Brett Taylor (@brett-taylor.bsky.social)

The Thing You Are You ever think about how an indirect marker of time comes when you are able to reference durations of your life by using the word “decades,” rather than merely “years”? Remembering things you were or did or said a few years ago is one thing, but decades ago? Not just ten years, but multiples of ten years? So many years that it’s worth having and deploying a shorthand to reference it? That means some TIME has passed, brother. Your references to time evolve as time, itself, goes by. That makes sense, of course, because a year to a 5-year-old is much longer, relatively speaking, than it is to an adult. And, as the years compress for you and the references evolve, you notice it more. You think about it more. You consider the implications. You linger in the mirror. You write long posts. For the first time in nearly two decades, I was not able to go to the Cubs Convention this year. Family obligations this time around were such that it was not going to be possible for me to disappear for three days, and I had to take in the event from a distance. It stung not to be there. It stung not to see my friends. It stung not to get to interact with readers. It stung not to be there when the energy swelled as new Cubs like Alex Bregman and Edward Cabrera were introduced. But most of all, it stung not to be present for the celebration – well, the start of a year-long celebration, I expect – for the ten-year anniversary of The Team That Did It. Can you believe 2016 was a decade ago? There’s that word again. I watched from afar. I saw the pictures. I heard the comments. I enjoyed the highlights and memories, and I wrapped myself in nostalgia as best I could. But it was hard not to be there, given all that the 2016 World Series win had meant to me. How it had, in ways both literal and symbolic, fundamentally changed my life. A change that came, despite the fact that my life was not physically connected to the moment Anthony Rizzo caught that final out. I never swung a bat or threw a ball or trained a player or constructed a roster or sold a ticket. Yet there it was. This precise moment that transformed me. Transformed – if I may be so presumptuous – you, too. A moment that connected us not only to each other, but to our collective past. This instantaneous collision of particles, otherwise random and meaningless, suffused with desperate import by the people who were watching. A final out, caught at first base, and everything was different. Suddenly we were no longer what we had been. And there that moment was again, a ten-year anniversary at a fan convention, celebrated by a community. Celebrated by the family we’ve chosen, embodying the impact we’ve had on each other. A moment rippling through time, reaching out to touch me in periodic waves, reminding me that it is never going away. It still means so much to me, and I can’t wait to be there on Opening Day this week when the year-long anniversary celebration for the World Series win truly begins. It still brings me joy, even after all these years. I expect that will be true for decades, too, should I be so fortunate as to catalogue several more. * * * It’s been a very long time since I was a miserable lawyer, a new father, and an anonymous blogger messing around on the pre-social internet on a site I’d made so I could opine about the Chicago Cubs. I started Bleacher Nation back in 2008 as an outlet for my Cubs thoughts and an escape from the day job. I was reading and writing and analyzing all day anyway, why not do the same thing at night, but about the baseball team I loved? It became my full-time job in the summer of 2011 when I could simply no longer do the lawyer thing, particularly in tandem with that new father thing, and I got very, very lucky that Cubs ownership decided to make an especially fateful front office change right at that same time, just as I was ramping this baby up. Whether I did a good job covering that Cubs front office transition, the subsequent rebuild, and the championship run that followed, I leave that to you. But it’s inarguable that my very fortuitous trajectory at BN tracked with that of the Cubs in that era. I probably earned some of my success, sure, but I owe much more than half of it to my wife, to Michael, to Luis, to Theo, to Jed, to Tom, and to a group of players whose 2016 performances we’ll be celebrating all year long. The arrival of that 10-year anniversary put some things on my mind, which is what led me to start sketching these ideas out several months ago. Of course a decennial marker is a completely arbitrary one from a cosmic perspective, but we can’t help but treat these things – these 10-year increments for which we invented a specific word – as special. As an invitation to ruminate on questions you have about what you’ve done with your life and what you may yet do. The things you were. The things you are. It felt all the more the case for me, with so much of my personal and professional life wrapped up in this baseball championship that happened a decade ago, and this baseball organization that was formed fifteen decades ago. Yes, the Cubs’ 10-year championship anniversary falls on the same year the organization celebrates its 150-year overall anniversary. The mind starts to spin about the nature of time, and its persistent habit of moving forward without regard for the rest of us. And, frankly, I’m getting older. Were I a baseball player whose career continued from here as long as I’d like mine to, I would be regarded as a Julio Franco-esque miracle. Thankfully, my job doesn’t require me to unleash