there is one reason for that. That reason’s name is Ednel Javier Baez: human GIF, invader of dreams, and literal magician.
Javy Baez is the most valuable player, not only in the National League, but in my soul. He brings peerless exuberance and frivolity to every play, whether he be at second base, third base, or shortstop -- three positions he plays better than just about anyone alive. He hits colossal home runs and scores from first base on weakly-hit bloop singles. His mere presence on the basepaths reduces the opposition to high school JV teams who are going to start running laps as soon as they chase down all of the wild throws they’ve scattered around the edges of the field.
It would be a mis-characterization for me to say that the rest of the Cubs have been a black hole of despair this year. They haven’t been. All of my favorite players are still my favorite players -- but for most of the team, the season has felt a lot like C.S. Lewis’ grey town: dreary and twilit, rainy not quite raining, neither day nor night. It’s been a slog. I know I made a lot of these complaints last year, too. Maybe this is just what it feels like to be a fan of a good baseball team.
Javy is the antidote, man. In a way, I imagine that watching him play baseball is the tiniest bit like watching a saint live.
I don’t mean to say that Javy Baez will be canonized in the Roman Catholic Church for being able to hit a ball with a stick; I am merely remembering the way Lewis describes saints in Mere Christianity. “Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant,” he writes. “They begin where most of us leave off.”3
Javy plays like he’s the only one in on the secret: that it’s a children’s game, and he gets paid to play it. His reckless contagious unbridled disruptive magnetic joy is so dang fun to watch, I fell in love with him two years ago when he was only half this good.
Normally, when an athlete reaches that transcendent level of performance, it feels like a titanic feat. LeBron James, Tiger Woods: these men exerted their physical dominance with a grimace, and we give them more credit because we can see how hard they work. Javy is more buoyant, taking himself more lightly, than anyone else I’ve ever seen play professional sports, and his joy makes me want to live the way he plays baseball. No matter how the 2018 season ends, I’ll always have that.
1 Editor's Note: As the chief baseball fan Restless Hearts, Rob and I are from time to time self-indulgent in our baseball-based writing. Be assured, we could end up writing about baseball with much greater frequency. What you see from us amounts to what is actually great restraint.↩
2 His defense is embarrassingly bad, is what I’m saying. Oh, he also said some stuff about a gay former baseball player back in 2015 that made a lot of people really angry.↩
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