It's my ball game and I'll cry if I want to
Yes, there’s crying in baseball
A towel covered his mouth as he looked up at the video tribute before he was announced in the Lakers starting lineup Wednesday night. But you could see that in the corner of Luka Dončić’s left eye, a tear was forming.
A dozen seconds later, the towel would cover his entire face. When he moved it, he kept his head down before he looked back at the video. This time, there was no hiding it; everyone could see the familiar frown worn by the emotionally overwhelmed as they try to dam a river of tears.
After nearly two minutes of watching the highlights of a life he once lived, the towel was drying his eyes. Dončić – back in Dallas for the first time since an inexplicable late-night trade sent him to Los Angeles 66 days ago – was crying.
Rōki Sasaki, the 23-year-old phenom signed out of Japan, exited his debut in America after recording just five outs two weeks ago. He surrendered a pair of runs on three hits and four walks. He threw just 32 of his 61 pitches for strikes.
Later that inning, the camera showed him standing at the railing on the top step of the Dodgers’ dugout, with red eyes that were filled with tears.
"Hope a vet pulled him aside and told him to man up,” former catcher Jonathan Lucroy wrote on social media. “No one has time for a kid crying on national TV in one of the biggest sports market[s] in the world.”
“I would have much rather see him do that upstairs,” pitcher CC Sabathia, who will enter the Baseball Hall of Fame later this summer, said. “There’s no problem showing emotion, but I want to see him do that in the locker room. I wouldn't want people on the other team to see him show that emotion if I was on the Dodgers.”
Nobody could blame Dončić for crying Wednesday night in Dallas. In the player empowerment era of the NBA, the 25-year-old superstar did not have designs on leaving. For six and a half years, he was the face of the franchise, a role and responsibility he embraced until he was sent away in a deal so shocking most assumed its reporting was a case of social media hacking.
In the opening minutes, the home crowd cheered Dončić’s every touch. When he stepped to the free-throw line, they chanted for the firing of the general manager who dealt him. Mavericks fans cheered his baskets and let out murmurs of disappointment over his turnovers as if nothing had changed.
When he exited the game with 90 seconds to play in the fourth quarter, the crowd rose to their feet again. Dončić exited after scoring 45 points in a 15-point Lakers victory.
He said he didn’t know how he managed to keep his emotions in check to perform so well, “because when I was watching that video, I was like, there's no way I'm playing this game. But all my teammates had my back. They were really supporting me."
Sports is a multi-billion dollar industry built on the foundation of the fans’ emotional attachment to games played by children. But only certain feelings are deemed acceptable.
Celebrate after a home run with too much pizzazz, dance in the end zone with too much vigor, or be too bragadocious after a slam dunk, and you may be met with violence from an aggrieved party. Because your perceived taunts have hurt their feelings, they may be entitled to attempt to injure you. That’s part of the game.
While throwing at the batter after allowing a home run has become a slight taboo in the modern age of baseball – just as any brawl that ensues will result in suspensions – it is an action and reaction that is grounded in the history of America’s pastime.
Take out your anger on an inanimate object in the dugout? David Ortiz obliterated a bullpen phone with a bat, Carlos Zambrano smashed up a Gatorade dispenser, or countless players who snapped a bat over their knee? We’ll make compilations of that.
“I worked with pitchers every day for over 15 years in professional baseball,” Lucroy wrote on social media. “The ones who succeeded were ones that handled failure with strength and resolve to be better the next time. They didn’t show sad emotion[s] and most certainly didn’t do it publicly. Outside of maybe throwing a glove or dropping an F bomb.
“Both of which I’ll take any day of the week over anything else. That at least shows me a determinate resolve to win and succeed.”
After the initial mayhem that followed Divock Origi scoring in the 87th minute to seal the 2019 Champions League Final, my older brother found me in the crowd at the bar, and we embraced. I realized then that he had burst into tears.
I have always been jealous of those tears.
Jealous that his emotions peaked, that what he felt in that moment manifested instantaneously in tears. Jealous that the realization Liverpool would win the European Cup triggered a reaction so great in him his body hit a state beyond heart-thumping excitement. Jealous that he got to experience that moment so perfectly.
There I was, forever playing the role of the younger brother, desperate to cling on to him for as long as possible and fighting to catch up. But I never did cry that day.
That most famous line in “A League of Their Own” always bothered me because there’s nothing but crying in baseball.
There’s crying when you win and crying when you lose. Tears from the players, from the coaches, and from the die-hards in the stands. Sometimes, even the netural party witnessing an athlete’s lifetime of hard work and sacrifice pay off becomes so taken by the moment that they too can’t stop their eyes from watering.
Seeing a dream realized fills our souls. And seeing another’s dream be dashed leaves our stomachs hollowed from a punch. Sports is guaranteed to always give us both.
It is generous, it is cruel, and we love it because of that.
We love it because the payoff after gambling with our emotional well-being is bigger than any prize worth winning. Because we know the depths of pain that come from heartbreak.
So we cry because it is the best of times. We cry because the best of times are over. And we cry, sometimes, because of what never came to be.
“Everybody saw me the way I reacted to that video,” Dončić said after the game. “I love these fans, I love this city, but it’s time to move on.”
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.