an authoritative swing in a microsecond after tracking a 98 mph fastball, but there are certainly moments when I wonder if the passing of time has sanded down some of my sharper edges. I wouldn’t necessarily call any of this a mid-life “crisis,” but it’s impossible – when confronted by such a clear and obvious opportunity to look back as this year’s anniversaries provide – not to think about how much has gone by into the rearview. How fast, and how far. In relation to all of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about something I wrote after the 2016 Cubs won it all. It was a contemplative bit of meandering about what had just happened, and what it meant to and for we Cubs fans who’d for decades identified ourselves as so desperately wanting IT to happen. The central framing, summed up by the piece’s title, “Then You Are Not The Thing You Were,” is what has been gnawing at me as I try to find my way through this mid-life transition. OK, I’ve thought to myself, as if responding to that younger me, If I am no longer what I was then, well, what am I now? More disconcertingly, and never intended when I wrote about the implied change after greatness is accomplished by us or by those around us: What if everything good about my professional life is from a really long time ago? What if I am not what I once was? Not as good? Not as useful? I’m warning you now, I’m gonna get a little existential. * * * Do you think the moment Anthony Rizzo caught that ball to end Game Seven was the absolute pinnacle of his professional life? Probably was, right? And, if so, I wonder about the mixed feelings that come from recognizing that the peak moment of your professional life came and went. It’s the highest of highs. A truly magnificent, laudable, blissful thing, and inarguably a good thing to have experienced. To have created for others! But there it sits, 10 years in the rearview. Over. Unmoving. Unchanging. Unrelenting. It’s a mid-life thing again, this kind of contemplation. I get that. It’s not even about Anthony Rizzo. It’s about me. I’m projecting. See, the stories we tell about sports are really just stories about ourselves. We see what we want to see in the players. We see whatever tells us what we want to believe about ourselves. Most of the time, it’s like that line from Eddie Vedder in ‘Someday We’ll Go All the Way’: “Our heroes with pinstripes and heroes in blue, give us the chance to feel like heroes, too.” Most of the time, we just feel good when we share sports with each other, feeling like the players are right there with us. It’s why we do it. But sometimes, it’s like we see our shortcomings reflected back. Our failings laid bare. Or our fears of various failings. I am not saying Anthony Rizzo didn’t have great moments – great games, great seasons – before or after the 2016 World Series, because I think we all know he very much did. But professional baseball players, by definition, have a peak. It’s not an insult. Heck, most players would kill for a peak moment like the one Anthony Rizzo had. © Ken Blaze-Imagn Images For Rizzo, the game-ending catch came at the conclusion of his third straight monster season with the Cubs. A stretch during which he hit .285/.386/.527/148 wRC+, averaged more than 5.0 WAR per season, was top-10 in MVP voting, and was an All-Star the only three times in his career. In 2016, he added a Gold Glove and his only Silver Slugger. Anthony Rizzo was still a very good player for many years thereafter, but when you peruse his stats, it’s not hard to see that those years were the peak of his production, with the final out serving as the emphatic punctuation in that stretch. I don’t know if any of us could’ve known how perfectly it would line up at the time, but it did. I hope Rizzo finds that a delightful way to think about his best years, even if the whole reason I think about this topic is because I’m contemplating what it means to have a peak and then be looking back at it in the rearview. But I don’t want to be presumptuous. Having only just retired, Rizzo may not yet be ready to look back at things he accomplished a decade ago as being the peak of his professional life. That might be especially true in Rizzo’s case, because it seemed like he would have preferred to keep on playing in 2025 if there’d been a good opportunity for him. Sometimes you retire, and sometimes the game retires you. I could imagine it really sucking to fall into that latter category. Note that I’ve been very careful not to say that catching the final out, or putting up monster numbers, or winning the World Series, or any of that was the pinnacle of Anthony Rizzo’s life. He’s done incredible things in multiple communities. He has friends. He has a family. He has done, and will do, things that are tremendously important and have no relationship to the Cubs or baseball whatsoever. Because our parasocial relationships with these players are experienced almost entirely through their profession, we can unconsciously treat that as the whole of who they are. That isn’t fair to the players, and it also misses something very important in our own lives. None of us is exclusively what we do for a living. If you’re lucky, though, your professional life can connect you in a thousand wonderful ways to a thousand wonderful people. You can leave a mark on them, just as they leave a thousand marks on you. I hope Anthony Rizzo knows how much joy he brought so many people during his career, and particularly in 2016. I hope it for all of the 2016 Cubs. I hope that, even a ten-year anniversary later, everyone associated with that victory – from the