Braff: Baseball as Oxygen—Another Year in Bloom

“Jim Leiland”? “Dwayne Kuiper”? The Unthinkable Thoughts of Joshua Braff…

I settle on the Yankees. 1459. The cool-kids table. Look at them. Tall, handsome, swaggering to the plate. They better win. I decide to root for them until they fail me. There he is. I hate him. There’s the other one. He looks so smug. Strut, strut, I’m a Yankee, I wear white with navy stripes and sleep with the hottest girls on the planet. Within an hour the two of them have nine hits combined and one might hit for the cycle.

I head to Dwayne Kuiper and my Giants. Brian Wilson, our closer, the one who looks like Big Foot will need a second Tommy John surgery. The Six Million Dollar Man didn’t have two Tommy John Surgeries. I am sad about this. Deeply. Truly. There is melancholy in my blood-tream, just like that, imbued in the marrow of my bones. Sort of depressed. Something’s been taken from me. What is it?

Without Brian Wilson the team will die in late August. I flick the channel to get away from the rankness of this truth. How can it be over in April? I find baseball pundits, five of them, Krucky, Harold, all talking about Brian Wilson of course.

“Big blow to morale, not sure if this means lights out for the Giants. 2011 was a horrendous offensive year, I don’t know, maybe if Posey gets hot. All that pitching… maybe they should make Lincecum the stopper.”

I turn the TV off.