The Empire Strikes Out

The World Baseball Classic is over, and in baseball, as in everything else, the United States remains the world leader in having a bad time. The international tournament provided a fertile field for winking nationalisms, and we sunk to the occasion with aplomb. Venezuela won it all with the dancing joy of a street festival; the Italians kissed each other with an exuberance usually reserved for Olive Garden ads pushing “authentic Tuscan” a little too hard. The U.S. partied like it was Sept. 12, 2001. We await the World Cup with shock and awe.

While everyone else seemed happy to play a fun series of standalone games, Team America played the WBC as if George Carlin’s routine about baseball and football was about replacing the national pastime with football’s war-in-the-trenches mindset. No more feminized playing in a park and yearning to be safe at home. Like “the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz,” we must shell opposing pitching and rain bombs out of the outfield’s reach, because everything is a peripheral front in a war we’re losing. Why should Paul Skenes celebrate making millions of dollars as an ace pitcher when he might have become a fighter ace? Every exquisite high heater delivered right where the catcher wants it can take a dim and distant second to a joint-directed attack munition lasering in on a school.

Besides Bryce Harper celebrating a game-tying homer by accidentally first pointing at an ad on his sleeve instead of the American flag, the best in-game image of militant magic happening came from Cal Raleigh — baseball’s answer to “What if a Muppet could play catcher and hit over 50 home runs?” — engaging in enough performative aggro behavior that his Cuban Mexican regular-season teammate told the press that he could “shove it straight up his ass.” For a similar image in the clubhouse, turn to Navy SEAL and alleged Bin Laden double-tapper Robert O’Neill taking a break from his imaginative homophobia, cynical cash-ins and worm-brained conspiracism to wear a “front toward enemy” shirt and get into the weeds about what the sniper said about the downed helicopter that night in Abbottabad. 

Sports and nationalism have always played with each other, of course. Since the Second World War, every game has begun with the singing of the national anthem, and it will continue until we finally win the thing. The flag is now almost always borne by a military color guard, whose fellow men at arms will usually appear later on the Jumbotron, wearing battle dress uniforms and enjoying some comped seats in Section TBD. It’s game-to-game whether the players have camouflage on their ball caps and whether a troop and a troop family are reunited on the field. After 9/11, we added “God Bless America” to the seventh-inning stretch, and if we are attacked again, we will have to invent another patriotic song and traditional game-break to accommodate it. At the rate we’re currently making enemies, baseball in 2035 will be an American Legion singalong where baseball breaks out now and again to let you rest the lump in your throat. We’ll have to use taxpayer dollars to do it, but we can expand all the outfields: left field, center field, right field and elysian field, where we keep all the headstones. Any ball that strikes the honored dead is ruled a double.

As with the rest of America’s 21st century permanent 9/12 oorah footing, we are simultaneously always preparing for it and yet never ready — like having the world’s most powerful army with enough ammo for, gosh, the next couple weeks, give or take. For one thing, we have not reconciled the exigencies of hosting an international competition requiring lots of nonwhite foreigners to move freely about the United States with our government’s need to showcase the Department of Homeland Security terrorizing them. We definitely don’t know what to do with loss in a competition where the other team doesn’t become the enemy when they take the field but before their plane even lands. Like saying, “You can’t quit, you’re fired,” our leaders have responded to making ourselves a pariah state by anathematizing all others, exculpating their extremism as existentially necessary. 

It’s a frame of mind that shifts the concept of loss from possibility to fatality, because it needs to. The transformation of “everything” into a continuation of war by other means makes sense in terms of Trumpism’s libidinal equation of masculinity to violence, the paranoid urge to create existential threats to be both terrified of and effortlessly triumphant over, and the constant creation of pretexts for — and illusions of — action. Another part is plainer and more embarrassing: If you just got done losing a trade war you chose and you’re already in the middle of losing a Middle East war you chose, you need to contrive a lot more smaller wars to win and hope that a mass of inconsequential victories papers over the hole you’re burning in the global economy.

Bringing up politics during a sporting contest and bumming people out is a noble tradition that belongs to nature’s killjoys, college students, who pair being often irritatingly right with being completely powerless. Most of the time, their Debbie Downerism presents a sincere wish that sports themselves be more just on their own terms. (Pushing for more Black leadership is both about social justice and about fans not wanting to see their teams blind themselves to tranches of talent on the vibes-based inefficiency of racism.) In the right hands, with a World Baseball Classic or a World Cup or even a Eurovision, politics offer an enriching pretext for coming up with credible-sounding hokum about one’s rooting interests. It takes a personal choice about allegiance and gives it a quick varnish of something that looks like moral purpose. Paired with the arsenal of the Department of War, this impulse becomes joyless and terrifying.

It is one thing to root against England because of some vague allusion to the War of 1812; it is quite another to reframe a rematch as the start of the War of 2026. Beyond the eternal night of the 9/12 mentality — trapped for decades performing our masculine response to a trauma that we cleave to our bosoms like Cleopatra holding an asp — thinking of sports in these terms is just an exhausting bummer, dull and tired, simpleminded and invariably hateful. In the hands of the Trump administration and its relentless conservative media-grievance engine, it poisons every joke, curdles every half-sincere boast and profanes every high five. No one enjoys it, including the people who insist on injecting martial flavor into every game. Every victory becomes an unsatisfying simulation of the thing they’d rather be doing, which is actually killing the people from the country they defeated on the field.