The Offseason Canon

If you're looking for a way to properly process the end of baseball season, boy, have I got just the thing for you.

I like to think I write pretty well. But I don’t think I’ll ever describe baseball as well as Bart Giamatti, former MLB Commissioner, did in 1977.

“It is designed to break your heart,” he wrote. “The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

I wish I could write like that. Maybe someone would pay for it, for one thing. There’s an undeniable truth to Giamatti’s words. Baseball ends as winter begins, and all of a sudden, the world is dark with no baseball to light it.

That’s why one November Thursday in 2015, I was lying in bed at 2:00 in the morning watching “Grown Ups 2.” It was my freshman year of college. The Mets had just lost the World Series. The girl I liked had a boyfriend. And now baseball was over and winter was starting. Friday morning economics class be damned, I needed to escape.

I picked “Grown Ups 2” for superficial reasons. It was ridiculous and lighthearted, everything I needed. But as I watched, I realized that I’d been missing the point.

“Grown Ups 2,” as its name suggests, is about growing up. But what I hadn’t realized was that it’s also about how to grow up. The short version of it — and believe me, you can’t handle the long one — is that Adam Sandler can’t figure out how to enjoy life as an adult who’s immature. But as the movie ends, he solves it: the way to stay young as you get older is to do childlike things with your children. You stay young by farting with your baby and playing football with your son. If you’ve reached middle age, joining your kid in watching videos of squirrels waterskiing can make you feel like a child again.

Basically, youth is forever. Just as you’re aging out of adolescence, you can become a parent and do it all again — and again. Like how my grandfather used to hide his fart machine under my grandmother’s chair on Rosh Hashana. But that’s another story.

Interestingly enough, that’s also the message of the greatest novel in American history. Do you remember “The Catcher in the Rye”? In case you don’t, or were in a coma in 10th grade, here’s a brief summary.

Holden Caulfield is about to be expelled from boarding school, so he decides to leave a few days early and explore New York. He hates phony adults but is cheered by innocent children, and because he’s right between the two, he’s scared that he’s aging towards phoniness. Finally, near the end of the novel, he takes his sister to the zoo and figures it out. He doesn’t have to grow up and turn boring. Instead, he can relive the exuberance of youth through the eyes of the young.

In the novel and in “Grown Ups 2,” the main characters are consumed with worry, either that they’re on the verge of leaving youth behind forever or that they already have. But both end on reassuring notes. “Don’t worry,” they say. “You’re leaving youth behind for now, but it’ll be back eventually.”

Lying in bed that night watching “Grown Ups 2,” I got the message. It’s why I’ve watched the film again every year since, the night the World Series ends. Baseball is over, it’s dark and cold outside — reassurance comes in handy. “Don’t worry,” I can almost hear. “You’re leaving baseball behind for now, but Opening Day always comes around eventually.”

Really, “Grown Ups 2” isn’t even subtle. It takes place on the last day of school, the first day of summer. Ahead lie barbecues and moonlight walks on the beach, water parks and effervescent, youthful nights. But as the movie ends, it’s not just the children enjoying themselves — it’s their parents too.

If “Grown Ups 2” and “The Catcher in the Rye” have the same message, they’re probably right. Which is why “Grown Ups 2” is the perfect movie to watch as winter begins. There’s always some uncertainty when baseball season ends, as if this time, summer might really be gone forever. Thank goodness for a movie that reminds us that no matter how old you are, summer always comes back eventually.