I won’t hesitate to admit, Hoke, that the image of Lulo in that hat was almost too much.

“Get your goddamn feet off the coffee table,” I whispered aloud during my first read-through.

I could hear Wuck as well: “Put your fucking hat on straight! Christ!”

It was just too perfect; of all the articles of clothing in the world, Lulo chose what would soon become the national emblem of deceit, dishonor, and disloyalty. Months before Trump’s bungling of the coronavirus further polarized the left and right, before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor became familiar names in the mouths of an exasperated youth, Americans had come together in a shared disgust: Dodger and Yankee, liberal and conservative, Black and white, have and have not, all united beneath a single banner. “Fuck the Astros,” it read.

You said nothing about your own garb that afternoon, Hoke, but I have to believe there’s a good chance you were wearing your Dodger hat—brim forward, forthright, your allegiances plain as day. With or without it, I can see you in that office, in good faith, ready to believe the best of everyone, trying your own best to navigate the high road with tenderness and humility, trying to do what you thought was right. I see the one across from you as well, beneath his Astros cap, this supposed fellow believer and fellow shepherd of men; I see him working tirelessly behind your back, lying to your face again and again, manipulating you, besting you in a treacherous game you didn’t know you were playing much less losing.

Yes. Even when we return to 2018, we return to 2017.

October 29, 2017.

I couldn’t help myself. I knew watching would make me sick to my stomach, but I watched anyway.

With two outs in the fifth inning and the count 1-2 to Bregman, on the heels of a looping curveball up and in for a called strike, Kershaw throws his pitch: an arm-side fastball to the corner. When he dots that pitch as he did in the fifth inning to Bregman that night—in that count, in that sequence—he gets strike-three looking. He just does. For twelve years I’ve watched him—even as the fastball velocity has diminished from 97 to 89—and for twelve years that pitch nets an out. I mean, these are not the rantings of a zealot; he’s inarguably a first-ballot hall of famer and arguably the best pitcher of his generation. When he dots that pitch, he gets takes for strike three. That’s just how it goes. Pundits like to point to how the Astros never swung and missed against any of Kershaw’s fifty-one hall-of-fame breaking balls that night, but that single fastball is all the proof I need.

<quote-01>Bregman was swinging before the ball left our guy’s hand. A foul.<quote-01>

Of course, Bregman—piece of shit that he is—is no Lulo, and in hindsight you can see the “holy shit” in his face, the recognition that cheating has just kept him in the at bat. Kershaw—legendary competitor that he is—also does his best to stifle a reaction, but it’s there, just beneath the surface of his seemingly unshaken expression: “How on earth?”

(If you remember correctly, Abram, “Daddy’s Kershaw” ended up walking Bregman. Your Maeda gave up a homerun to Altuve the next batter. It was a real bummer, <quote-02>kiddo<quote-02>.)

In a Tom Verducci interview from last January, Kersh almost allows himself some slack in the noose before plunging from the gallows once more: “the Astros pitcher was using multiple signs almost immediately,” he remembers. “<quote-03>I should have known<quote-03>.”

I feel awful for Kershaw every time I remember that night in Houston. How can he not beat himself up? I pray there’s baseball redemption out there for him somewhere, a sweet moment to temper the agony of October 2017.

<quote-04>I’m more certain you’ll get yours, Hoke<quote-04>. Still, I’m praying.

Christ, what better background noise for a tale of slowly unfolding heartbreak than the sounds of Dodger Baseball in October these past seven years of our collective fandom?

When every baseball season of your adult life has ended in heartbreak, each glorious, real-time peak casts a quick shadow: “<quote-05>How will we blow it this year?<quote-05>”

As you both intimately know, last year we were as well equipped as ever to hoist the Commissioner’s Trophy at October’s end. Unfortunately, you can say that about every Dodgers team since last we strolled the grounds at New Harmony Ranch together.

<quote-06>Shall we review the lowlights?<quote-06> 

2019, NLDS Game Five: Kershaw flounders in inexplicable relief role, Will Smith’s flyball dies on the warning track, Joe Kelly can’t buy an out—season over.

