“it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something”

Linda Holmes was an apostate Phillies fan who only recently returned to fandom for her team, and for baseball. I think she rationalizes it well here, somewhat echoing Roger Angell’s point about the crucial importance of caring— even for something as trivial as the flight of a ball or the fate of professional sports team—as a consistent feature of life.* 

“So, here’s the big question: Does this new daily, super-intense fanhood make you happy? Absolutely. The other day, when the Phillies had that walk-off hit, I said to one of the other Phillies fans: “I had honestly started to think that nothing good could happen.” And that applied both to that specific baseball game and to my team in general and in the world, right? I don’t ever want to be misunderstood as if I’m saying: “If your baseball team wins, that makes up for horrible things going on in the world.” Not true. However, I do think it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something. And to keep that part of your brain active and alive. And even if it’s a little bit artificial compared to so many other things, I think it’s really important to activate those brain chemicals, really important to remember that sometimes things are fun and exciting. Sometimes, I can feel excited and happy.”

 — Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love by Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski https://a.co/0gkG3PNy

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*“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” Five Seasons