The national pastime is a wonderful game. I truly appreciate many of its nuances and will spend every October much like the one before it — glued to my TV screen with the green grass and the brown dirt on it. However, in many cases, I tend to neglect this game at certain points throughout the year. I hear it cry out to me sometimes in the form of my friends who are more faithful to the game than me.
They say to me during these past months, "how could you have not seen that nine-run comeback by the Yankees, or "how did you not know who Francisco Liriano was? He's tearing up the league!" I still follow the game. but not with the same rigid 162-game vigilance I once did.
The problem is this: the season begins on the first few days in April, when I have clearly contracted March Madness. This highly contagious seasonal flu ravages my body and makes me too physically weak to watch anything other than college hoops as the Final Four and national championship usually wind down around opening day time.
The tournament itself often calls to me more so than any excitement for the upcoming spring training. I know what the tournament will bring to me, all sorts of frantic, incredible, and incredibly important and memorable buzzer-beaters all within a short, condensed time. The baseball season, I have no idea what will bring, and it won't conclude for another six months.
Then college basketball ends. Time for baseball? Not quite. The NHL playoffs begin, then the NBA right after it. Every night there is another big game, a Game 7, an overtime, a poster dunk by Kobe Bryant over Steve Nash that immediately meant more than it should, then a Kobe buzzer-beater two games later that ultimately meant less than it should, or a hockey sudden-death, triple-OT special that has you captivated for hours because every shot could be the end of the world as we know it.
Then these playoffs drag on and on, through late April, through all of May, and then through most of June. Meanwhile, entertaining, sometimes exciting, but hardly critical baseball games are being played every day throughout. Some involving your team, some not, but it has never been easy for me to keep the same passion for a team sport whenever a more team important sport was going on at the same time. To add to this, when you are early into the baseball season and you stop to think about just how insignificant the fraction 1/162 really is, well you may tend to find other options here and there.
Finally, late June comes, the NHL and NBA champions are crowned, and we are done with the distractions and can finally rejoin the national pastime, but not this year. No, now once the NBA playoffs are ending, it's World Cup time. That meant all kinds of new playoff games and systems, it meant three games for Team USA to perhaps show their stuff to the world, and it meant 16 single-elimination games in what they call the "knockout stages" of the tourney. Soccer may not have a lot of scoring, but as a result it sure has a lot of overtime, and every goal scored seems to be an important one, especially with the true championship of the world on the line.
Now the World Cup has ended, along with baseball's first half. It was a first half I did not see all of, or even half of. In fact, most of it I heard about or saw on sports highlight shows while I was waiting to see more NCAA tournament or NBA or NHL playoffs or World Cup. But now, with the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game standing alone on the horizon and the second half stretching out before me, I plan to once again be nothing less than a baseball junkie. While I have a decent outline of many of the game's ongoing subplots, I now look forward to coloring it all in and making the picture complete.
After all, as a Yankee fan, with my team trailing the Red Sox in the standings and struggling with injury after injury, and looking to the sky and praying for not just one but in fact a small army of quality pitchers to make up this small-but-respectable deficit, it's time I started caring again. Time I started to pump my fist and fill my mind with delusions of grandeur when Randy Johnson has a solid start and appears to be heading on the right track again. Time I started throwing the less useful faction of our household appliances and terrorizing my family with anguished cries when A-Rod hits into yet another double play with the bases loaded.
Because now, the margin for error grows thinner with the passing months, and the finish line may still be off in the distance, but it is visible, and there is excitement in the air. There is excitement I feel not just for the Yankees either, as I ponder aloud the rest of the state of baseball for this second half.
Is the Braves' regular-season dynasty coming to a halt?
I think we all know the answer to this, I just can't wait to see what it will look like because it is just that unfathomable not to have the Braves winning the division and in the postseason. Really, it's been this same way since 1991.
Are Mets really better than the Bronx Bombers?
Possibly. However, it's also possible that they benefit from playing in an overall weaker division in an overall weaker league that regularly gets manhandled by the AL in every head-to-head competition since 2003 and every All-Star Game since 1997. They may just have to settle for the New York team most likely to succeed.
When is the real last time we see Roger Clemens pitch?
Just how many mulligans do you give a legend contemplating his last ever start? Are he and Brett Favre trying to make a contest of this? Is Michael Jordan in on it, too?
No more Barry Bonds?
That's right, no making national headlines by going 0-for-2 with a strikeout. Not really even making headlines when he hits a home run anymore. Some writers and commentators see this as a void. It was a controversy they could always rely on to scream about, and now that Bonds has passed Aaron and is wandering through the 41 HR desert on bulging knees and varicose veins (okay, so maybe I made that part up, or maybe I'm right, who knows?). Yes, it does leave us with a void, one which can now be filled with actual baseball-related content. Wow, what a concept!
How much longer can Brad Lidge continue his meltdown?
This guy was the baddest man in the 'pen back in the 2004 playoffs. He made a Yankee fan green with envy despite having relied on the comforts of Mariano Rivera over the past 10 years. What has happened to him is on one level sad, yet on another, morbidly spectacular (am I just a sick person or what?). How can a closer with this much talent, that many nasty sliders and heaters, blow it in the big game again and again?
Just in the past month, we have seen him, in a sense, revisit his past playoff failures by blowing an interleague game against the White Sox with a two-out ninth-inning game-tying grand slam to Tadahito Iguchi, and giving up the go-ahead run to the Cardinals' Scott Rolen at home in the last Astro game of the first half. Is Lidge destined to become another Mark Wohlers or Byung-Hyun Kim, a formerly great closer psychologically ruined by a scarring postseason blown save and who never again returns to form?
Can the Tigers be this year's White Sox?
Why not? They have the pitching, they showed signs of coming on strong with tough victories against the pennant-contending White Sox and Indians in September when they had nothing to play for, and they have a revitalized Jim Leyland running the ship. Pudge Rodriguez is their starting catcher. Notice each of the last two guys were single-handedly capable of resurrecting the floundering Marlins, albeit for just a year, and not at the same time. My point is, they could very well do it again. The Detroit Tigers do have — and I can't believe I'm typing this — the best record in all of baseball: 59 wins, 29 losses. How big a collapse would it take for them to blow it? You do the math.
I eagerly look forward to watching all of these unfold without distraction from any more playoffs, just as I look forward to watching my Yankees fight the good fight for that AL East crown once again. And when football season comes in September, well, I may watch those on Sundays, too, if and when it does not conflict with crucial pennant-race and playoff baseball games that I will not and cannot miss. Football will just have to wait its turn like all the other sports did.
I'm just a man with his sports priorities straight. Is that so bad?
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