How I Lost a Religion

Very soon I will be going to a Red Sox game with my son and a friend and his son. We will sit in the shadow of the Green Monster, cheer and boo, eat Fenway franks and sing “Sweet Caroline” and otherwise perform the rituals of fandom. And afterward I will feel guilty because the Red Sox, the obsession of my first two decades of conscious life, no longer mean what they once meant to me and don’t mean much at all to my kids.

One of the great challenges of the 21st century is transmission — passing along beliefs and practices and traditions (not to mention human life itself) in the dissolving conditions created by scrolling and streaming and artificial intelligence. Our parental grade is incomplete, but I like to think that my wife and I are doing OK at this across certain dimensions — religious practice, novel-reading, historical arcana, the cinematic classics of the 1980s and 1990s.

But sports fandom is a place where I’m the failure, the weak link in the chain of intergenerational transmission, the Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer watching his kids grow up without much grounding in the faith.

I became a Red Sox fan in 1986, at six years old, following the team on its march to an American League pennant. It was a maternal and New England inheritance to which my father, a Los Angeles native and Dodgers fan, had converted. At a late hour on Oct. 25, he and my mother woke me up — I had been sent to bed after the seventh inning — to watch, they said, the first Red Sox world championship in 68 years. Three hits, one Bob Stanley wild pitch and one Bill Buckner error behind first base later, the game was lost and my destiny was sealed.

Thereafter, baseball ran like a river through my childhood: box scores in the morning paper, TV games on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons, radio broadcasts in my bedroom and on long car rides, historical statistics piled on historical statistics, Roger Angell essay collections on my shelves.

If baseball was the obsession, the place where I could list every World Series winner or narrate entire games (Bucky Dent, Carlton Fisk) I’d never seen, other fandoms were added naturally: the New England Patriots in their dreadful years, the UConn Huskies in their 1990s ascent. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t much of an athlete, that I stopped playing baseball in high school, that I had friends who held jock culture in contempt. I experienced the seasons through my sports teams, connected to American culture and history through them, relied on them in forging social bonds and believed in them as a unique sphere of excellence, poetry and drama.

I believe in sports that way still. But it’s an abstract belief, because I don’t consistently watch or root or identify. And while this retreat from fandom is connected to specific aspects of my professional life, my wife’s preferences (she is, let’s say, extremely bored by baseball) and the kind of family schedule we’ve set up, there are also some general lessons from my experience about how traditions fade.

The first lesson is that eccentricities and distinctives really matter. The intensity of my fandom turned out to be bound to a very specific conception of what my teams represented. In both experience and family tradition, they were the underdogs, the tragic heroes, the strivers after unrequited dreams. So when they became not just winners but consistent winners, even Yankees-levels winners — the Red Sox adding three more titles since they broke their long drought in 2004, the Patriots becoming the N.F.L.’s most hated dynasty — I didn’t relate to them in the same spirit anymore.

Here I very clearly deceived myself. Before and just after the Red Sox finally broke their curse I scoffed at the argument that something profound was being lost, insisting that all I wanted was to be a normal baseball fan, no longer haunted by Buckner and all the other ghosts. I was like the religious liberalizers in the 1960s and 1970s insisting that all they wanted was a church more in step with the times, only to find that the more normal, modern, mainstream version of my faith didn’t have the same binding power as the weirder and more archaic version. (And yes, I have contemplated converting to Mets fandom for the suffering — but the memory of 1986 is hard to overcome.)

The second lesson is that cultural transmission depends on leisure and constructive boredom. Following sports is a passive entertainment relative to reading novels or practicing the piano, but it still requires long stretches of unclaimed and undistracted time. And under current conditions, that time is claimed from one side by the creep of meritocratic overscheduling and from the other by machines of entertainment and distraction, the infinite content available on every device and screen.

Moreover, the entertainment isn’t just infinite; it’s also guaranteed. This is something I notice with my kids: If we let them watch TV on a weekend afternoon, the movies that stream on Amazon or Disney+ have a certain dramatic payoff in a way that the average professional sports game does not. The peaks of baseball and football are much higher than the movie you’ve seen four times before — the game is live, it’s real, anything can happen — but the fandom of my youth was built on the nuances of a quotidian 5-2 result in baseball or a 34-7 football blowout. The rhythm of a very ordinary game can still hold you if you are already committed, but in competition with every movie ever made the commitment itself feels less natural and more difficult to forge.

The third lesson is that traditions need material and chronological anchors. My first anchor as a baseball fan was the sports section, the morning newsprint bearing the prior night’s results in narrative and box-score forms, and then later the highlight reels on “SportsCenter” and “Baseball Tonight.” All of those things are of course available today, but they are almost too available — lost in the stream, disconnected from any particular ritual or schedule.

If you can read about last night’s game at any time during the workday, maybe you don’t read about it at all. If the highlights are always there on YouTube rather than only at a 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. appointment, maybe you actually watch fewer of them. If there isn’t a specific moment of connection with your favorite team, bound to a specific medium, maybe the connection thins or snaps.

I want to be clear that this is not an elegy. I don’t think sports fandom is doomed (the leagues are doing OK without my dollars), and I think American sports can get through the digital-age bottleneck for the same reasons that America itself can make it through. I hate certain changes in baseball, but I appreciate the sport’s willingness to experiment: The automatic runner on second in extra innings is an abomination, but the pitch clock is a necessity. My kids play softball and Little League and enjoy sports as games even if they don’t really experience them as a culture. My older son identifies as a Red Sox fan even if he doesn’t really practice the religion. And over time, who knows what will happen, or what Buckner-style imprinting may await them? Life is long and endlessly surprising.

But right now, my annual pilgrimage to Fenway is a moment of participation in the spirit of the age, when I can sense an inheritance fading into digital static because I failed to pass it on.