The consensus around baseball is that it is generally pretty boring. I think the consensus is correct. American football is a strategic push and pull that repeatedly showcases a mix of freak athleticism mixed with a constant attempt to outsmart the other team. Basketball and hockey are played at breakneck speeds that demand close attention. Soccer is breathtakingly fluid while expressly outlawing the one adaptation that propelled humanity to the top of the food chain: our hands. (That is, if you ignore, you know, the brain.) Baseball, by comparison, is two to three hours of mostly nothing. So what does baseball bring to the table? Baseball is, first and foremost, a storytelling medium, and it is the story of baseball–the story of my St. Louis Cardinals–that pulls us in.

October 7th, 2022

National League Wild Card, game one. This is the first year of the expanded wild card games, meaning that instead of having a single winner-take-all game, there is now a three-game series. Still, game one has huge implications. By taking game one, you put the other team on their toes forcing them to win two in a row. On this day, my St. Louis Cardinals are facing off against my best friend’s Philadelphia Phillies. He’s just gotten off the train from Chicago, but the usual feeling of excitement of his arrival has been replaced by uncomfortable silence as he climbs into my Honda Civic. The Cardinals are still freshly out of a streak of futility where they failed to make the playoffs for a chunk of the late 2010s. Even when we have made the playoffs, we’ve had mostly nothing to show for it. I haven’t seen this team do much in ways of winning a championship since I was 12 years old. Dylan’s Phillies have had it much worse. His Phils haven’t even made the playoffs since 2011 when they were bounced by my Cardinals who were en route to winning a World Series. Speaking of which…

October 28, 2011

Hey! The Cardinals just won the World Series! My still-developing 8-year-old brain remembers the sight of my mom crying tears of joy and I had little idea why. This is what the Cardinals do. They’re supposed to win. My teary-eyed mother looks me in the eyes and tells me that this is something I might not ever get to see again. It’s clearly very special to her. For me, it’s whatever. The Cardinals have won two World Series since the time I was born. I’m just happy my mom let me stay up late.

October 30, 2013

Oh, the Cardinals just lost the World Series. This isn’t supposed to happen. The Cardinals win. It’s what they do. They aren’t supposed to lose. My beloved St. Louis Blues? They lose. Not the Cardinals. My still underdeveloped brain convinces me that this isn’t a big deal. We’ll be back soon anyway, right?

October 7th, 2022

About an hour before first pitch. How I yearn for the youthful optimism of “we’ll be back soon.” The Cardinals, to this point, have definitely not been back. This year feels different, however. We have two players who finished top 3 in MVP voting, with one of them (Paul Goldschmidt) winning it. The Phillies, on the other hand, barely squeaked into the playoffs. They only made it due to a magical run at the tail end of the season, but they haven’t had to face a team as good as us. Why am I so nervous? Dylan has told me he doesn’t even know why he bothered getting excited for the Phillies to make the playoffs. He fully expects to get stomped. I fully expect that he’s right.

October 8th, 2022

The Cardinals are packing their bags for Cancun. The Phillies are celebrating a series victory in our stadium, the first series win of three that will eventually propel them to a World Series berth. Why do I even bother?

Summer, 2017

I think I hate baseball. I quit playing before high school after riding the bench through middle school despite my consistent efforts to get playing time. I was relegated to being a glorified cheerleader. In eighth grade, however, I thought I had finally found my niche. I had decided I wanted to become a catcher. Catcher is by far the hardest position to play in baseball. You are directly involved in every single play, making sure the ball stays in front of you on every single pitch. This is an especially difficult role in middle school because the pitchers, for the most part, are not very good. They miss their spot, like, a lot. The other part of the equation is how physically taxing the position is. Catchers are the only players on the team who are forced to sit in a squatted position for half of the game. Nevertheless, I was a freak who was willing to put up with my teammates throwing a ball at me as hard as possible while squatting inches away from a metal bat that could easily break my fingers (or my skull) if I was set up even slightly out of position. I had somehow convinced my parents to drop 450 dollars on the gear to play under the promise made from my coaches that it was guaranteed to get me in the game. This promise was not kept. We had a kid join the team who had previously played select ball, and who also happened to be a catcher. He was one of two kids who started ahead of me, the other being the coach’s son. I only caught two innings all season, with those two innings coming in a game where the select ball kid couldn’t make it and the coaches’ kid wanted to pitch. The thing that irked me most is that both of them openly complained about hating playing catcher. Believe it or not, this is a rather bleak experience for an undersized 8th grader already saddled with pubescent insecurities and feelings of inadequacy.

