It’s late December, and you know what that means. My peers across the media industry are proudly sharing their favorite stories of the past year, an often self-indulgent practice I’m allowed to poke fun at because I’ve definitely done it myself. But as I looked back at the words and sentences I put together in 2022, it occurred to me I have been carrying around a burden: My favorite piece I wrote this year has been read by a grand total of one other person. It got spiked.
Turn the calendar back to late October. People were apple picking, listening to Taylor Swift’s new album and learning a lot about the British government. MLB editor Matt Martell asked me whether I’d want to write a column about the Phillies winning the World Series. The Phillies are the team I was geographically born to root for, whose misery I watched a little too closely the last decade, whose schedule I revolved my own around for that month, canceling social plans to spend autumn weekend nights in front of the TV.
The playoffs were a special experience. I have long since left Pennsylvania and two years ago moved even farther away from my hometown, but the nature of this postseason run (its length, its excitement, its unexpectedness) elicited a strong feeling of community. Long-dormant group texts came to life nightly. My social media feeds filled with photos from inside Citizens Bank Park, and they became excuses to catch up with everyone. This is an aspect of sports that is so foundational for so many fans, and it rushed back into my life around a squad that had fired its manager in June. It was joyful to feel those particular butterflies of a tight and important baseball game involving my team once again, and to know how many of my people were going through the same.
The Phillies last won the World Series my senior year of college, the perfect time in my life to enjoy such a thing. This felt like I was teleported back into that type of aura. I no longer had a keg in the living room, and one of my text threads had to be spoiler-free in the early innings because my friend would watch on delay after he’d put his kids to sleep, then fast-forward through commercials and tell us when he’d had caught up to live action. But other than that, sure, just like college.
So when Matt asked me to write about this team, I took great pains to do it well. I wanted to have my thoughts and feelings put into words, for myself and to share with friends and strangers who may have enjoyed the experience as much as I did.
When the Phillies clinched the NLCS, I started typing some notes into my phone. It was twice as many words as Matt had asked for. When they came back from a 5–0 deficit in Game 1 against Justin Verlander, I emailed the notes to myself so I could pull them up on my laptop, which is when you know things are serious. When they hit a World Series–record five home runs to turn Game 3 into a laugher, I labored until 3 a.m. so it would be ready for SI’s copy editors and fact-checkers when needed.
The Phillies lost Games 4, 5 and 6, and nobody has read my words except Matt.
The column is unsalvageable—a jumble of words that are not just reduced to fiction, but no longer possible in this timeline. Even if the team wins it all next year, the tone and reaction would be totally different. It was written about the journey of snapping an 11-year playoff drought with an unlikely title as a sixth-seeded wild card, not being in the World Series two years in a row.
I had a recent conversation with some coworkers about how columns like these would make a great April Fool’s Day project—letting people take a quick plunge into the bizarro world where the Phillies won it all. People enjoy historical fiction, don’t they?
Then the week before New Year’s hit, and people started sharing their favorite pieces from the last 12 months. My mind went back to those nights in October and early November, and I thought,
I also recalled at some point this month that last year, on Dec. 27, my former SI colleague Kalyn Kahler tweeted that she was two books short of her goal for 2021 and asked whether anyone could recommend some “extremely short books.” I teased her that this was Big Overachiever Energy, but I admired (and identified with) the need to check this box off a list no one else would care about. That’s when it clicked. We have just a few precious days to put a bow on the year, whether that means finishing your reading list, making that phone call you’ve been putting off or rescuing the contents of an abandoned Google Doc.
So, yeah, that’s my energy right now. Put your finishing touches on the year that was. Go forth into the new year with hope for what will be. Set goals for yourself and see to hitting them. Put yourself out there.
Below is my favorite thing I wrote in 2022. It’s about the Phillies winning the World Series. It’s totally nonsensical to share it now, and I imagine anyone who is not a Phillies fan will likely find this laughable. Who cares; it wasn’t meant for you, anyway.
But happy new year. May your 2023 be full of things that make you and your loved ones as giddy as I was this past October, and may you arrive at January ’24 proud of how you spent the year.
