MIAMI -- The best part of sports?
The feeling.
So how does it feel to arrive at the very top of the feeling?
"Crazy. Crazy. Crazy," champion Cody Ross says.
No, but how does it feel, exactly?
It feels like this:
You walk into a Mexican restaurant with your family and friends. Quiet place. Small place. Maybe 70 people. You sit in a corner. You don't have any indication anyone there knows who you are. As recently as a few weeks ago, you weren't really famous. Maybe you were on the far fringes of fame, asked for a couple of autographs or pictures here and there, a pretty anonymous major-league outfielder, but that was before crazy, crazy, crazy. So you get up to leave the restaurant after your meal and there it is, in your face, your life changing. One by one, the customers rise from their meals to applaud.
"You feel Paul McCartneyish," Ross says.
The soundtrack to your life has changed. Music follows you. You are walking home after one of the games with your family and friends. A hundred feet up, in a bar you haven't been in and aren't entering now, the drunk and happy people are chanting something. You hear it faintly, and can't believe it, but it becomes obvious as you get closer to the joyful noise. "Do you hear that?" you ask your disbelieving friends.
The people in the bar, drunk and happy people who don't know you are nearby, drunk and happy people who don't know you can hear them, drunk and happy people who are drunk and happy because you made them drunk and happy, are chanting your name. Singing it. Two syllables, again and again. Co...dy! ... Co...dy! ... Co...dy! It is just about the greatest song you've ever heard.
"The craziest thing," Ross calls that, but then he re-evaluates given everything else swirling around him. "Actually," he says. "Not too crazy."
So how does it feel, exactly?
It feels like this:
"I can't walk 10 feet without 'Thank you' or 'Congratulations,"" Ross says.
Every 10 steps, you don't merely feel the gratitude. You hear it articulated. Thank you. Every 10 steps, you don't merely feel the happiness inside you. You hear it, out loud, from strangers who appreciate being this close to your joy and getting to share in it in some small way. Congratulations.
Blessed. Thankful. That's how you feel. Every 10 steps of your life.
Your voicemail clogs up with people wanting to be near this feeling. Texts, too. All of a sudden, opportunity is always on the other end of the line, so much of it that you don't have time to answer it all. People asking for appearances, autograph shows, endorsements. The phone rings nonstop. Money is calling.
The number of requests? "Tons and tons," Ross says.
You walk into your hotel room after another home run to your beaming wife, getting to share with the one who has been there when things weren't this good. "Am I dreaming?" you ask her.
"I kept waiting for her to nudge me in the side and say, 'Wake up,"" Ross says. "She never did."
A few months ago, Ross was crying and angry. The Marlins didn't want him. He wanted to be here long-term. He wanted to get even just a low offer from the Marlins, he said. But the unpopular franchise let go for free of one of its most popular players. And the Giants didn't really want him, either. They just claimed him off waivers to keep him away from the Padres, thinking the Marlins would pull him back once the claim was made. Ross didn't think there was any chance he'd go to the Giants. They had six outfielders. But then one of them got hurt.
When he met with Marlins executives before leaving for San Francisco, he let them have it in his own polite way.
"I looked every one of the guys in the eye and said, 'You guys are making the wrong decision,"" he said. "I got really emotional. Started crying."
Angry or heartbroken?
"Both," he says.
And then, being Cody Ross, he thanked them for the opportunity.
In San Francisco, he opened his stance, put his foot down earlier, started seeing the ball better, began taking bad pitches he had been swinging at -- and hit three home runs in his first six at-bats in the playoffs against the Phillies, two off Roy Halladay in one game. He was named the Most Valuable Player of the National League Championship Series.
"Incredible," he says.
Fandom feels proprietary. That is one of the coolest things about it. We get to be near the ups and downs, feeling joy and suffering, heart jumping and stomach churning, but we are really sort of renting this feeling as fans. The people at the center of the action, the players, the landlords, have more stakes and consequences -- more ownership, even as we pay to live near them with our loyalty and allegiance.
The players, the landlords, haven't merely failed themselves and their teammates when they strike out. They have failed you. Those growing stakes get so big toward the end of a season, so enormous, that only the small few jumping up and down on each other on the mound, at the delirium's epicenter, can understand the power of that kind of sharing as the rest of us gather around and dance and scream near it.
So, overwhelming as it was in the Mexican restaurant and under the happy bar and in that trolley during the two hours that fans screamed and chanted his name at the parade down Market Street, unfathomable as it was to be holding the MVP trophy after nobody wanted him, you know the moment Ross chooses as his favorite and most surreal in this most surreal October? It wasn't either of his own home runs off of Halladay. It wasn't any of his big hits that made San Francisco sway. No, the moment of most bliss, he says, was celebrating what another teammate had done.
Edgar Renteria had hit a three-run home run off of Cliff Lee in the clinching World Series game, and Ross had a pretty good idea what that meant with Tim Lincecum on the mound and Brian Wilson in the bullpen.
So how does it feel, exactly?
It feels like this:
It feels like being rewarded. It feels like hope and possibility and anticipation morphing into certitude. Ross was on the bases as that ball sailed out, and what swept over him was so overwhelming that he misplaced his manners. As he got to home plate, he jumped high up in the air, right near Lee, who was backing up his catcher, and felt a tinge of embarrassment at the idea that this great pitcher might feel shown up by little, old him. Did I really just do that to Lee?, he asked himself.
"I was so excited and emotional that I couldn't hold it in," Ross says. "So happy."
And it washed over him in a wave right then.
"This has got to be," he says, "the best time of your life."
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