In my defense, I wasn’t thinking. This is never an actual good defense for anything, but at least in this case, there was only one victim, and it was me. Regardless of the circumstances, I’m not a pregame guy. Pregame shows load up on the kind of stuff that doesn’t interest me, the tears-of-joy human interest stories, the reductive and authoritative-sounding analysis, the forced sportsdesk banter. It’s fine if you like these things. Clearly people like these things. They’re not for me. So I set my alarm for 5:00 PM PT, climbed into the couch with my notebook, and flipped on the television. There were lots of flags. Flags superimposed on the field, flags held solemnly by team captains, anthems and colors and pride. I should have set the alarm for 5:20 and made the kid play piano for a bit. I appreciate how much joy people have found in this tournament, and I don’t want to take that away from them. I really don’t, so I tend to keep my mouth shut. But those 20 minutes were enough to set my teeth on edge, and I spent the first couple of innings trying to scratch that unidentifiable itch, figure out and break down exactly what was bothering me that didn’t seem to bother anyone else. What made it different that there were countries on the uniforms instead of cities? Teams are artificial constructs in either case, assembled by billionaires or boundaries. It’s all still rooting for laundry. But in that sense, nationalism was the original rooting for laundry, and it’s still the only form of dying for it. To accuse anyone of sticking to sports, of eschewing politics, when it comes to the WBC would be madness even if it weren’t a team representing a country that had bombed the other country less than a month ago. Nations are inherently political constructs, people literally separated by invisible borders that everyone agrees on, or agrees to agree on or else get shot. The difference is that when my local baseball team fails to represent me, it’s because they’ve refused to reinvest their postseason earnings into next year’s payroll, whereas with my country, it’s more of a Henry David Thoreau situation. With teams, you get to choose who you want to be a part of. With countries, especially one particular country at the moment, a key part of their identity is about not letting people join in. I wish I could enjoy the one side of the equation, the celebration of culture and togetherness, and ignore the other half, the war and the exclusion. Lots of people can. Baseball and wartime have always co-existed. It’s usually offered as a respite, rather than simply another layer of metaphor. The flags are just flags.
