AMT on Baseball

This is a linguist-in-chief Anne-Michelle Tessier guest post. You may recall AMT normally writes on the topic of dogs, but she knows about a good many others, and today’s topic is baseball, and her long acquaintance. This is in contrast with Mark’s post last week, a decide more junior fan’s approach to the sport. It’s nice to have the contrast in this accidental series, which will be ending at two (unless someone else approaches me with a post about baseball [??] or I decide to write something myself about my hat with the wrong logo on it and being surprised that Mark kept turning the TV in the middle of the week). Anyway, AMT was very charmed by Mark’s novice fandom, but hers is of an elderstatesfan sort (like Mark’s extension cords). You should definitely read both posts!

The year I was born, the Toronto Blue Jays were a two year old baseball team. We grew up together. They spent the ‘80s getting their footing, learning to keep it together, growing stronger and more confident, showing bursts of early promise that fizzled (we do not discuss the 1985 American League championship series against Kansas City) but they were still kids. Me too. Around 1988 I played a season of all-girls T-ball, and I remember from pictures that summer that I looked very determined at the plate, on third base, throwing from left field. But over the years I mostly just played catch with my dad, placed my unwavering faith in the likes of Roberto Alomar, John Olerud, Mookie Wilson and Tom Henke, and on muggy dark July and August nights we would sit in our suburban backyard with the radio, listening to crickets, Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth.  

When the Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992, I remember my feeling of crystalline elation, almost a panicked level of happy. I honestly don’t think I’ve quite felt that emotion before or since. When they won again in 1993 I was perhaps more happy but less shocked, and when the following season was cancelled by a player’s strike I was very disappointed, but just possibly a little relieved? Because there wasn’t the pressure to three-peat now, it was out of our control … And really, that was my last real season of baseball fandom. Maybe it would have happened anyway. By 1995 we were proper teenagers, the Jays and I, and we were getting ready to move onto the next phases of our lives.

In August of this year, my father alerted me to the fact that the Jays were doing Real Good, maybe Go All the Way Good, and when I looked at the standings we had suddenly clinched the division, and our record meant we would have home field advantage in the post-season, and …

“We?!” my other half asked. “Who’s WE?” His incredulity was understandable. He met me in grad school; he didn’t know us when me and the Jays were children. (Due to circumstances beyond his control, he was a Baltimore Orioles fan in his youth, for which I will allow a certain romance but this is not the place or time.)

Funnily enough, grad school was one of the few other times in my life where I experienced a core sentiment of sports fandom: the pain of caring too much about things beyond one’s control. In the case of academic research, you might think it was entirely in my control: if you read enough, young AMT, and think and write well enough, then you will become a great linguist! But that really isn’t the way it works. As I am almost as old as the Jays now, comfortably middle-aged, I am happy to tell you that for a theoretician in my subfield I am competent enough to hold my (very luckily-acquired) tenured professorship, but I am by no means a rockstar or a genius [editor’s note: this is a filthy lie], and that’s fine. What really hurt especially as I was writing my dissertation, starting to attend conferences and engage in the big kids discourse, was recognizing that I was better at it than some but definitely worse than others and I couldn’t DO anything about that. I cared so much about linguistics, and I couldn’t be good enough at it. That fucking sucked.

Part of the cure for that pain was just getting older, because after many more years of absorbing ideas and watching theories wax and wane you eventually get a little quicker and wiser, at least about seeing how the details connect to the big picture. But I have come to believe that the main lesson to learn was caring the right amount: enough to get jobs and publications and tenure, but not so much that you can’t  handle the extent of your abilities and limitations. This is perhaps just more growing up, but it was certainly hard won.    

Back in the present day, August became September and then October and if you read Mark Sampsenblum’s piece last week (or you’ve been in Canada and not under a rock for the last few weeks), you already know that the Blue Jays made it back to the 2025 World Series, déjà vu all over again. I felt familiar pangs of anxiety, so I put up boundaries: I would only look at the score around the seventh inning; I would only let myself listen to the live broadcast starting in the ninth (albeit not much help when Game 3 went EIGHTEEN innings.) It felt important to declare these rules because once I start paying attention to a Jay game, I cannot help but become superstitious – a Tessier needs to be paying attention, or if they lose it might be our fault! My father is on East Coast time, and he needs to go to sleep! I must be vigilant!

A lifelong Dodgers fan of my acquaintance, who also wrote a dissertation in linguistics so he knows about academic self-criticism and mental gymnastics, scoffed at this voodoo. He knows I’m extremely impatient with the youth and their astrology horseshit, and he wanted to claim I was being hypocritical about irrational beliefs. But no, my use of sports superstitions represents the precise opposite -- because they are NOT about ways that my place in the universe define and controls me, but rather about ways that I CAN define and control my own universe. I allowed myself these fandom windows of caring too much, of being vulnerable to disappointment like a child again, but it was my adult choice to do so. I am satisfied to know that my heart was there right till Game 7, willing these strangers to victory along with a million others – but now it’s back here in 2025, and nobody else’s opinion of my starchart or my expertise about Maximum Entropy grammars is going to ruin my Sunday.

I’m so happy we all rode that ride together again.

I’m also happy there won’t be Jays baseball for another several months. I have research to do, and my heart couldn’t handle it.