2018, World Series Game Four: Madson and Jansen give up gut-punch dingers after what would have been Puig’s crowning Dodger moment. Red Sox score five in the ninth—next day, season over.

2017, World Series Game Five: After Altuve’s dinger, Murph can no longer bear to watch the game in front of his wife, mother, and newborn son; goes downstairs; has existential crisis; <quote-07>realizes how important The Dodger Thread is to him<quote-07>; licks wounds—three days later, season over.

2016, NLCS Game One: Joe Blanton throws the same cement-mixer slider 0-2 that Miguel Montero obliterated for a foul ball 0-1. Montero hits a grand slam. Blanton also loses Game Five in relief—two days later, season over.

2015, NLDS Game Five: Greinke doesn’t cover third base; Daniel Murphy comes home on a sacrifice fly and homers two innings later—season over.

2014, NLDS Game One: Dodgers score nine, but Kershaw has the worst start of his career; the offense flounders thereafter—four days later, season over.

2013, NLCS Game Six: six games after Joe Kelly breaks the rib of an impossibly hot Hanley Ramirez in the first inning of Game One, Kershaw has the worst start of his career until the above-mentioned game against these same Cardinals—season over. 

Is this what the Greeks called catharsis?

I could list the highlights more readily, I’m sure you both realize. Each season above has them in spades. That’s just not where I am tonight.

What do you have in store for us, 2020? Hopefully not more of what happened earlier tonight: Jansen surrendering six straight hits before being removed from the bottom of the ninth—<quote-08>against the Astros no less<quote-08>. As I mentioned on the Dodger Thread, the game really tugged at my playoff PTSD. That ninth inning felt like just the kind of meltdown to epitomize a postseason. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 2017, was it?

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about 2017 lately, even before reading your latest effort, Hoke. Because of what you and Sarah have been up to these past few days, Wuck—and because news about Baby Webber has been in long demand and short supply—I’ve been remembering more vividly that period of time from my own life: those last, blissfully lazy days of Kristen’s pregnancy as well as those first clueless and bleary weeks of Grammar’s life at home. What a contrast. Probably the womb is pretty sweet compared to those first days of life, the squeezing and prodding and pricking, the terrible brightness, all those unconscious whims suddenly rendered desperate necessities. It’s no wonder some babies prefer the music of a muffled heartbeat on their <quote-09>sound machines<quote-09> to crashing waves. Grammar would often get hiccups in utero. <quote-10>Nothing carried him off to sleep more soundly in the first weeks of his life than a good bout of hiccups<quote-10>.

We were watching an episode of Sesame Street before bed the last time he got them. He begged me to make them go away. “They’re too—they’re too warm!” he yelped. Whenever he can’t express why he doesn’t like something, he defaults to temperature. When did they lose their soporific effect on him, I wonder. Anyway, a sip of cold water did the trick.

Sometimes it’s not so simple.

For me, two simple things go a long way toward improving my mood as the day draws to a close: the afterglow of a Dodger victory and the promise of a full night’s sleep. During baseball season—which mostly coincides with summer—I have a better than 60 percent chance at each. <quote-11>There’s nothing I enjoy so much as watching the Condensed Game highlights on my phone before tucking into eight vouchsafed hours of sleep<quote-11>. Maybe it’s foolish to place any fraction of my mood in the hands of something I can’t at all control. My 2017 existential crisis centered on just that, weighing the hopeless anguish of almost certain defeat each year against the potential benefits. Maybe it’s foolish to think I control anything. 

Still, I’m pretty happy if I can get just one of the two. I’ll take it, at least. Neither? It happens. Fortunately, it’s baseball; there’s always tomorrow. And if the boys don’t pull one out, I can always do my best to hit the hay early, right?

Right?

Enter the 1 and 16 stretch from August and September of 2017.

<quote-12>Do you two remember those three unspeakable weeks from the end of summer that year?<quote-12> In the grand scheme of things, the skid was next to meaningless. On August 25th of that year (my tenth wedding anniversary; Kristen and I went out to dinner for the first time since Grammar was born; the players were wearing those jerseys with their nicknames on the back; the <quote-13>Wild Horse<quote-13> hit a dinger), the Dodgers were an incredible 91-36, twenty-one games up on the Rockies. By slump’s end they were still up nine with only eighteen left to play. There was never much concern that they’d relinquish their lead in the division, much less the best record in baseball, but those for me were seventeen increasingly miserable days and nights.

