Henry Loves Baseball
The truth is, it’s me Kyle, who loves baseball. As a kid I obsessively followed my favorite teams, tracked daily statistics in the newspaper, and never missed an episode of Baseball Tonight, where I could catch up on every diving stop, complete game shutout, or homerun of the day. As I got older, I started playing the sport itself. Through little league, Fall ball, middle school team, and camp, I played nearly all year round. I played second base and I was pretty good, until high school when it became clear that I did not have the ability or the strength to compete at that level. So I quit.
For years I ignored baseball. I wrote off professional sports, the players, the teams, the managers, the owners, the fans, and the culture as symptomatic of larger sicknesses in our society. Sicknesses that encourage addictive behavior and toxic masculinity, glorify traumatic injury, and prioritize competition in a world where collaboration should really get more playing time.
As I began living more independently, the anxieties of everyday life — jobs, commutes, bills, sickness, politics — drove me back to baseball. I found a nostalgic comfort in its familiarity. I bonded with my dad. I rediscovered my joy for statistics, data, and meaningless trivia. I found the long, drawn out games and the droll, dry announcers endearing. I realized anew that experiencing live baseball in a stadium can be a lot of fun. But it can also be very scary.
I hope I don’t need to justify how spectating sports can be scary. We have all found ourselves in a sufficient number of bars or stadiums or living rooms surrounded by a sufficient number of sufficiently sweaty, sufficiently drunk people that express their passion for their teams to know that fanaticism can be terrifying at worst, but can also make someone feel very unsafe.
I don’t want Ghostrunners to make anyone feel unsafe. I do hope that through our next horror-comedy, we can explore America’s pastime and its more troubling aspects. I hope that this next production will adequately express my genuine love for baseball — my genuine fear of and respect for it — and urge audiences to grapple with the possibility that baseball is not actually that unique. We all have our own passions and obsessions. It takes courage and faith to come to terms with what might hurt within what we love.