players to the coaches to the front office to the support staff to literally everyone who helped one iota to make it happen – understands the impact they had on so many of us. Interfamilial decades of pain and need and ache, resolved in spectacular fashion. A peak, professional or personal, for so many of us. A peak, and a change. Then we are not the thing we were. * * * As you get older, it’s probably just about impossible not to start thinking a little bit about what you’ll leave behind when you’re gone. I don’t know that I’ve ever cared about having a “legacy,” whatever that means, but I do find myself contemplating the experiences I’ve had over the years, and their relationship to the people I care about, from my family to my friends to the wonderful folks reading this. I think about what mattered. What will last. Flags may fly forever, but we don’t. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote probably the best thing I’ll ever write. I intend that sentence not as a bit of self-praise – again, you can judge my work for yourself – but instead as a bit of lament about the aging curve. The nature of creative output. Hell, the nature of life. As with Rizzo, the peak comes for us all. “My legs gave, and I started to go down. I never quite made it, though; the explosion of energy released by the cracking of so many years of frustration and hope compacted into a tiny, dense star in the pit of my stomach lifted me back to my feet. And then off my feet, and into the air. Gravity no longer had any dominion over my movements. I felt no weight, and, for a moment, I was untethered from anything that had ever restrained me. I was a swirl of smoke. I was atmosphere.” I was writing about the moment It Happened back in 2016, trying to put into words a feeling that I suspect most of you remember could not actually be put into words. I did the best I could, and that piece, which I called “Then You Are Not The Thing You Were,” is likely as good as it is going to get for me. Nearly a decade ago. I was at my best back then, apparently, and now I am supposed to hold that up as the pinnacle of my professional life. Trading on it. Like I still deserve it, a laurel on which to forever rest, obviating any need for me to do something great ever again. Acting like I am still the same person who wrote that piece, and therefore have the same value. I mean, it was right there in the name, for crying out loud. Everyone, everything has a peak. We talk about it a lot in the baseball world, opining on the extent and breadth of a given player’s best years, wondering when they are yet to come and when they are in the rearview. The aging curve moves around a bit from player to player, but it is ultimately undefeated. Why wouldn’t that be the same for the rest of us? Physically, yes, of course. Obviously. But also in our creative lives, such as we have them? Or our work product? Or our hobbying? Or our relationships? At some point, by definition, there is a peak period for all of it. And, a peak having taken place and your rearview, that necessarily means you have some things to look back on as what you’re leaving behind. The legacy, if you want to call it that. The flag that flies. That can be a very hard thing to accept for anyone, even as it’s just in the fundamental nature of being a human with a finite lifespan. Think about the expressions “over the hill” or “past his prime” or “riding into the sunset.” They all inherently suggest some kind of apogee has taken place, and everything that follows is no longer that. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The sunset is beautiful, with its palette of colors we might not otherwise experience. But something is on a downslope. Something is ending. I’m lucky, though. I’m still here, writing this sentence. I still have a platform available on which to connect with you, and I still really enjoy doing it. My peak as a Chicago Cubs blogger is in my past? Maybe even far in my past? OK. I can probably hold my nose and accept that, because this part is pretty good, too. One thing I realized at the end of this exercise of exploring what came before is that I have, in some way, carried around these longer pieces from my past like chains around my neck. Like I’d written freaking ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and couldn’t possibly live up to that again. I didn’t. I wrote some pretty OK blog posts, you know? Whatever else I am now, I can still do that. The weight of the world is not hanging in the balance as I try to find the precise turn-of-phrase to convey my meaning in some cutesy, folksy, cheeky way. So maybe my writing did peak after the 2016 World Series, but, hey, maybe it was a relatively shallow peak. Or maybe what I’ve lost in creative pep I’ve made up for in added wisdom. Maybe I’ve lost my four-seamer, but I can always try to tweak the sinker. * * * Hey, do you ever think about your first really important baseball memory? I don’t just mean the first memory you have of baseball, or even the first great baseball play or game or season you can remember. I am talking about something you experienced personally. Something that played out on the field of baseball, but that happened TO YOU. As if it were FOR YOU. Something that taught you there was something much deeper to this thing than a ball and a bat and some gloves, even when you aren’t yourself playing the game. Call it the first moment to which you ascribed something close to divinity. For me, although I have many happy and important baseball memories before the 1998 season, I have no doubt that the year was something especially