Laura Albanese: How I became a baseball lifer
Newsday's Mets beat reporter Laura Albanese in the Mets dugout at spring training. Credit: Albanese family
10,000 FEET OVER THE EAST COAST — I’m 11 years old and my home life is tumultuous. But there is baseball.
I was a precocious, outgoing child, but by 11, sitting alone in my brother’s room watching the Mets play the Pirates, a lot of that spark was gone.
We had been homeless for a few months, though there was always a family friend’s bed to sleep on; life was volatile and money was tight. Fear made me withdrawn, stripping away parts of my personality I’d eventually fight to retrieve.
But there was baseball.
Through the isolation, I made my own kind of summer friends: Howie Rose, Bob Murphy, John Sterling, Suzyn Waldman, Ralph Kiner, Gary Thorne and Gary Cohen — media I often consumed from a radio hidden under my pillow.
Baseball sparked both joy and devastation and imbued me with a sort of fairy tale hope that sometimes an underdog can win (or at least fight like hell trying).
I’m thinking about all this as I fly back from Port St. Lucie after five weeks at Mets spring training, and it makes me laugh to think I ended up here.
I came by my initial knowledge of the sport using the trinity of trial, error and WFAN. For years, I was afraid to approach pretty much anyone, and now I'm professionally obligated to go up to athletes in what I can only describe as an aggressive form of immersion therapy.
I began covering major-league baseball full-time in 2014 and became the Mets' beat writer for Newsday last year. Now I'm going to say something you won’t like: The workload can break you if you let it. You work nights and weekends and miss family functions and weddings (but never funerals).
I'm told it's a dream job; the emphasis usually is on "dream," but it actually should be on "job." I'm privileged to do this, but it’s a grittier, messier vocation than most people believe.
It’s not a complaint, it’s an explanation: To do this, you should love the game.
I do love it.
It's easy to get jaded. Baseball is a billion-dollar industry in which people often are trampled under the weight of the bottom line. Journalism is hard — you’re lucky to go a few months without consoling one friend or another over an undeserved layoff. Everyone wonders if they’re next.
But loving something also means assuming the risk of losing it — losing my livelihood or even losing my passion. Appreciation helps — not just for the job, but for the community that helped a child looking for a life raft.
It’s a thank you to my childhood friend Denise, who explained balls and strikes without making me feel dumb. It’s a tribute to my brothers-in-law Frank and Tony, a Yankees fan and a Mets fan, who treated me like family while concurrently trying to make sure I rooted for the "correct" team.
It’s the bonding thread I have to my college classmates, Lucky Ngamwajasat and Stephen Haynes, a sports editor and a sportswriter who became like brothers to me. In a male-dominated field, they made sure I knew I was one of them.
That’s baseball — it brings people together unexpectedly. It’s a beautifully human sport, made better by its idiosyncrasies.
It can function as a mirror to our lives. There are winners and losers, unexpected triumphs and shattering defeats. It sparks to life in February and dies in October (or very early November), and everything is earned the hard way — 162 games that demand their pound of flesh.
People like to say it’s boring, but I just think it doesn’t insist on itself. Like a quirky orange cat, it slinks by unbothered, yawning and stretching, not begging for affection. A golden retriever loves everyone; you’ve got to work for the cat’s approval.
I love hearing about the inciting moment — the one play, one game, one season that made you a lifer. That doesn’t just happen because some guy wearing a particular piece of laundry hit a ball really far. It happens because something captured your imagination and rewired your brain.
In a cynical world, it seems unfathomable that that can still happen.
Maybe it was Johan Santana giving the performance of a lifetime, reminding you that a sacrifice can be worth the monumental price you pay for it.
Maybe it was Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte walking to the mound to take the ball from Mariano Rivera, helping you understand that family comes in different forms, or that you can both mourn the end of something and celebrate the joy it brought.
Maybe it was David Wright homering after returning from the injury that eventually ended his career, telling you that we can still have perfect moments in an unfair world. Maybe you needed to remember that even when your body gives out, spirit, stubbornness and righteous spite can create magic.
There are going to be plenty of days when 26 guys in glorified pajamas can’t do that much for you. There’ll be days when your love is tarnished by cheating or lockouts or greed.
But good things can still happen, even when it comes in the form of something as low stakes as a baseball game. When you woke up the neighbors screaming after Pete Alonso hit that homer in Milwaukee, that was the kid in you coming to life. When you held back a tear after Jeter got his 3,000th hit, that was the person who knows there's value in feeling things deeply.
When the final out is recorded, there’s a good shot your life is unchanged, but maybe you’ve changed just the tiniest bit.
And that was because there is baseball.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
