Emotional Equivalency V.1: Love & Baseball

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Maybe not my greatest hair day, but I’ve always like this photo for some reason.

One thing I’d like to do in my third season of writing Powder Blue Nostalgia is a couple of recurring series. Each one will be open-ended and tied together with a broad, shared theme. They won’t run continuously, but rather whenever I feel like returning to them.

I’m calling the first of them Emotional Equivalency. The idea behind this one is that we all experience a wide range of powerful emotions each day as we move through our lives, and it’s always a little startling to me how many of those emotions translate to baseball. Their scale and relevance is, of course, skewed when we encounter them as we cheer on our favorite teams. For anyone with the proper perspective, emotions in this context are hardly matters of life and death, but I don’t want to trivialize them either. And in this series, I want to compare my personal experiences with a given feeling on and off the baseball field.

My first choice is love, arguably the most powerful emotion of all. I’ve fallen in love twice in real life. In terms of baseball, I’m much freer and fickle with my affection. I’ve used the “L” word toward a lot of players in my life, but there are two recent MLB examples who mirror my real-world experiences, and I’m going to highlight them today.

Adalberto Mondesi, the son of former big leaguer Raul Mondesi, made his MLB debut in the 2015 World Series, becoming the first player to ever do so. He went 0-1, striking out in his only appearance as pinch hitter, but this did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of KC fans. They won the World Series that season, and they were a great team, but they didn’t have a true superstar. Mondesi appeared to be that guy, arriving to spearhead the next wave of Royal success. Kansas City was giddy.

I felt the same way when I met Julia. I had just moved back to Lawrence and got a job at a bookstore. She already worked there, and we started flirting immediately. The first time we hung out was at a Christmas party hosted by one of our co-workers. I was so nervous beforehand that I downed a couple Vicodin and a shot of vodka. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that, but it worked.

She agreed to let me take her out to dinner the following weekend. She wore a long red coat that was cooler than anything I owned, and I remember giving her shit for mixing ketchup and mayo to dip her fries in. We went back to my apartment after dinner. I only had one chair, but it didn’t matter. We sat together on the floor and talked until three in the morning.

We hit some bumps shortly after that, however. In recent years, I’ve grown used to being the one with baggage, but back then, it was her. She’d just gotten out of a relationship with an abusive piece of shit who’d done a number on her. She was scared, and she ended things abruptly.

This bump in our relationship correlates to the first two years of Mondesi’s career. He started 2016 in the minors, and was quickly suspended fifty games for PEDs. He claimed he mistakenly took the wrong cold medicine, and the Royals forgave and forgot, calling him up for 47 games, but he looked hopelessly overmatched at the plate. Not to be deterred, they forced it again to start the following season, putting Mondesi at second for 25 games before they pulled the cord, reluctantly admitting he still wasn’t ready.

The Royals had Whit Merrifield, a less-heralded player who was producing at a high level, but they weren’t prepared to give up on Mondesi. I’ve sometimes wondered what would have happened if I’d simply let Julia go all those years ago. I would have saved us both a great deal of heartache, but while I can’t speak for her, I’m not sure I would have been better for it. In any case, I certainly wasn’t prepared to make that sacrifice at the time. I poured my heart out in a letter, and she agreed to give us a second chance.

That was the beginning of our best time together. We said “I love you” for the first time a few months later, on the morning of her college graduation. Like a couple of dorks, we kept slipping away during the festivities that day to repeat it over and over out of earshot of everyone else.

For Mondesi, my "I love you” moment came in the 2018 season. That was his peak, even if he only played in 75 games. He started at second again and progressively pushed the veteran, Alcides Escobar, at shortstop, dazzling fans with his glove, and in one of those games, during the final homestand of the season against Cleveland, he drove one of his 14 home runs into the right field seats near where we were sitting, clinching a 2-1 win. The Royals were terrible that season, but that was a good way to end the year.

The next couple of seasons were up and down, not unlike my relationship with Julia. There were highlights, not the least of which were my two oldest sons, but there were a lot of struggles too. For Mondesi, most of them came in the form of injuries, which kept him from reaching his full potential. And even the one time he did manage to stay healthy, in the shortened 2020 Covid season, his performance was erratic. For the first two-thirds of that sixty-game season, he was one of the worst players in baseball, but he finished with such a flourish it was impossible for Royals to write him off.

My first marriage followed a similar pattern, but at a certain point I knew it had run its course. A lot of the blame belonged on me, but no matter what I did to make amends, we had reached the point of no return. The prospect of losing her destroyed me, but it was inevitable. When she finally served me divorce papers, I was heartbroken, but also a bit relieved, though I didn’t realize that at the time.

For Mondesi, the writing was on the wall in 2021. After starting the season on the IL, he came out strong, and I was at the K in June when he walloped a 507-foot blast to right against the Red Sox. It was a Bo Jackson-type of dinger, possibly the most impressive home run I’ve ever seen live, but by that point I was too cynical to get suckered in again. And I was right. He got hurt again shortly after that, and only played in 35 games. Fifteen games into 2022, he blew out his ACL, and the Royals traded him the following offseason for basically nothing.

