ESPN's Buster Olney is on vacation this week, but he's still compiling roundups. View Tuesday's roundup here.
Why does @CNN bore their audience with people like @secupp, a totally biased loser who doesn't have a clue. I hear she will soon be gone!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2015
Needless to say, this was not why I got into politics.
It has been a strange year, to be sure. In my career, I have covered three presidential elections, five conventions and countless other major moments in politics, and it's safe to say it has never felt this nasty, this uninspiring.
As I've said numerous times on CNN during this election cycle, just wake me when it's over.
In this year of fear and loathing, politics, for the first time, feels like a job to me. There was a time when politics was just a hobby and sports was actually my job. I grew up outside of Boston. When I was 7 years old, my dad took me to Fenway, and I got a photo next to a Wade Boggs cutout and an autograph from first baseman Carlos Quintana -- future Caribbean Baseball Hall of Famer. I was friends with the batting coach's daughter, who lived in my apartment complex. The Red Sox were religion. Thirty years later, I married a Red Sox fan from Rhode Island.
But the Mets ... the Mets made me a baseball fan.
In the late '90s, I was in college in upstate New York. I dated a guy from Queens who was a devout Mets fan, and I got hooked. It helped that the Mets were good then, which Sports Illustrated hyped by putting Rey Ordonez, Robin Ventura, John Olerud and Edgardo Alfonzo on its cover: "Best Infield Ever?"
The answer was yes, but shhhh! It was too late -- the 2000 Subway Series against the Yankees was officially cursed.
I moved to New York and eventually got a dream job. I worked at The New York Times in a department called the Index. I spent all day reading the sports section and writing abstracts for each story. I got health insurance, a 401(k) and every Wednesday off. During the season, I spent every one of those Wednesdays in the cheap seats at Shea. This job was, like, stupid good.
Before politics, I became a sports fanatic. The Mets, NASCAR, the Green Bay Packers -- they all got more of my attention than the sequester (the what?), the Hill or the Donald. I wrote my master's thesis on the devotional practices of sports fans. My favorite television show was Stump the Schwab. My greatest accomplishment was getting Bill Simmons to answer one of my mailbag questions.
Eventually, I got writing jobs on the side. I wrote a couple columns for NASCAR.com, and at one time, I had a regular online column for Sports Illustrated. I was in heaven.
But in the years following 9/11, my passion for politics gradually grew into an obsession. Suddenly, I was skipping Shea and volunteering on a city campaign or writing think pieces for conservative publications.
Just as I had cobbled together a little career in sports, over a couple years, I cobbled together a little career in politics. Neither has ever felt like a job.
Until now, of course. It's just a garbage year for politics, a mechanism I genuinely believe can be good and useful -- and should be -- when exercised properly and can produce something worthy of our great republic. But nobody roots for garbage, in sports or politics. Who would have become a Mets fan in 1962, when they posted a 40-120 record, one of the worst in the history of baseball?
Likewise, who would want to get into politics right now?
What I do know is this election has made me miss baseball more than ever. The baseball gods must have sensed this because last fall they delivered a postseason gift to me in the form of a New York Mets World Series appearance.
Watching the playoffs for the first time in years, all the old emotions flooded back: the exhilaration of a surprise 3-2 series win against the Dodgers in the NLDS, the cautious hope after dispatching the Cubs (a little too easily) in the NLCS, the familiar sinking feeling of knowing it's going to end badly when Alcides Escobar hit an inside-the-park home run on Matt Harvey's first pitch of the first game of the World Series against the Royals. I was right back in it, only this time, I was watching alongside my 10-month-old son.
In those hours, politics didn't matter. Baseball was life. Baseball made the world right again. Baseball wasn't yelling at me or calling me names. Baseball wasn't lying or making promises it could not keep. It wasn't telling me what I wanted to hear. It wasn't pandering or pretending.
Baseball was the best of us: hard work, sportsmanship, community and, above all else, faith -- ya gotta believe.
I haven't gotten to watch much baseball this season, unfortunately. But I know it's there and that it's more than just a necessary distraction from my life in politics -- it's a huge comfort. Maybe after November I'll take a year off, go find some cheap seats at Citi Field (if those exist) and remember what it's like to be a fan.