Losing It

Walls literally pancaked. He seemed for one second to lose two dimensions. He actually went splat. He was a frozen cartoon character splayed out and sustained by the illusion that his body hadn't noticed gravity yet. Then his seemingly boneless flesh (his skeleton was surely pulverized by the blow) drooled down the wall and he collected in a little puddle at the ground.

Wall 1, Walls 0.

The center fielder reached him first, and reached into the puddle of too, too sullied flesh and pulled out -- Eureka! -- the ball. Lee Walls had held on, though knocked unconscious. I'm no expert, but you can have your Willie Mays running away from home plate, grabbing the Wertz boomer and whirling and throwing and all those other great snatches that seem to defy probability. I'll take lanky Lee Walls knocking himself unconscious in a meaningless game for a team that paid him peanuts. He was my first hero, and all these years and games later, I remember.

But the point of this is metaphorical. I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was watching was in microcosm the reality of baseball. You watch, you love, you identify, you marvel, you believe, then SPLAT the guy hits the wall (of reality? of probability? of the limits of talent and strength?) and it all collapses on the ground. That is the pain of baseball. It almost always smashes you up. I love the Bart Giamatti quote, which seems to me to be the only true expression of this reality: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

Yes, it does. Always, in some way or other, if you're one of the 28 teams that don't get the incredible run of breaks and calls and bounces and clutch jobs by no-names who couldn't get the hit or strike that guy out again in a thousand years, and end up in the World Series.

As Nats fans are now discovering, baseball pain is different than football pain, as of course baseball is different than football. Yes, I remember Mel Gray's phantom catch in the St. Louis end zone 30-odd years ago and how the ache of that lasted -- why, it must have lasted at least until the following Sunday! Because football is so spectacular and overwrought and explosive and so weekly, you get a few days of recovery and then you're suckered into the buildup for next Sunday. Baseball just goes on and on and on and on, grinding you to nothingness.

I didn't know it then, but Walls was preparing me for the years of disappointments that baseball would bring. There would never be a moment out of baseball like the second quarter of Doug Williams's great Super Bowl, where he filled the air with intercontinental footballs and each seemed to rainbow down perfectly onto its target in the hands of a Redskins receiver. Or Jermaine Lewis's kickoff runback that put an icicle into the Giants collective heart as the Gothams had just drawn a little too close to the Ravens, and we knew in both cases: This baby is done.

Baseball is just a toothache. It's a headache that won't dance to the music of Tylenol. It hurts and hurts and hurts. I am something of an expert on baseball hurt. I stayed with the feckless, cheap-o Cubs for years, though thank God I was in the Army and crawling through New Jersey marshes during the big collapse of '69. That would have killed me. I happened to get out of the Army on the first day of the 1970 World Series, and so I watched the Orioles do their thing and was in their thrall just in time -- perfect timing! -- for the big decline. Oh, there were spurts, none of them worth the pain. I remember the last game of the '79 World Series, when Pittsburgh came back from being down, three games to one, to dust off the Birds. I remember being stuck in traffic. I remember being so depressed I could hardly breathe or talk, and there was no big Sunday game to seduce me from the pain. I remember the '83 series, and wish I could say it was swell. As baseball, it was pretty awful: The Birds just wrapped Philly in a large wet blanket of great pitching and squashed them to nothingness in five games, without a single memorable play. Aghhh.

So now I speak to Nationals fans. What can I do to help you? How can you profit from everything I've been through? And there is an answer. There is one skill that, mastered, can relieve the anguish. You think I'm about to say patience? Nope. What about faith? Prayer? Am I wearing a collar? What about optimism? What am I, your insurance salesman? All those good things that so many people tell you to do to weather life's little storms. Positive attitude, self-belief, teamwork, inspiration.

Please, we're adults here. We all know: In the real world, that stuff never works.

No. Here's what will help: You must learn to hate.

Hate is way underrated. Many people seem to be against it. Okay, I grant you, it causes murder, violence, war, poverty, suicide bombings -- bad, bad, bad, I hear you. But let's look at the positive side of hate.