I wasn’t sure I would ever fall in love again. It wasn’t that I was jaded. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic when it came to both women and baseball, but I was emotionally wrecked.* The idea of opening myself up to that kind of devastation again was worse than undesirable. It felt reckless and delusional. Then Stephanie and Bobby Witt Jr. came into my life.^

*Obviously, I wasn’t nearly as upset about Mondesi as I was about the end of my first marriage, but even if it weakens my analogy a bit, it was still very disappointing.

^The timelines don’t match up at all here, but bear with me.

I got on Tinder and dated a few girls after some time had passed, and it was fun, but I didn’t feel any sort of magical connection. At least, not until I saw Stephanie’s picture. The photo was from a Halloween party, and she was wearing a blue crayon dress and black stockings, and I was smitten immediately. We talked until the waitstaff pushed us out the door of the restaurant on our first date, and then we went back to her place and talked some more. She even had two chairs. Clearly, I was moving up in the world.

I felt the same kind of instant attraction, metaphorically speaking, when I saw Bobby Witt Jr. play for the first time in spring training. Witt had torn through the minors, and it was clear by the spring of 2022 that he was forcing the Royals’ hand. Of course, they were still clinging to the Mondesi dream, and they stupidly moved Witt to third, but even their questionable decision-making couldn’t get in Witt’s way. He collected his first hit on Opening Day with a game-winning double in the bottom of the eighth, and it was obvious the Royals had something special.

A few weeks after we met, Stephanie and I attended an art class on a Friday night. I should clarify— an art class with booze. I’m not much a of drinker, but we partook and painted the apple they offered as a model. Well, I tried to paint it. I’m not much of a painter either, and the alcohol didn’t help, and mine actually came out looking like a strawberry. Stephanie’s looked like an apple, but then again, she’s a good painter. And oh yeah, we might have gotten carried away and started painting each other’s faces. It was one of the most fun nights of my life.

Watching Witt play was the baseball equivalent of that. Obviously, he still has a long way to go before he’s in George Brett’s stratosphere, but he’s the closest thing Kansas City has had since. I only caught the tail end of Brett’s prime, but I was in on the ground floor with Witt, and it didn’t take me long to realize he was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of player. I didn’t hesitate to commit.

The same was true for Stephanie. Nine months after we met, we moved in together, and we just keep building on the awesomeness. We’ve been to Ren Fest and Comicon, and I dressed as the Doctor from Doctor Who at both. She wore a Medieval dress to the former,* and because she was pregnant with our son at the latter, she dressed as Spider-woman and took pics with the guy who actually writes the comic, recreating the iconic cover pose for the pregnant superhero.

*Did I mention I have a degree in Medieval history? The fact that we spent our first night together talking about things like Medieval Saxony and Old English might get us labeled as nerds, but it only proves we were meant for each other.

Witt, meanwhile, announced himself as a legitimate superstar with his breakthrough 30-30 season in 2023, the first in Royals history. He followed it up with a season for the ages in 2024, and if it had not been for Aaron Judge having an even better season for the ages, he would have cruised to his first AL MVP. But the best part wasn’t even his individual accolades, as impressive as they were. For the first two seasons of his career, he was one of the few bright spots on an awful team, but in 2024, he was the leader of a playoff team, and while he didn’t have the postseason he wanted, he did have two game-winning hits in the Wild Card round, leading the Royals to their first playoff series win in nine years.

That’s the most exciting thing about Bobby Witt Jr. As good as he is, he’s still only scratching the surface. Obviously, he can’t do it all himself. He needs help from the rest of the organization to win championships. But as long as he is playing in Kansas City, the Royals have the centerpiece they need to build a contender around.

I feel the same way about Stephanie in my life. We can talk anything from movies to philosophy, even if she tends to go on a lot longer than me.* She’s opened me up to new experiences, like standup comedy shows and even the ballet. We went to see Dracula at the ballet and it was actually really cool. And she’s reopened the door to old experiences I thought had passed me by. I no longer feel like I’m too old go to concerts because she’s given me tickets to Queens of the Stone Age and Cage the Elephant for my last two birthdays.

*Sorry, sweetheart, but you know it’s true.

We’ve traveled to each coast, and quite a few places in between, and I’ve got a feeling it won’t be long before we go beyond the borders of this country altogether. We bought our first house two years ago, and I’m a better husband and father now, mostly because we’re such a good team. She brings out the best in me, and I hope I reciprocate at least a little bit.

Where do we go from here? Well, for Witt and the Royals, that’s easy. I hope it leads to the World Series and parades. For me and Stephanie, that’s a little more difficult to pin down, if only because the possibilities seem endless. One thing I know for sure though, no matter where we go, as long as we’re together, it will be amazing.

I can’t wait to get there.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. What baseball players have captured your heart? And more importantly, did they break it? Share your stories in the comments.