transformative for me. The Kerry Wood Game. The home run chase, of course. The Cubs were competitive! Ope, the Brant Brown drop. They even made the playoffs for the first time in nearly a decade! It was a memorable year on the whole, both for the Chicago Cubs and for Major League Baseball. But the specific memory I have from that season, and the one that has stuck with me all these years later as instructing me in the magic of this sport was this one particular home run. The home run came from a guy who wasn’t even on the roster two months earlier, in a game that wasn’t even on the schedule. The Cubs, having swooned in September, and having lost the final game of the regular season, got a miracle assist from Neifi Perez in the form of a walk-off homer against the Giants. That pushed the Giants into a tie with the Cubs, and forced a now-famous Game 163. In that game, with no runs on the board in the 5th inning, the Cubs got a two-run blast from their third baseman, taking the lead in a game they would hold on to win. That home run, from a dude staring down baseball’s grim reaper, has stuck with me ever since. There was something about the combination of everything that led up to that Game 163 in the first place, the tension in the first five innings, and the story of the guy who hit it. A moment as beautiful as it was unbelievable. And at the center of it, this unlikely hero. This plodding old fart, with just enough power left in his bat to muscle out one final game-changer. Bringing everyone to their feet, chanting his name as he returned to the dugout. The hero, of course, was Gary Gaetti. A man who had been released by the Cardinals a little more than a month earlier, and was picked up by the Cubs for essentially nothing. All in a season now nearly three decades in the rearview, and it sticks with me to this day as so important. Even at the time I knew the whole thing was made all the more incredible by Gaetti’s proximity to the end of his playing days. I was young and my future was infinite. But this guy? This guy was clearly almost done. Pretty cool that he got this final moment. Gaetti managed a five-game death rattle the next season with the Red Sox before hanging ‘em up. It was no slight by that point, as Gaetti had already accomplished so much simply by lasting as long as he did. Just watching him with the Cubs, you could see how old he was, and anything he gave would’ve been impressive. Thank you for the memory, Gary. The dude I have remembered affectionately for so long as that “old fart” hit that home run at age 40, by the way. Four years younger than I am today. Well, shit. Did I mention I’ve been thinking about getting older lately? * * * The scoreboard operator at Wrigley Field is famous for being the quickest draw out there. If you’ve ever been at a game and tried to catch the balls and strikes being flipped after watching an umpire make the call at home plate, you know exactly what I mean. That scoreboard operator is just so absurdly fast that it sometimes feels like he is updating the count at the exact same time the umpire is making the call. Of course, we know those two moments aren’t actually happening at the same time. The umpire’s call is necessarily an antecedent event to the scoreboard operator putting a ball or a strike up there on the board. Because that’s how time works. Causality. Flow. Change. But, if you’ll indulge me in a little light physics, what if I told you some of that is actually, technically, not true? Albert Einstein’s work on special relativity stands for a great many propositions that we unknowingly experience and reference in daily life. You’ve heard about E=mc2 no doubt, and that is a famous spillover from special relativity. Mostly, though, it’s just kind of an easy way for us to reference Einstein’s genius as casual outsiders. OK, but what exactly is special relativity, and why am I talking about it right now? (Well, strictly speaking, I’m not talking about it right now – I talked about it some time in the past and you are merely reading about it right now.) Offered in an overly-simplistic, but reasonably-accurate way, special relativity describes a quietly funky aspect of our universe: the experience of time and space is relative to the motion of the observer. You’ve probably heard about time dilation? The thing where, if you traveled close to the speed of light, then time would have moved slower for you than for everyone else back on earth, so you would basically be traveling forward in time? That’s not just the stuff of science fiction, at least not in principle. That kind of time-getting-mucked-up effect really does happen, and we have to adjust for it with satellites and other objects in motion for which precise time and space calculations are critical. It’s real, and it actually happens. One consequence of relativity is that there is no universal “now.” Because the experience of time and space is relative to the motion of the observer, and because each observer’s experience of time and space is objectively valid, that means we cannot correctly state a single time at which an event happened for all observers. For example, a fan in the stands at Wrigley Field might see the umpire’s call and the scoreboard operator’s flip as happening in succession, one following the other, while a fan flying overhead in a jet (if at an incredible speed (some meaningful chunk of the speed of light), oh, and with incredible eyesight) might see those two events as ACTUALLY AND TRULY AND MEASURABLY happening at the same time. This concept is known as the Relativity of Simultaneity, and its implications are