My favorite part of the baseball season is here- the last couple of months of the pennant race. Now I actually enjoy watching games on television. Before, unless I was there in the stands, everything that I love about sports, the sense of urgency that compels athletes to greatness or to tears, is missing.
The managers and the players always talk about the long season and how taking one game at a time is the best way to go through the season. Fuck that. That is probably what makes baseball so difficult of a sport for non-sports fans to get behind. It is like a dry, melodrama teeming with subtle meanings over its seasons.
Perhaps I am not a true baseball fan then. I would not care about getting Red Sox tickets in Boston or Cubs tickets in Chicago unless the game actually meant something. That tension needs to exist. Otherwise baseball is just an exercise in box scores, lazy weekend afternoons, and beer until the last two months of the season.
In some ways this arrangement may be perfect. If I yelled at the television as much as I did every Sunday during football season or tensed up at the end of every game waiting for the potential season ending shot from the corner like I do during March Madness I might have been found dead clasping my heart at the age of 20.
No, now that the final two months are here and more than two-thirds a season that goes for 162 games are over I am finding that addicting anxiety again.
White Sox fans are scared shitless by the Minnesota Twins. The Tampa Bay Rays are playing blindly, afraid to look back at the Red Sox or even the Yankees and become aware that they should not be in first place. The New York Mets games are filled with fans worried that last days at Shea Stadium may end without a playoff run with the Phillies so close and so freaking loaded at the top of the lineup.
The story lines have emerged and I can watch just about any meaningful baseball game and become on with the local insanity. Even if my favorite team loses, at the very least I have spent two months exercising my vocal chords and conditioning my heart for the three hours of emotional high and lows that await every Sunday when I watch the New York Giants play, especially when I have to watch the games with the Dallas Cowboys on the division schedule.
