Life of Wry

Baseball season ended tonight.  The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers in game 7 to become the World Series champs.

I supported the Cardinals in the World Series largely because they were Peter’s favorite team about five years ago. I got to know them at that time and grew to sort of like them, mostly because of this guy, Albert Pujols:

The Cardinals, as it turned out, were the right dogs to pick in this fight. The Rangers had a lot of talented players who were super fun to watch, and I was really impressed by their coach. But I certainly wasn’t going to root for any team from Texas. Too Tea Party-y. Happily, they came up short. Hahahahahahaha, take that, Texas. I’m shallow that way.

So, it was a great series; I watched all seven games, which brought my game watching total for the season to… seven.   Before this series, I hadn’t seen a single major league baseball game all year. Missed the entire television season for technical reasons: could never quite figure out how to watch something (anything) with our TV set up. I wrote about that in this post of a few days ago.  Pathetic, given how much I love baseball.

More unusual still, we didn’t manage to get to a single Giants, Oakland, or even River Cats game.  So, I really knew nothing about the season.

[Oh wait, I did go with Peter to a Dodgers-Tigers game at Dodger stadium in June for his birthday… so I take it back, there was one game.]

Being completely out of touch didn’t stop me from becoming a ten-day Cardinal fanatic, however. Whatever the hell that is about humans–we’re so quick to take sides, and suddenly we’re pulling for a team as though our very lives depend on it.

How odd that is. It gets unattractive pretty quickly, too.  Remembering an obnoxious fan at the above-mentioned Dodger game who was hoarse from yelling non-stop for two hours and slurry from drinking, and turned belligerent when forcefully escorted out of the park after about 7 innings. And really, I can hardly think of anything uglier than a rowdy horde of rabid, war-painted sports fans. Always so hilarious to see them pumping their fists in the air after a win like they had anything at all to do with any part of the victory.

But that’s not me.  I’m more amused by my fanism. I fall into it easily but it fades as soon as the game’s over.  My fanism is thin, but it does the trick: keeps me interested, gives me a cause to rally behind, invests me in the outcome, makes me care about the players and their dramas.. but then it’s gone.  I guarantee you, by the time the season starts again next spring, I’ll have forgotten everything about the series–who played, who won, those drama prone players..

Anyway, I’m already looking forward to next year.  I expect by then we’ll have the TV set up figured out and I’ll be able to find a team to root for and settle in for a long season.