mind-blowing. I don’t want to get too much further into the physics weeds than I already have – oh, who am I kidding, I love this stuff – but the short version is that, if simultaneity is relative, and if there is no universal “now,” then there are things in my experience that are in the past, but are still in some other observer’s future. And there are some things in some other observer’s past that yet lie ahead somewhere for me to experience in the future. That theoretical observer saw me type this sentence before I’d even thought of the words. The Relativity of Simultaneity, in turn, and by some very smart folks’ physical and philosophical calculations, takes us to The Block Universe. It’s an apt name, because it conjures in the mind a three (well, four)-dimensional “block” of spacetime in which every single event in the history or future of the universe exists forever fixed in place. We experience the flow of time in one direction (feel free to go do some reading on the debates as to why that is if you REALLY want to go off the rails (or are you free?)), but that’s merely our subjective experience. Relativity, and its logical consequences, tell us there is a fundamental mismatch between our subjective experience and some larger, objective truth. When I first started reading about these things, I found them rather horrifying. The idea that all of my life existed in some fixed position, with me and my choices inexorably tracking along a path that was already laid out for me is … well, it sits at the heart of some very fundamental disputes in our world. Fate versus free will. Determinism versus randomness. Choice versus resignation. Doesn’t relativity, which is real and experimentally verified, logically mean that The Block Universe is real? That those disputes aren’t just the stuff of freshmen philosophy class, but that there is actually an answer? An ugly, uncomfortable answer? Does it mean we never change? Does it mean The Thing You Are is the Thing You Are is the Thing You Are, and don’t even bother trying to grow? But wait. Wait. Stop. Something here isn’t quite registering. I change. I know I change. I know I have changed. I wouldn’t be experiencing this whole look-back on the last ten years of my life if things hadn’t happened and I hadn’t changed. Change is not only the law of a universe ever-tending toward entropy, it is baked into the very fabric of everything that ever was or ever will be. From the sublime to the mundane. For as much as we like to say, as the bullpen melts down, “I’ve seen this one before,” we haven’t. Not really. To borrow from my man Heraclitus, a fan cannot experience the same game twice, for it’s not the same game, and he’s not the same fan. Change is a constant. Is that how we have it both ways? We were one thing and then we changed into another thing, but that change was, itself, always there? I don’t have an answer, and I have to be OK with that. It’s all cosmic stuff. It’s as real as the bleachers you sit on, but you’re not really going to live in that headspace while desperately trying to catch a Brewers dinger so that you can throw it back. These concepts are out there in the ether, but we have to live day-to-day down here. Maybe yesterday and tomorrow are both equally set in the universal firmament, but if I can’t perceive it that way as I live and breathe here on Earth, then what’s the difference? People worry about the implications of The Block Universe for fate and free will, but if what I actually experience is a decision, borne of my own volition, to write this sentence, then in some very meaningful sense none of the cosmic stuff matters. Change is a permanent fixture in the Block … OK, fine, but I’m still the one riding that wave of change. I’m still the one watching the game play out. Yes, I think I can have it both ways, and I think there’s beauty in embracing it. That is all to say, I wasn’t wrong back then to ponder how we might all change after the Cubs won it all. We did change. It’s just that I hadn’t thought enough about the change as its own constant. Am I different in many ways from the person I was then? Unquestionably. But that change is a fundamental part of who I am, and I am sure now that I underappreciated that all of me was already there in 2016. I wasn’t this one thing back then, and now I’m this other one thing. Everything I was then, I am now. And everything I am now, I was then. I am and was and always will be changing. So are you. We are not becoming something new so much as we are living what we have always been; at our core, we sit outside time. A permanent swirl of constant change. Brief and eternal. We always were the thing that we are. In that way, the magic of 2016 is simultaneously ten years in the rearview and also it is still coming. Maybe I don’t get to perceive it that way day-to-day, but there’s an odd and delightful comfort in knowing it is, in some real and physical way, nevertheless true. My professional peak is in some distant past, and also somehow lies still ahead of me. I have already died. I am not yet born. It’s all relative. * * * What you want in writing something like this, of course, is to land on this neatly-constructed line from “I Used to Be This Particular Thing” to “Now I Have Become This Other Particular Thing.” I wanted it for the narrative value, sure, but I also wanted it because I felt like that’s where I should be landing in an exercise like this. I know I’m not what I was ten years ago, and shouldn’t I know what I am now? Give me that clean, straight line to some fixed and definite outcome. But I suppose progress is not linear, or