Playing a Modern Baseball song in the car on a typical Tuesday has a subtly depressing effect. For a brief moment, you’re not driving home from a job that pays the bills but doesn’t provide for anything else as Jake Ewald’s voice fills the room. You’re back in a disorganized dorm room with half-drawn blinds, moving slowly, and feeling everything at once.
Seven years have passed since the dissolution of Modern Baseball. Seven years have passed since the Philadelphia five-piece, which never quite made it into the mainstream but managed to leave its mark on the inner lives of a whole generation, finally called it quits. The pain of the anniversary has not diminished. Distance has, if anything, improved the precision of the feeling.
The band was founded in Philadelphia and got their name from a baseball technique book that guitarist and co-vocalist Jake Ewald discovered gathering dust in his basement. This kind of origin story seems too perfectly suburban and accidental to be made up. After releasing their first album, Sports, in 2012, they went on to release You’re Gonna Miss It All in 2014 and the darker Holy Ghost in 2016. From beginning to end, that is five years. The lights went out at closing time after five years.
It was not a scandalous breakup. There was no public conflict, no tabloid drama, and no implosion akin to that of Guns N’ Roses. What transpired was more subdued and, in a sense, more truthful. The band’s other vocalist, Brendan Lukens, had been experiencing severe mental health issues. As a sort of parallel creative life, Ewald and bassist Ian Farmer had already been working on another project, Slaughter Beach, Dog. The band wasn’t as important as the friendships. The band ended in a slow, mutual realization that the moment had passed rather than in a fight, which is how most good things end.
The particular irony of an emo band disintegrating due to mental health issues is difficult to ignore. Irony isn’t cruel; rather, it’s about how life often rhymes with itself whether you ask it to or not. Anxiety, self-doubt, heartbreak, and the particular loneliness of being young and online and not quite able to express what you mean are the foundations of Modern Baseball’s catalog. The majority of artists at the time were either too polished or too self-conscious to touch what they had discovered. Stepping away was probably the most self-aware thing they could have done when the mental health issues that had subtly underpinned so many of their lyrics became too much to handle from inside the machine.
You’re Gonna Miss It All, their middle album, is still regarded as one of the more subtly important records of the 2010s emo renaissance. It takes slightly less than thirty minutes to complete. There is no waste. Ewald’s lyrics depict real, textured, everyday moments that somehow feel enormous when the guitar kicks in beneath them, such as a walk home after a night with a new crush or a basement party where the kegs are half-empty and everyone is a little too drunk and someone is falling in love in the corner. It encapsulated a unique aspect of growing up in the mid-2010s that has no true counterpart. prior to social media becoming completely oppressive. once it had begun to alter the situation.
According to a 2023 Gallup study, loneliness among adults between the ages of 19 and 29 had skyrocketed. Before most researchers were even measuring that emotion, Modern Baseball was writing about it. “I walk home with my eyes low dreaming of conversations we’ll have tomorrow” is a line from You’re Gonna Miss It All that expresses more emotional truth than most self-help books can in two hundred pages. It’s not hyperbole. A good three-minute song written by someone who is truly experiencing it can accomplish that.
It wasn’t label pressure or commercial failure that caused Modern Baseball to disband, but rather the band’s members’ limitations as human beings. Perhaps this is why the conclusion felt so much like losing something genuine. They didn’t burn out trying to achieve something greater. They stopped because it was the proper thing to do. In retrospect, Modern Baseball’s quiet departure in 2017 felt like the first warning sign for a generation that was about to have a lot taken away from them: college years lost to a pandemic, early careers reshaped by economic chaos, friendships that never quite recovered from the distance.
Demos for previously unreleased songs like “Pothole” and “Rock Bottom” have recently been released; this is not a reunion. Most likely, it is not the start of anything. It is more akin to a box of pictures that someone left on the porch; it is significant, somewhat upsetting, and not really intended to alter the course of events. It’s something, though. And something is sufficient for those who needed this band at precisely the right time.
