As an avid baseball fan who wasn’t born in the 19th century, for a long time I thought the game’s tagline of “America’s favorite pastime” was at best, corny, and at worst, out of touch with what American culture has become. The more I thought about it, and the more kinds of sports I watched, the more I began to see the ways in which we find our values, fears, desires, and priorities (for better or for worse) reflected back at us from the pitch. From baseball to Australian Rules Footie, fans have been interweaving sports and identity for as long as games and teams have existed. This new monthly series will spend time parsing out ways we see ourselves—as Americans, and as humans—in our sports, and what that might say about us.

Mets’ 1962 Inaugural Season Record: 40-120; Worst Season Record in Modern-Day Major League Baseball: 40-120; Citi Field Seating Capacity: 41,922; Number of Shake Shacks in Stadium: 1; Number of 2019 Mets Bobblehead Giveaways Remaining: 3

My grandma had a story she liked to tell about the birth of my dad.

“You know, your father came out ass first,” she would say. It was a fact she’d offer up regularly at the dinner table, whenever my father would tease her or refuse to take her Christmas shopping in mid-September, a reminder of how she’d suffered for him. The story never did end there, though, at least not for long. Because the other thing about my father my grandma wanted people to know about was his utter perfection: “He was bleach blonde,” she’d say—good hair a compliment of the highest order from a former hairdresser—“and he had a perfect curl, right at the top of his head like this.” She’d take her two fingers and mime a ringlet at the center of her forehead.

At the time my grandma was 22, living with her parents in their apartment atop the family-owned bar. Fifteen months earlier, she’d given birth to my uncle. It was the summer in Newark, NJ, and it was hot. She survived those airless final weeks of pregnancy by stationing herself in front of a box fan and the television, faithfully watching Major League Baseball’s newest edition—the New York Mets—in their inaugural season.

The 1962 Mets were a wonder—without a stadium to call their own, they played at the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights, and whiffed their way to the worst season record modern-day baseball has ever seen: 40 wins and 120 losses. No one in the history of the MLB has ever been more terrible, though the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, considered pre-modern era ball, managed an impressive...