something like that. True for baseball prospects, true for people. The best we can hope for is a high probability of steady, if uneven, progress. That really is a good baseball parallel, isn’t it? A good year is never guaranteed, but ideally you sit there in March, looking at a club with a high probability of success. The Chicago Cubs will open their 2026 season this week, marking the 10th anniversary of the World Series win that ended a 108-year drought. They will do so in the same season they celebrate 150 years of existence. As I said a handful of words ago, these numbers are entirely arbitrary, and take on special meaning only because we ascribe to their roundness some kind of importance. If you’ll indulge me a little more overreach, the same is true about all of baseball and our relationship to it. What does any of it matter without the value we’ve decided it carries? How important is this sport, outside of the special meaning we, individually and collectively, bring to the experience? As a practical and economic matter, there is no professional sport without fans to support it, sure, but I mean something more than that. I’m not sure how meaningful any of it would be without the experience that weaves itself between the fans and each other, between the fans and the players, and between the fans and their decisions about what they choose to put a piece of themselves into. It’s why my mind so readily bounces in and out of baseball discourse, physics, and existentialism when I’m writing something like this. It all somehow feels like it’s one conversation. The relationship between the observer and that which is being observed is one of those things that pops up frequently in a superficial read of quantum physics, from the Wave Function Collapse to the Quantum Zeno Effect to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Although it would be imprecise at best to take these concepts from the quantum world and graft them onto our macro experience, there is nonetheless something compelling about the idea that we are all part of a system. A system of probabilities that constantly feeds back in on itself, collapsing every superposition that ever was or ever could be into something fixed and definite. We matter. We matter to the things we care about. We matter to each other. Again, it’s hard not to see some parallel in baseball, where the probabilistic nature of the universe is so clearly on display with every pitch. Where our experience of the game as observers is so fundamentally intertwined with the reason the sport exists in the first place. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” – Werner Heisenberg Observing and analyzing baseball, we are constantly reminded that what we are seeing is not necessarily the objective truth of a performance, but instead we are seeing or analyzing a performance through the filter we brought with us to the performance. There is the play we see, there is the play others see, and there is the play that actually happened. We try our best to harmonize those things, pairing ours and others’ reason-informed observations with the cold and bare math of analytics. Sometimes that gives us a pretty good picture of the Capital T Truth of a play or a player or a game or a season, but we have to remember that we have still brought something of ourselves to that process. Our messy, complex, ever-changing selves. I think at all times, there are no fewer than three versions of you. There is the thing you see yourself as, the thing others see you as, and the thing you actually are. There’s a healthy bit of overlap in the venn diagram there, without question, but I spend a lot of time these days wondering about that last one. I know the person I hope others see in me, and the person I aspire to be, but, at my core, who am I really? What is the thing I once was, but am not anymore? There is a core tension in life, where we try to hold simultaneously the thought that our best moments are a reflection of our true and earned selves, while our worst moments are simply the product of external factors we couldn’t control. Therefore the latter cannot possibly define us, even though the objective measures say there is no real difference between those best moments and the worst. They all still count to the universe. We actually confront a variation on this concept quite often when watching and discussing baseball, desperately convincing ourselves that the best performances were a well-earned, accurate reflection of the Cubs and the team’s players. The bad performances? Pfft. That’s just bad batted ball luck. Or the wind. Or the ump blew it. But just as the indifferent universe sees of us what it sees, the loss counts in the standings whether the Cubs deserved it or not. Over on the analytical side of things, baseball has always been best understood through probabilities, even if that’s not how we prefer to experience the sport as entertainment. Outcomes are obviously fixed once they are in place, but the probability of that guy hitting that pitch over the wall wasn’t actually yet 100% until it happened, you know? Sometimes we use this concept to make ourselves feel better about an outcome. “Yes, the Cubs lost, but the probability they win that game with all the same individual results was over 85%, so they actually played quite well. The outcome was just a fluke. It doesn’t mean anything for the state of the team or its future success or failure.” Sometimes we use this probability hedge to make ourselves feel better about, well, ourselves. “No, I didn’t finish that book I’d always wanted to write, but there were all