Obviously, we weren’t getting much regular sleep with a newborn in the en suite bassinet, but I’d also <quote-14>begun my full-time position in Orange<quote-14> just the week before. My first day of classes was an off day for the Dodgers, just two days into the losing streak. But even back-to-back losses was news for that team; they hadn’t lost two straight games in over a month before that and only nine times all season. This was the summer, remember, when Tom first photoshopped the image of Marvel’s Juggernaut clad in Dodger blue armor. Even so, on that first Monday morning—back-to-back sections of English 101 to christen—not a single anxious nerve existed in my body for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team on pace to tie the all-time Major League Baseball record for wins in a season. Wait. Did I just say “morning?”

I did.

A full-time professor at the two-year college level enjoys seemingly countless benefits over his part-time colleagues: more than double the pay for a reduced teaching load, health benefits for the whole family, a genuine sense of security and belonging, just to name a few. But scheduling, for full and part-timers alike, happens nearly a year before each semester begins. As a long-tenured part-timer on my previous campuses, I’d been able to more or less handpick my schedule. As such, I usually began my workday around two in the afternoon; a late class once a week also meant I was home by eight most nights. Sure, I was treated like a second-class citizen, but by scaling the second-class ladder, I’d at least earned the right to request my preferred hours.

When I was hired in April of 2017, however, scheduling for that upcoming fall semester had been completed for months; my department chair had likely set aside a standard slate of classes at ordinarily desirable times when the district first flew the position. A few weeks after I officially accepted the job—I’d already informally accepted when another school made an aggressive push to steal me away—she, toward the end of an email about office keys, attached my schedule as an afterthought, “Oh, I almost forgot,” in nature. “This is a fine schedule,” she almost certainly figured. “Any adult would be happy to have it.” 

I sent her the following e-mail almost immediately:

_{Dear Elizabeth,}

_{‍‍Thanks for the warm welcome! I too am looking forward to getting both situated and started.}

_{‍First things first, I am definitely interested in the available section of N60. Sign me up!}

_{‍As for the remainder of my schedule, I am hopeful there remains some wiggle room with those early morning classes. I do understand that scheduling is likely at an advanced stage, but I’m usually an early afternoon-to-evening guy. Of course, I don’t want to disrupt any time-honored “hazing of the new hire” that might come along with these early-bird slots, but if two open sections of 101 exist elsewhere in the day, I am officially interested. Again, I don’t intend to die on this hill, but some dawn-lit, bleary-eyed, first-weeks-of-September version of me would never forgive my present self if I didn’t at least inquire.}

_{‍I’ll look forward to your reply.}

_{‍Best, FM}

Her response the next day made it clear that it was my right as a full-time professor to refuse the schedule and force her to move around adjuncts to suit my preferences. Some of them might lose classes altogether as a result, she remarked, but such is the part-timer’s existence. I remembered too vividly the frustration of losing a course I’d already budgeted for, of arriving to a classroom only to find that the section had been canceled, the students funneled to an unpopular full-timer who “needed to make load.” I sent her a reply I clearly didn’t agonize over; unlike the above cited paragraphs, it is not preserved in some miscellaneous folder on my desktop. I’m certain I used the phrase “no worries.” To be fair, I did not actively worry. With a baby on the way, I was so relieved to have secured a full-time gig, I would have happily taught any class at any hour. I had no issue paying dues with the promise of a payoff.

So to work I went—each day in the dark. Make no mistake, I’m well acquainted with the five and six o’clock hours, but usually at the close of my day, not the beginning. Thus began a zombielike existence of driving and eating and teaching and grading and driving and eating and sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking and driving once more. My two joys Monday through Thursday were the moment I returned home to see my little guy’s chubby face and watching the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers.

That chubby face held up its end of the bargain, but the Dodgers did not. 

