Reasons to Hate Baseball by Molly Magestro

I knew it bothered him that I didn’t like watching or following or talking about baseball.  “Why didn’t that guy just tackle him?  This sport is for wimps,” I would say.  Or, “Imagine how useful that bat would be if he didn’t toss it away before running the bases.”  Or I would joke about the three hundred and sixty-two more games between the All-Star Break and the World Series.  Not one of them mattered to me.

“Couldn’t you at least pretend to care?  For me?” he asked.

“Sure I could.”  And because it was important to him, I did.  I watched televised games cuddled on the couch with him or we listened to them on the radio in the car.  And when I wasn’t with him, I made sure to at least check the score online and send him a message to let him know I was paying attention.

He thought that I had seen the light and no longer believed football was the only sport that mattered in October.  That I had had a genuine epiphany.  And I let him believe it, figuring it wouldn’t hurt anything and that I could come clean once his team won the pennant.

But then they didn’t; they lost game six of the league championship series on a Saturday night.  On Sunday afternoon, five minutes before kickoff, I told him the truth about my feelings for baseball.  Mine didn’t turn out to be the biggest revelation of the day, however.  My team won, remained undefeated, but I could hardly enjoy it at all.  Because while I had only been pretending to care about baseball, he had only been pretending to care about me.

Molly Magestro is a writer who teaches.  She lives in Wisconsin where she has, within the past year, become a political activist and a PhD.  She believes in happy endings, making wishes, and the Green Bay Packers.

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What Wasn’t Said by Molly Gillcrist Small Daisy Tied Around a Finger Like a Ring by Rich Ives Sad Day, Miss by Erin Castle [the fifth daughter] by J.A. Tyler