I have this feeling I may be a little preoccupied for the next few days, leading up into and through the long weekend. That’s probably a good thing too, as I’m sure you must be as tired as I am of hearing about ranked ballots specifically and just plain ol’ uninspired local governance in general. A break will probably do us all a little good, right?
Let me take a minute here to venture into somewhat more alien territory for me to be writing about. Baseball. There far more people, far better qualified to do so than I am. If you can’t explain exactly how you arrive at WaR, maybe you should just stay silent and enjoy the game from the cheap seats. But as many of you long time readers will certainly attest to, a certain ignorance of a topic has never stopped me from writing about it before.
I’ll just say this.
Regardless of what happens going forward, while understanding that anything less than a World Series championship will be seen as a failure for many, we should all take a silent moment of contemplation to appreciate what we as baseball fans have already witnessed before this final push commences.
After what was shaping up to be yet another lackluster season, just like all the 20+ seasons prior, we then experienced a kind of run few fans get to experience. Not just in a season but ever. Beginning in late-July right up until the game the division was clinched last week, we got to follow a team that flirted with an .800 winning percentage. That’s nearly two months of watching a team win almost 8 out of 10 games, 4 out of every 5. It’s a rare thing. It’s a joyous thing. It’s fucking magical, is what it was.
Fingers crossed such winning ways continue. The next 11 will be the most difficult to notch. But when all is said and done, I think it’s going to be August and September I will remember most from this past season. We got to shrug off our well-earned shroud of disbelief and bury the certainty we’d developed that somehow this wasn’t going to work out, that it would all inevitably come crashing down in a flaming heap of disappointment. Again. For another year.
Embrace, baseball fans, and enjoy. Before you know it, it’ll be November and spring training will be just 14 weeks away.
— giddily submitted by Cityslikr