This summer was also a rough time to be a Cardinals fan. We’re in the middle of a streak of not exactly being bad, but definitely not being good. We’re in baseball purgatory. Our offense had regressed to being league average at best. The Cardinals  defense, something that they historically prided themselves on, had morphed into a squad that was around the top of the league in errors. Our pitching staff, while not being bad, was highly frustrating to watch. All of our young players were wildly inconsistent with signs of them maximizing their potential being hard to come by. All of our veterans were either clearly past their prime or never really that good in the first place. They were, for lack of a better word, a scrappy group. It was hard to understand how they even remained remotely competitive. On paper, some of these squads should have been bottom dwellers. In practice, we were usually just passable. It was not, however, very fun baseball to watch.

The game is inherently unfair. The path to getting playing time at any level is unfair. The experience of rooting for a team is unfair. The Major Leagues themselves are unfair! Did you know that baseball is the only major North American sport without a salary cap? The New York Mets, who currently have a payroll of $308 million, play games against the Oakland Athletics, who have a payroll barely north of $63 million. The tagline of arguably the most famous book written about baseball, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, is “the art of winning an unfair game.” Baseball, however, isn’t just unfair in the ways I’ve previously listed. It’s also wildly unfair in the way fans treat players at the highest level.

Having a deep understanding of why a player is good or bad tends to make you deeply critical of the players on the field. I’ve grown a propensity to just blatantly stating that so-and-so sucks. My criticism usually never makes it into the real world, instead finding a home on Twitter. Some people, however, take the knowledge of why a player sucks and take it a bit further. 

April 5th, 2024

Kris Bryant, a player for the Colorado Rockies, sucks. He was once really good, as in MVP conversation good. Now he’s awful. He’s so beyond awful that he’s in conversations for the LEAST valuable player in the league. He is also making nearly two hundred million dollars to be in said conversation. In an interview after a game where he had been badly booed by his own fans, Bryant stated that he had been routinely receiving death threats for his performance on the field: “I’ve been through it all – death threats, kill yourself… all the craziness that this game will dish out. It’s just what I’ve been trying to talk to these young guys about. It takes courage to keep showing up. It’s going to make you a better person at the end of your career. It’s something that I’ll be able to teach my kids through adversity, how do you respond to it. And you just gotta keep going.”

While I understand booing a player for sucking for a team you deeply care about, death threats seem, ya know, a little extreme. The knowledge that fans routinely take their criticism this far forces me to do something that was once quite uncomfortable for me: acknowledge the human element of the game. These are people. They just happen to be people in a position to receive extreme amounts of criticism from people they will never meet in their lives. They rarely have the star power of true celebrities and instead are subject to the scrutiny of people who would seemingly give their own lives for the sake of their team’s success. Sports fans are deeply passionate people who really do not take kindly to someone who provides little value hogging up a roster spot on their beloved team. The anger and resentment I felt over not being able to play in 8th grade is nothing compared to the pressure of disappointing 40,000+ people who paid to see you, are relying on you for their happiness, and are more than willing to let you know if you aren’t meeting their standards.

Steve Jeltz was a bad baseball player. He’s a guy that managed to hang around in the majors for an extended period of time simply because he was passable at defense, but he couldn’t hit to save his life. In a video titled “How to score 10 runs in the first inning and lose,” sports writer Jon Bois puts things into perspective: Imagine there is a sliding scale of everybody to have played baseball at the high school level. Around the 95th percentile, you start to see guys who cracked a college roster and played in the lower levels of the minors. Most of these guys will still never sniff the major leagues. Guys who actually stand a chance are around the 99th percentile, but most of these guys will still sit in the upper levels of the minor leagues and never get a shot. Guys who make it to the majors and stick? You’re talking about the top 10% of that top 1%. Bois places Steve Jeltz a micrometer above that line. Being just above this line, however, opens Jeltz up to some of the most violent criticism that mankind is capable of. If you look at the big picture, you see a story of remarkable triumph. Millions of players gave everything they had and couldn’t sniff the position Steve Jeltz was in. Jeltz was, however, the worst player on the biggest stage. His play on the field was a product to be consumed. People don’t appreciate it when a product they are paying for appears to be of low quality. When Jeltz talks about his time in the major leagues, he still gets teary-eyed. It meant so much to him. To those looking on, he was a nuisance hogging up a roster spot worthy of asinine amounts of hate.

But this is Baseball. It has actors, antagonists, plot points, story arcs, acts, bittersweet conclusions, and unexpected twists. The story, however, is not written. The actors didn’t necessarily sign up for the critical eye they’ve all been placed under. Each player has their own story. Each team has their own story. Each season tells its own story.

October 27th, 2022

While seated in the nosebleeds of Busch Stadium with Dylan, three players on the Cardinals roster that day held my attention. Those three players are Nolan Arenado, Juan Yepez, and Ryan Helsley.