these external factors that made it far more difficult for me than for any other writer, and there’s still a 30% chance I get it done in the next year.” As I said, the stories we tell about sports are really just stories about ourselves. * * * So, then, I can’t help but return to the question that animated all of this, a decade after my world so completely changed, and as I reach what I hope is only the middle of my life: What am I now? A mere collection of the things I’ve done? A smeared probability wave of all possible things I could be? A fixed point in an unchanging universal block? I was recently asked by someone what is different in the Cubs’ fandom between now and before the Cubs won it all. Although we can’t ignore how much of the world is so different in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with baseball (but necessarily impact so much of our lives around it), I thought about the question within the very specific context of this year’s special anniversary. I answered that the quest to see the Cubs win it all was perhaps the highest and best expression of the communal experience of being a fan. Just look at what people did with the chalk outside of Wrigley Field when It Happened. After the win in 2016, that particular quest was at a close, and that particular expression of the communal experience was over. So there was certainly a difference in what moves us as fans now, and denying that would be silly. Wanting that first win after ten years is not quite the same thing as wanting that first win of your great grandpa’s life. Something stuck in my mind after I’d said it, though: surely that’s not all we were, right? Surely our connection as Cubs fans – as a kind of family – was about more than seeking this one championship that ended this one drought. Again (and again and again), I was confronted by that same nagging question, prompted by what I’d written after the win. “Then You Are Not The Thing You Were” … so what am I now? And again, I kept butting my head up against a wall, writing this piece, trying to find the answer in the sport, in my fandom, in time, in physics. Everywhere I looked I could find little pieces of the answer, but nothing quite felt like it put the whole thing together for me. Turns out, I just needed to look in the one place I hadn’t been, because I think maybe I already had the answer back when I unknowingly formulated the question. From what I wrote after the Cubs won it all: “We like this sport, but we don’t swing the bat and we don’t catch the balls. Instead, we get to experience the process of a particular team trying to achieve something at the end of a show we happen to like watching – and when the show has a happy ending, we as humans find that happiness reflected in ourselves. And because this is a process stretched over long periods of time, it is only natural that we would become attached on some deeper level to the outcomes of the games. You follow along in the highs and the lows with the players on the field and the other fans around you for long enough, and the results start to feel like they are your results, too. You feel like you’ve earned these experiences, good and bad. But I never felt like that was enough to explain the depth of our attachment and emotional reaction to these games. There is something about the fact that it’s just a silly game that strips away everything else in our world, and allows us to get down to something in our core. Something powerful and primal. I have always believed that, in the deepest depths of our soul, we feel just one thing, and we are so desperate to share that feeling with as many other beings as possible. It’s love. Love comes in many flavors, but I challenge anyone here to deny that what they were feeling on November 2 was one of the most love-infused moments of your life. And you knew, on some level, that in that moment you were sharing that love with so many other people, who were themselves feeling that same love. Your friends. Your family. Those players. Your internet commenting chums. Total strangers. There is so much power in something that can bind millions of people together in a moment, however fleeting, of nothing but pure love. How could that be silly?” It was always about love. We age, we grow, we gain, we lose, but we are forever bending toward that collective love. And how we love – the doing – marks the continuous change. We change. The world changes around us. We live. We die. We exist. We don’t. It takes 100 years. It all happens at once. For all the pseudo-philosophy and gas station quantum physics, I finally kept coming back to something much simpler. Something I can’t deconstruct analytically or prove with an experiment, but which I nevertheless know to be true: The thing you are is whatever you mean to other people. Maybe the last decade was never about becoming something new, but instead about discovering, in each other, the many things we already were. After all, what have I really been dedicating my professional life to? Not a team. Not a game. It’s people, isn’t it? It’s an expression of love. That’s the thing you are. To me. And I hope I am to you, too. I enjoy the experience of watching baseball, unpacking it and writing about it. But the sport was never the thing that I was, either a decade ago or now. It was always a conduit through which I could connect, meaningfully, with you. If I’m any one thing, that’s what I am, somehow constantly changing and also ever the same. Wherever you go, there you are. I’m there, too. Always was. © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2026/03/25/the-thing-you-are/