Each night during that streak I retired with the promise of—at best—five or six broken hours of sleep, enveloped in the exasperating, nearly surreal energy of yet another loss.

I recall a rare moment of frank honesty with a near stranger that September, a long-tenured English department colleague, herself a fellow Dodger fan and commuter.

“How’s it going?” she asked gaily. New hires often walk on air their first semester, their lives so immediately and drastically improved.

“Great!” I replied at first.

“Oh yeah?” she beamed, eager perhaps for some feel-good story of tenure-track living.

And I went, “Well…”

And she went, “Dodgers?”

And I went, “Yeah. And these morning classes.”

And she went, “Yeah.”

And I—utterly drained—blurted, “I feel like what I imagine a drug-enthralled sex worker feels like: always on the move, always out of it, reaping no joy from a thing that once brought me immense joy.”

She laughed, God bless her, instead of taking offense. 

“Take sleeping in and Dodger victories away from me, Bert, and you take away everything else that’s good and beautiful too.”

“I get it,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“We’ll get ‘em tonight,” she said.

That was Monday, September 11th, ten straight losses under our belts.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t.

Because of a rain delay, the game really didn’t get going until almost eleven, the hour at which I tried to be in bed each night. I watched the first few innings on my phone in the dark, but when the Dodgers went down four in the third inning, I let exhaustion take me. <quote-15>I kept having dreams<quote-15> of the Dodgers taking the lead in improbable ways, of fan interference and three-base-errors. I remember waking repeatedly and checking the score. Before falling truly asleep for the night, I saw in the box score that Puig had homered to put us up 5-4 in the fifth. I was upset to be missing it but happy we’d taken the lead. When I woke to my 5:20 alarm, the Dodgers had lost their eleventh in a row—<quote-16>the all-time Los Angeles record<quote-16>.

Yet again I stumbled through the dark to the bathroom and showered with the lights off in silence. Usually I’d put on sports talk radio, but I’d abandoned it seven or so losses into the streak—the every-hour-on-the-hour score reports unbearable by then. Quietly I dressed and descended the stairs, disarmed and reset the alarm, grabbed something caffeinated from the fridge, and made my way down Euclid with the rest of the working world. If I beat the worst of the traffic, I’d grab a bagel near school—either <quote-17>honey walnut with cinnamon raisin cream cheese or strawberry with strawberry cream cheese or plain with butter and jam<quote-17>—if not, <quote-18>a Snickers bar<quote-18> from the second-floor vending machine in the humanities building. I remember almost nothing from those 8:00 a.m. classes that semester. Usually by the end of that time slot I’d receive a text from Kristen with a photo of Grammar. That and an <quote-19>unhealthy lunch<quote-19>—what the fuck did I care, I was exhausted—would keep me going until it was time to hop back in the car and <quote-20>endure traffic<quote-20> once more.

Don’t get me wrong; I have many wonderful memories from those first months of Grammar’s life. This letter just isn’t about them. For whatever it’s worth, this is where my mind first goes when I reflect upon September 2017, when I was living the same portion of my life that you, Wuck, have just embarked upon.

Do you guys ever listen to music on YouTube and see comments like “The Bad News Bears brought me here,” or “Seinfeld brought me here”? Well, Kenley Jansen brought me here. <quote-21>Fuck you, Kenley<quote-21>.

Speaking of wonderful memories, I trust you both remember the tale of my late-night walk through the streets of Upland with Grammar in tow. I realize now all the more why the memory is so cherished. Yes, I was reveling in a Dodgers playoff-victory; yes, I was giddy at the prospect of sleeping in on a Tuesday morning—exactly four weeks removed from that record-setting eleventh loss in a row—but six of those sixteen losses had come at the hands of the Diamondbacks, the team we’d just vanquished in three straight games. I was exorcizing the demons of that streak on our walk, for sure. In a lot of ways, that midnight stroll was like a cosmic respite, a breather gifted to me by the universe even while half of Southern California burned around me. It felt like genuine redemption, like sins washed clean in the River Jordan—or the Avenue Second.

The feeling, alas, was short-lived for Grammar’s new daddy.

Here’s hoping no snakes lie in the grass for yours, sweet Ben.