Nolan Arenado, Cardinals starting 3rd baseman. What a stud this guy is. At this point in time, Nolan is considered one of the premier talents in baseball. He would go on to finish 3rd in MVP voting. Nolan also has won a gold glove every single one of his last ten seasons, meaning that he’s been considered the best defensive player in his position in the league ever since he made the majors. He is truly unbelievable to watch. Despite being so damn good, he is also a subject to be pitied. You see, Nolan spent the first eight years of his career toiling in Colorado, by far the most dysfunctional franchise in baseball. For years he was one of the sole bright spots on that team. One of the greatest players the game has ever seen had trouble sniffing the playoffs. It got so bad he spent two years demanding out of Colorado because they downright refused to build a winning baseball team around him, so he got shipped to St. Louis. He’s chasing the one thing that’s always eluded him: a shot at the World Series. Today, he’s not going to get a single hit when he’s expected to do the heavy lifting on offense.

Juan Yepez is a player not unlike Steve Jeltz. He’s on the fringes of the major leagues and fighting to stay there. He is also tonight’s unlikely hero for the Cardinals. The big Venezuelan signed with Atlanta in 2014, one of many Latin American players who sign with American teams in the hopes of being able to provide for their families. They travel to a foreign land that speaks a tongue not native to their own, experiencing intense culture shock as the only skills that translate is an innate ability to beat the piss out of a baseball. 

Yepez, however, beat the odds and got a big league cup of coffee in 2022. This moment is one that is sadly rare for many players who get signed out of Latin American countries. They are signed for pennies on the dollar and are put in a position where they must dedicate their lives to baseball not for sport, but for survival. After being signed, Yepez bounced around towns in what is mostly flyover country with nothing but the urge to not have to be there anymore. Not being there anymore means he’s either on his way to playing at the highest level or granted the ability to be back with his family. 

I know family matters a lot to Juan Yepez because I’ve spoken with his father over Twitter. The pride he has for his son shows that this means as much to his family as it does to Juan himself. Back to the game. Yepez was slightly above average with the bat in his hands in the regular season and is now coming up to bat as a pinch hitter in the biggest moment of his career. The game is scoreless at this point, and one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the league with a fastball that can reach over 100 mph is who he will be squaring up against. It’s the seventh inning, meaning the game is nearing its conclusion. Off of his back foot, Yepez clobbers a ball over the left field fence. Yepez didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the biggest moment of his career as of today. Playoff baseball is just different. Instead of having 162 games to figure out who’s the best, playoff baseball (in this case) reduces the number of games down to just three. A home run here, especially one that gives the Cardinals the lead on a night where the bats have been otherwise lifeless, is quite literally a career-defining moment. This is the Juan Yepez moment. On a team stacked with star power, it’s the rookie who was more of an afterthought than anything in the regular season who comes through big for the Redbirds.

Tonight’s big loser, sadly, is Ryan Helsley. In baseball, there are stats called wins and losses given to whatever pitcher was in the game when the winning run was scored. Helsley was arguably the best closing pitcher in baseball in 2022. Tonight, he’s entering the game with a finger that is badly bruised, weakening his grip on the baseball. No stranger to high pressure and controversy, Helsley faced backlash in 2019 after saying he wasn’t a fan of the “chop” chant used at Atlanta Braves games. The chop chant is one where fans wave their arms in the motion of a tomahawk while yelling a characterized Native American chant. The chant is, for all intents and purposes, pretty racist. Ryan Helsley is a member of the Cherokee nation, and has a platform few Native Americans have attained in baseball. 

Helsley is mocked mercilessly for his comments, called a coward. He has voluntarily put a target on his back. He’s used not only to the pressures of baseball, but the the pressure that comes with being the center of a media cycle, even if only for a brief time. He is the perfect player to come into this game, kind of. Despite the mental fortitude that Helsley has displayed, his body, more specifically his finger, has not been able to keep up. Helsley was clearly not himself out there, throwing wildly in a way that was largely uncharacteristic for him. He threw multiple pitches that failed to even make it across home plate before spiking into the ground. We’ve seen him throw with pinpoint accuracy all season. Something is very clearly off. A hit batter here, a walk there, and all of a sudden, the Cardinals are in position to lose. For Helsley’s efforts both on and off the field, tonight his reward is his name next to the “L” in the boxscore, indicating that he is at fault for the Cardinals’ loss that night.

October 7th, 2022

About 20 minutes after the game is over. Dylan, my best friend who was more than aware of the story arcs and actors on his own team, looks over to me and says he’s sorry I had to watch that. I appreciate the bit of pity he shows me, having just watched my team collapse in the playoffs without winning a game for the 3rd consecutive year. One of the bittersweet endings in the story of baseball belonged to the Cardinals in 2022. Is it that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things? No, not really, but everyone loves a good story.

Peyton Vasquez is a student at Saint Louis University and a lifelong resident of St. Louis, Missouri.