This week’s newsletter is short and sweet, in part because last week’s was not so short or so sweet; and also, I think we all deserve the magic of Juan Soto to start September, a month that the coffee shop near me has heralded, for weeks now, as PUMPKIN SPICE COLD BREW.
Look: I was not always a baseball fan. I believe I once called it like “a bunch of men with a thing for triangles.” When Stephen Strasburg made his Major League debut in 2014, with the Washington Nationals, and struck out 14 batters, I didn’t know. My father did, but he kept his mouth shut about it.
Sometimes, though, I would find the Washington Post sports section crumbled on the couch, as if he’d heard me, the intruder, and made a mad dash for it. Or I’d discover him watching baseball on the TV, eyes glazed over in reverie. Or he’d tell me, maybe twice, that growing up, he’d been forced to write with his left hand tied behind his back—at that time, for religious reasons, being left-handed was Very Bad—so there went his pitching dreams.
In 2019, the Nationals won the World Series. That sentence is a lie, not because they didn’t win—THEY DID; SUCK IT TRASHCAN ASTROS; WE BEAT YOU CHEATERS—but because it doesn’t capture any of the wild, rabid energy of that team that beat the odds (they started the season 19-31, 19 wins) and embraced the words of manager Davey Martinez: stay in the fight.
This 2019 team was where Gerardo Parra made his walk-up song “Baby Shark” because his daughter loved it; soon, the whole stadium was chanting BABY SHARK DOO DOO, DOO DOO DOO. During the Wild Card games, which offer teams the last-chance to make it to the playoffs, the DC Metro hired extra staff to distribute signs, at the subway stop by the ballpark, that read FINISH THE FIGHT on one side and DOO on the other.
It was also the team where Juan Soto turned 21, already obviously headed to the Hall of Fame one day, and completed the prophecy his father had made a decade earlier: Soto would play in the World Series on his birthday.
I could write a lot about Juan Soto, a player who I call my son because I just want the best for him, and even though I don’t know if I will have kids, I do know that’s the type of mother I’d want to be: committed, maybe even a bit ferocious. He made his Major League debut in 2018, when he was just 19 years old—at the time, the youngest player in the MLB—and was voted Rookie of the Month for three months of the 2018 season.
At the plate, he developed a signature way of adjusting after each pitch—or sometimes before the pitcher had even begun—that was half dance, half intimidation tactic. If you’re on top of the world, all you can see is horizon, and God if that shouldn’t be beautiful.
Juan Soto is that rare combination of electric talent—the kind so otherworldly it’s almost awful to see—and being, or at least seeming, like a genuinely good person. How can you not root for him?
And you’d be stupid to trade him when you still have two years left on his contract and you literally said he was what you were building around and why you traded Anthony Rendon and Max Scherzer and Trea Turner because that money was going into the Stay, Juan Soto! moneybag and yes, this is about stupidity, because this is about the Washington Nationals we’re talking about. They traded Juan Soto this summer, along with Josh Bell—Josh Bell, who runs, ran, a book club with PG County Library! A book club!—to the San Diego Padres.
But Soto is Soto regardless of where he’s playing, he’s still emitting joy into the atmosphere. Last week, he was pulled out of the Padres starting lineup due to mid-back tightness, which he had developed a few days prior during a Family Day the Padres hosted at their stadium Petco Park: “Padres fans in despair as Soto hurts his back riding a camel.”
I don’t know why there was a camel at Family Day. I don’t know who in the Padres front office thought, “You know what families need in this economy? A FUCKING CAMEL.” (To be fair: Family Day tickets are $15 for kids and $20 for their parents, and include a hot dog and a soda, so the Padres are doing their part in fighting inflation.) And I honestly don’t care, because it is one of the best things I’ve heard in a while. Thank you, random Padres staff member, for doing us all a solid.
But wait—there’s more. In one r/baseball thread about Camelgate, which I’ve since forgotten, a commenter pointed out that this isn’t Soto’s first rodeo with a camel. You can’t make this up: in 2018, during a preseason training session for the Nationals, manager Davey Martinez decided that the players needed inspiration—at the time, they hadn’t won a postseason series.
As the Nationals gathered for their morning circle-of-trust meeting, third-base coach Bobby Henley and first-base coach Tim Bogar rode on the backs of the camels, as the song "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas blared through the speakers.
The idea came to Martinez during the winter, although it took some time to pull off because he had to figure out where to find camels. Martinez found a family nearby that raises camels, and they brought in three: Lawrence, Blondie and Brownie. Convincing Henley and Bogar to ride them was easy.
The players formed a line and walked past the camels on the way to the workout while Henley randomly screamed "hump day" from the top of his camel. Unfortunately, one of the camels relieved himself on one of the practice fields -- a "No. 2 on Field 3," center fielder Michael A. Taylor joked -- but the players enjoyed them, anyway.
In a callous, despair-riddled world, we somehow lucked out: there is Juan Soto, there are camels, and there is a man called Davey Martinez, who named his son Jagger Lee—which I shout, aggressively, as JAGGER LEE!—and decided you know what? Let’s laugh. And if that isn’t good advice for making it through, I don’t know what is.
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Did it involve camels?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
Her greatest inspiration may be a cashew.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
I love your posts! This is just what I needed on a stressful Friday to lighten my heart. It makes me smile like Ted Lasso makes me smile. I'm glad that I paused to read it before diving into the work of the day. My one small thing this week was having a conversation, complete with pictures, about all the cool Volkswagens that the guy repairing my car had owned or fixed up for family over the years. Carmen Ghia's, Ragtop Beetles and the like. And I waxed poetic about the various VW's in my past and future - Electric Bus here I come!