Your bag is empty.
Growing up, September and October were chaotic months in my house. In my family of four, there are three birthdays in a two-week span. The Jewish holidays add additional logistical wrinkles. The start of each new school year only created even more to do.
But all of these events were eclipsed by one overwhelming force: playoff baseball. In the busiest stretch of the year, my family’s world revolves around the Yankees. If the Yankees are on TV in October, the Sosnick men cannot be found anywhere other than the couch. As early as August, future plans are made around dates that could hold playoff games which the Yankees could play in. It’s easiest to leave the entire month free. To my mom (not much of a sports fan, and more importantly, from Massachusetts) this remains a source of endless frustration. And in years like this one, where the Yankees are lamentably absent from the playoffs, she still doesn’t get a break—because now the Islanders are playing.
Things changed when I went to college. I spent four years in Philadelphia, where time is measured by the Eagles schedule. Different cultures use different calendars, after all. For a while, I drifted away from baseball. When I moved back to New York after graduation, I realized what had been missing from my life. My twenties have been a decade-long process of falling back in love with baseball. I started watching more and more games. Then got partial season tickets. I joined a fantasy league, and won it this past year. I spent nine months writing an article about baseball cards. Becoming a baseball fan has cost me more money and time than I care to admit, but it was a good decision. Actually, it wasn’t even a decision. It was my destiny.
Something is wrong with young men in America. They have fewer friends and they spend less time with the ones they do have. They are less likely to have girlfriends, have sex, and get married. They are staying home, skipping college, and not pursuing careers. Anecdotally, they seem lost, lonely, apathetic, unmotivated, and hopeless. And weird. They are too online, getting lost in strange rabbit holes, derailed by pointless arguments, and enthralled with bizarre influencers manipulating them for money.
Here’s something that could help: Watching sports.
Sports are often the scaffolding around which male friendships are built. Games are low-stakes, readymade excuses to spend time together. Sports provide the raw material that sustains friendships for years on end. Do they enable profound, life-altering conversations? Of course not. But sports give men something to talk about, all the time. I have new lifelong friends from playing fantasy baseball. Without sports, I would be a lonelier person. Without sports keeping the group chat alive, it might not be there when someone actually needs to talk about something serious.
And it’s not just about making and keeping friends. I just spoke to my 90-year-old grandfather on the phone. He congratulated me on getting engaged, then brought up how bad the Yankees are. I’m in a fantasy football league with my cousins, and I’m now talking to them more in a week than I did for years before. At a party with my fiancée’s family in Chicago this past weekend, it was only a matter of time before I found myself in front of the White Sox game with the other baseball sickos. These were great-uncles, second cousins—the in-laws I might never get to know without a game on.
Fandom automatically grants you membership in a community of your neighbors. I talk to people—strangers, assholes, barflies, the unhoused—about baseball all the time. I know some very shy men who, if there is a game on in a bar, suddenly have no trouble making conversation. Sports are a social lubricant. They turn a big, scary city into a smaller, friendlier one. It is hard to feel lonely in a stadium full of people rooting for the same thing.
Spectator sports also provide young men with real role models. There are some unsavory professional athletes, to be sure, but the vast majority are just ridiculously disciplined freaks of nature. They get attention by becoming good at something and doing it well under pressure. When they do speak publicly, it is usually about their loyal teammates, wonderful families, and the value of hard work. Their comments about women are generally limited to thanking their wives (though there are obviously embarrassing exceptions). As a rule, professional athletes do not talk about hypergamy or crime rates or gooning or dropshipping or escaping the matrix. (Michael Porter Jr. is doing his best to change that.)
It does seem like a painfully obvious suggestion—“watch sports.” But it works. I took many years off from fandom. I lost the passion for a while. And I was an absolutely atrocious athlete myself. (I did not hit 5 feet until my sophomore year of high school.) But as an adult, I chose to watch sports as a way to improve my life. I wanted the community, the connection, and something to share with my family, friends, and so many others. I found it.
Sports are not a panacea. There is much sexism, racism, and toxicity in sports. Being a fan will introduce you to the dumbest assholes you’ve ever met in your life, that’s for sure. You can be a sports fan and still be a lonely, angry, bitter man who never leaves the computer. There are many of them.
Most frighteningly, the art of being a fan is threatened by the explosion of gambling, prediction markets, and collecting. Young men and boys are squarely in the crosshairs of an under-regulated industry seeking to get them hooked on a life-ruining vice. On television, every timeout is a Clockwork Orange-esque video barrage of ways to lose your money. The path to lifelong fandom is now a minefield, and every real fan should be outraged.
What do young men need right now? There are a million good answers to that question at every level of society. But stronger friendships, deeper connections to their fathers and families, a sense of connection to their neighbors, and better examples for how to live are probably four good places to start.
